Author: elbeno

No matter how much you badger me, I’m never going to sell back my used books. Never. I like books. That’s why I buy so many from you. And if you think I’m going to trade in a book I bought a scant 10 months ago (relatively newly-published, at that)…

I just installed the Now Reading Reloaded plugin and fiddled with my sidebar template, so you can see what I’m currrently reading. Over time, this will also log what I’ve read, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I don’t understand the postal mail forwarding system. I sent out Xmas cards last month, and as usual, one of them came back. The sticker on it said that the forwarding time had expired, but had the correct forwarding address printed on it. If the USPS is going to go…

It’s that time again… the King William’s College quiz is upon us. It rained pretty much all Xmas break, and when it didn’t rain we were cooped up in the house with “flu-like illnesses”. But I guess it was fairly restful, most of the time.

Q. Why can’t you tell a joke in octal? A. Because 7 10 11!

One of my colleagues came into my office the other day, and said to me: If p is prime and greater than 3, prove that p² – 1 is divisible by 24. Interested readers might want to try this for themselves: it’s not particularly difficult. Of course I started in…

Indeed. Imagine what a better place the world would be if John had been alive these last 30 years. Have a happy and peaceful holiday season, whatever you celebrate.

It is puzzling to me that in the US, that holdout of the Imperial system of measurement, schoolkids learn up to the ten times table only. When I was at school, I learned up to 12, even though the UK had been metric for a decade already. But apparently nobody…