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Rachmaninov lived about 70 years, which is approximately 2.2 billion seconds. The quoted number of notes was 7.5 billion billion. So the composer would have needed to have written more than 3 billion notes for every second of his life.

I watched a YouTube video which said Rachmaninov wrote 7.5 x 10¹⁸ notes during his lifetime as a composer. Could this be true?

I only wish I could post the scent as well as the picture.

See https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=260011

I found this in a puzzle book and thought it would be not too hard, but it was more tricky than I expected. Making sure you haven't missed any triangles, or double counted any, is quite slippery.

Here are the possible kinds of triangle:

Each of these can occur in five positions, so I thought at first the answer is 6 x 5 = 30, but I was mistaken, because config. e has chirality, i.e. handedness; the triangles can be aligned right or left, and so we get a total of 35.

After more investigation I found a fairly recent paper which gives a general formula for a regular polygon with any numbers of sides, but for larger numbers it gets quite complicated. 

I liked this problem, for the original pentagonal case, because it is easy to grasp, less simple than appears at first but is still solvable with some careful working.

I'll post a link to the paper about the general case for anyone interested.  

How many triangles can you find in this diagram? I don't just mean ones whose vertices liu on the outer pentagon, I mean all the triangles visble.

Nominative determinism is the idea that a person's name might somehow influence their career choice. 

The term was popularised in New Scientist magazine in 1994, and was intended humorously. It attracted many examples, such the book The Imperial Animal by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox and Pole Positions—The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by Daniel Snowman. You can find lots of similar examples in the Wikipedia article here.

There is even an intriguing possibility that is it more than a series on coincidences, that these is really something in it, and it has been seriously discussed by a number of psychologists, although it would be hard I think to0 establish any real effect.

Be that as it may, I have just been reading the history of Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire and in the Wikipedia article about it I came across this advertisement from 1926. Bidwell and Sons auctioneers, eh?

Autumn's arrived—
Just hearing that
I'm cold already.

When you tread on grapes,

They let out a little whine.

But don’t worry,

It’s only sham pain.

My brother photographed this beautiful moth.

A few months ago, I bought a mobility scooter designed to go on the road, rather than the pavement. It’s a bit like an electric motorbike except of course it doesn’t go as fast, there’s a limit of 8 mph.

Like many motorbikes, it has a back box, but its capacity is limited. Having literally just bought a baguette I wondered how I could fit my bread and other groceries in. 

What I need is panniers I thought; storage baskets that hang on either side of a donkey or a bike; and then it occurred to me, that’s exactly why they are called panniers. It must be connected with French pain = bread. Aha! 

So I looked it up in the OED and sure enough, a pannier was a bread basket in old French, and we borrowed the word, into Middle English or maybe before.