As a former mathematician, I also like this exchange in Arcadia between Valentine and literary academic Bernard:
B: I'm sorry - did you say trivial?
V: It's a technical term.
B: Not where I come from, it isn't.

(And a nice article on 'trivial' in maths: shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/o...)

For roast potatoes, most of the literature encourages only brief parboiling. But I took inspiration from @ishankolhatkar.com (www.ishankolhatkar.com/food/roastpo...), boiling them until nearly falling apart, before drying and adding to *hot* oil - for a good result, worth trying again!

(In case anyone surprisingly reads my posts for cooking advice, I picked the "high heat first, then turn it down" approach to roast the pork belly, & that - & rubbing the crackling with crushed fennel seeds along with the salt - did the trick. But other methods might have done well too, of course!)

With the best CGI an Acorn BBC Master can conjure up?

My own copy of The British General Election of 2024 arrived today - and the back cover recalls the surprising, rainy May afternoon which started it all.

I'd seen that 3G networks are being / have already been switched off in the UK. But I hadn't previously realised the older 2G network, probably what that phone wants, might (depending on provider) be around a few years longer. www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-b...

Yes, I remember saving HTML files (no CGI allowed, no PHP!) in ~/public_html on the university's server - and remembering the then-cryptic-looking chmod invocation to set the permissions and publish them to the world. (Useful experience for a few hobby projects over the years!)

I didn't know either, now learned it was prohibited only relatively recently by Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004, introduced (as a Government-supported Private Member's Bill) apparently after some chains tried/considered Christmas openings in early 2000s. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

Reminded of hypothesis in "You and Your Research" (Hamming): researchers who closed their office door were less interrupted & more productive on their focus in short-term, those who left it open stayed more aware of what's happening & big in the field so did more *important* work over their career

The version of this question seeking non-trivial integer solutions of x^y=y^x came up in my maths undergraduate admission interview - after being invited to sketch the curve y=ln(x)/x (which also illustrates the result you mention). And then re-appeared during a third-year course on number theory!

The most memorable line from an advert which was, of course, *not* for the chips.

Happily, the Internet does suggest newsagents "Honey's of the High" - handily across the road from Univ, and once home to a budget-priced photocopier where I'd churn out college music society fliers etc. - is still going.

Rule 57 is an unfortunate error and should be disregarded