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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 6d

Liked "Color Engineering" at www.chartography.net/p/color-engi... by @infowetrust.com. I'd long known about the hue-saturation-lightness (HSV) model. But this post took me further in applying it for *collections* of colours: analysing the palette of a design, or choosing effective combination onself

Color Engineering

The tool that snaps mercurial design into mechanical focus.

www.chartography.net

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Edwin Heathcote @edwinheathcote.bsky.social · 6d

on.ft.com/46M9mXI Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Free to Read.

Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world

Design was once seen as a tool to improve lives — but as modernism has become marketing, that sense of social purpose has drifted away

on.ft.com

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Tim Harford @timharford.ft.com · 15d

Does economics use too much maths - or the wrong kind of maths? on.ft.com/3IqOgGb

The wrong kind of maths

[FREE TO READ] Why the mathematics used in economics for decades needs a rethink

on.ft.com

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Tim Harford @timharford.ft.com · 19d

A lovely essay by RJ Andrews on lucidity vs luminosity in information design: www.chartography.net/p/clarity-un...

Clarity Unbound

Restoring Radiance to Information Design

www.chartography.net

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · 25d

New "Eclectic Stacks" blog post: Getting a Rubik's Cube again after 40 years, I look at how I solved it then (with trusty copy of "You Can Do The Cube" at my side) and the approaches available nowadays - for beginners, speedcubers, and omniscient entities. www.eclecticstacks.com/post/revisit...

I Can (Still) Do The Cube: revisiting Rubik's classic puzzle

When I was a child in the 1980s, I had a Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Patrick Bossert’s book “You Can Do The Cube” - and carefully following the instructions, it indeed turned out that I could. So when ...

www.eclecticstacks.com

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Aug 29

Also on that theme - Lockhart's "Mathematician's Lament" on teaching mathematics as exploration & curiosity rather than crushing rote - building on his essay (profkeithdevlin.org/wp-content/u...). I like both: Polya focuses more on applicable methods, while Lockhart is perhaps the more motivational.

profkeithdevlin.org

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Aug 29

Polya's "How To Solve It" has related method under generic name "Variation Of The Problem": reduce it to a simple/degenerate case with known answer, to identify characteristics of general solution. E.g. for volume of a pyramid frustum, set the top to zero (pyramid!) or to match the bottom (prism!)

Frustum of a square pyramid. A pyramid frustum is the three-dimensional shape that remains after the top part of a pyramid is cut off by a plane parallel to its base.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usech_kvadrat_piramid.png)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Aug 29

I don't know a name for it but remember using it ("a length isn't stated, but the multiple-choice options show it's got to cancel out - so let's assume a value which makes it easy"). Perhaps "solution by pedagogical convention" or "solution by implied existence, uniqueness, and generality"? ;-)

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Tom Calver @tomcalver.bsky.social · Aug 17

NEW: Are migrants more likely to commit crimes than non-migrants?

Here’s what the data does and doesn’t show.

1/8 @thetimes.com
www.thetimes.com/article/72b6...

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Samuel @samuel.fm · Aug 7

they should be taken to The Hague for this graph crime

Bar chart where 52>69 and 69=30
about gpt5 comparison

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Simon Rogers @simonjrogers.bsky.social · Aug 5

I think Tesco and M&S are doing everything in their power to break the person in HMRC who decides which food should incur VAT.

Michael Lee Witchardson 🎃 @hrfmichael.bsky.social · Aug 4

Every day we stray further from god

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social · Jul 27

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 25

How a mixed strategy in a game (adding randomness to your choices) can beat a deterministic one, from @kityates.bsky.social: open.substack.com/pub/kityates...
(I'd pondered similar "Traitors" strategy of random murders to stop the choice of victim giving any hints, but that's not usually the issue!)

Mixing it up

Can maths help you to do better in a penalty shoot-out? England's Lucy Bronze certainly thinks so.

open.substack.com

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 24

Yes, I since worked out the unit square and agree. Now I'll have to think about a nudging a vertex! :-)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 24

(An example of the latter, on theatrical angel investors: "The term should really be confined to those who help with no thought of a benefit in return, as the rules of angelic behaviour would seem to dictate... They nearly always lose their money anyway and become angels by default.")

Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 24

Enjoying John Caird's "Theatre Craft", a hefty A-Z on working as a director. I don't expect to be directing a play (or doing any more than sitting in a theatre watching one!), but liking the insights on how it all works, run through with entertaining anecdotes and dry humour. #theatre #books

Cover of "Theatre Craft: A Director's Practical Companion from A to Z" by John Caird

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Clara Murray @claradoodle.bsky.social · Jul 24

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 24

Interesting! It's a weaker condition than convexity (where *every* point on the segment would be in A). If 0 and 1 are in S then so is every point of the form k/(2^n) in (0, 1). Now... if the corners of a unit square are in S, what does that force to be included? Now I'm curiously wondering too! :-)

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Brian Bilston @brianbilston.bsky.social · Jul 22

Happy Spoonerism Day to all those who belly crate.

The Bad Salad of William Archibald Spooner

Why do I always watch my birds?
I know that statement sounds absurd
but today I reached an all-lime toe
when I received a blushing crow.

It’s wetting gorse – and here’s the crunch:
my conversation packs a lunch.
I’m not sure when all this began
but I think I need a plaster man

to help me when my stouth gets muck.
I should sit, perhaps, and bead a rook,
fight a liar, or flick some powers.
No, I think I’ll go and shake a tower.

Brian Bilston

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 19

But I suppose with the classic Dragon book, if you didn't have Pascal on your computer you might have implemented a Pascal compiler yourself before using it to write your game. In (so, so much!) theory. ;-)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 19

I wondered how popular Pascal was in mid-1980s to sell a book on programming adventures. (I'd *heard* of Pascal, and local library had "Pascal from BASIC", but in UK home computing at the time I don't ever remember *seeing* it. However, I learn from Wikipedia it was popular on Apple.)

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 11

I'd also been surprised by that Miss Marple theme a couple of years ago, listening to a capella group Voces8 and realising that they too had gone back there and adapted it for "Evensong" and a tale of a distracted chorister: youtu.be/KgQWEffd9d4

VOCES8 EVENSONG

YouTube video by ddbmt

youtu.be

Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 11

The sound of (well-played) trumpet practice drifted from a neighbour's windows this roastingly hot afternoon, and I was happy to recognise theme from classic BBC 1980s "Miss Marple" with Joan Hickson and music, the Internet tells me, by Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Knll...

Miss Marple Joan Hickson Opening and Ending (OP / ED) in 1080p (1440x1080)

YouTube video by Jordan Baker

m.youtube.com

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Reposted by Terry Boon

Jason Moore @moorejh.bsky.social · Jul 7

fruity #philosophy #apples

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Terry Boon @terryboon.bsky.social · Jul 6

On creating a #TextAdventure: discussion of breadth (many locations/objects but generically implemented vs smaller scope with more detail and interaction), technical challenges in writing a modern game, and a programmer's thoughts on the #Inform7 game engine: entropicthoughts.com/lessons-from...

Lessons From Creating My First Text Adventure

entropicthoughts.com