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?

I suppose we should ask if it all went well?

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!

With me on this?

(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.

555

555

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

I tried asking ChatGPT 4o to decode that, and it couldn't quite manage it.

I’d have got it wrong; I assumed way = rd!

Lovely. That should be the standard way to obscure email addresses.

A friend of mine is a Greenaway which is also quite a rare name. Slightly etymologically connected, if not genealogically.

So how's everyone doing?
I've got bloomin' loads to do at work. Haven't managed to look in here for a while.

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?

[nominative etymology] There's a place called Kenovay on the island of Tiree, which looks like a phonetic rendering of its Gaelic name Ceann a’ Bhàigh, which means "head of the bay", or Bayhead ("the parst of a bay most distant from the larger body of water with which it is confluent"). There are a couple more Ceann a’ Bhàighs and Bayheads in the Hebrides. So that could be the origin of the name.