I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes are quite what I’m after, and I think it may miss some solutions.)

Would I pay for a translation? Well, I’m obscenely broke these days, but I might.

Several important things happened on April 19, but here’s one of which I was unaware: Charles Darwin died on this date in 1882.

It came to my attention because the bookmark of the hour happens to be the Darwin-L archives. Darwin-L (1993-7) was a forum devoted to the historical sciences, full of tasty wide-ranging discussion. I was very sorry to see it close down.

How many list-servers, I wonder, still use the -L tag?

Will Wilkinson spanks someone or other at The New Yorker for worrying too much about income inequality and disregarding the psychological benefits of autonomy.

In the old Bill Cosby Show, Chet Kincaid was a PE teacher who, in one memorable episode, substituted for an algebra teacher. (Come to think of it, that episode was probably my first exposure to algebra!) Does anyone remember the problem that stumped him? It was of this form: A customer buys some candy at p cents/pound and some other candy at q cents/pound; the total weight is m pounds and the total price $k; how much of each kind of candy?

I was reminded of this by a rant about the importance of algebra.

I recently began contributing to Wikipedia; my biggest contribution so far is these tables of convex uniform polychora (the data are borrowed, the arrangement mine).

After a few days of this, wherever I see a webpage with awkward language I want to find the Edit button!

So I was writing a little allegorical paragraph which invited the reader to imagine a poker game in which a dispute arises over whether a flush beats a straight or not. “(The one holding the straight,” I explained, “is a math nerd who assumes that the rank reflects the probability.)”

But it’s a lucky thing I stopped to make sure. There are 10×4⁵ = 10240 possible straights, and only 4×13!/5!8! = 5148 possible flushes. Yet somehow I’ve believed for most of my life that a straight is more unlikely than a flush, and the ranking of flushes over straights a mere arbitrary anomaly. I wonder how the heck I got that idea.

(I’ve temporarily removed poker from the spam list so that you can respond to this without excessive awkwardness. If after clicking the button you find yourself looking at the FBI’s homepage, you’ve found another word on the list.)

Everyone’s doing it, and now David Friedman is doing it.

What’s wild is that my bookmark chooser showed me his home page, with a prominent link to “My New Blog”, about eleven hours after his first post.