This is a fairly recent nickname but then to me, of course, Harold Wilson is a fairly recent Prime Minister. I've only seen Ipswich once but they lost 10-1 to Fulham for whom everything turned to gold, including a a goal direct from a corner by the great Tosh Chamberlain. It was a filthy wet afternoon in 1963 with rain and hail. Later, Ipswich had a couple of FORRINERS, two rather good Dutch players, Thijssen and Muhren. This was quite a novelty then. In their new flashy surroundings they will need more than that, preferably access to the huge piles of loot in yet another boiling-hot backward desert shit-hole. Otherwise they'll be out of their depth and have just one season in the Moneyball League. A great shame, but that's modern sport.
Love to, but I've got to inspect a train those days and I'll no doubt be too frazzled. I was wondering if I should binge on "Life on Mars", what were you thinking about watching?
Yesterday the European Championships of football got under way, and as usual people were straight onto the statistics of rare occurrences. While it might be interesting to have the fastest goal or the youngest player record, saying that something is the third this, or only the fourth time that..., is of far less interest even for those interested in football. I'd like to propose the name of "the Grover effect" for this, after the limerick:
There once was a batsman called Grover, Who scored thirty-six runs in one over! Which had never being done By a clergyman's son On a Sunday, in August, at Dover!
(Bismarck) No, not by a clergyman's son on an August Sunday at Dover but by the great Gary Sir Garfield Sobers on an August afternoon in 1968 at Swansea, off the bowling of Malcolm Nash. Serve 'im right. Bloody South Walians.
They've got another five hundred and fifty to go, this could be quite boring. Spam starting like this is like finding a couple of ants in the kitchen - you know there's going to be more along shortly.
[Raak] Please could you remind me of your email address (obfusc. as necessary). I've largely rewritten my, er, mathematical thing for the Summer of Math Exposition, and I think the new version is significantly more convincing. Even though you never said you'd seen anything wrong with the old one... My offline email database is currently extra-offline thanks to a hardware failure.
[SM] My first is in Richard, and so're the next six An at sign; the next begins kerning, and kicks The next starts elopement, and is most of epee Then the middle of and, and the start of "no way!" That letter once more, and then half of an aa And a "way" to complete it; if you're with me thus far A dot and an org and a dot and an uk And that is the whole of the handle — good luck!
Bonus clue: I'm probably distantly related to these people
Well I'm okay, apart from a week's pretty horrible toothache. My work is kinda chill - I feel a bit underemployed at times. But it's partly because I'm doing stuff that generates work for others, and then I have to wait for them to do it before I can do my next bit. I definitely get more done when I'm at the end of a chain like that than in the middle. Out of work, I want to enter Grant Sanderson's Summer of Math Exposition competition this year, and I've co-opted Raak as maths consultant. Deadline for that is mid-late August so I've still got weeks to go. I think/hope the work is in the last 10% (the part that takes 90% of the time) but... we'll see.
[SM] Did you get my answer suggesting that the Collatz jelly has fallen off the wall again? :) I just noticed I sent it to the zen[randomnumbers] address instead of your readable email.
[Raak] I did receive it - the darn webmail form constantly auto-refills the zenxxxxx address every time I tweak the email (such as by adding an attachment), and it's easy to fail to catch it. My short answer to the jelly question is that I don't think it matters because even when the numbers rise, their 'rail number' still ticks down inexorably. Showing that numbers can rise as high as they like and yet it still doesn't help them escape is a key thing I'm trying to make clear. But you exposed an area where I'm not saying what I really wanted to - so I'll be fixing that and sending you a reply, probably at the weekend. I was also sidetracked into wondering whether numbers in the sequence have a provable 'high water mark'. If you could show that no number n can ever rise above, say, 2^n, that could be another clincher. 2^n ought to give sufficient headroom, right?