Personal Blogs

The doctor said "Your BMI is way too high, you're obese."

Quick as a flash I riposted "Is that clinical waist?"

“Even since I slipped a disc, my back has been my Achilles heel.”

My friend keeps ants as pets and he's very fond of them. He reckons he's protected from Covid, on account of his anty buddies.

Q. What do you call an ant that never says anything?

A. A mutant.

Q. What do you call ants that do what they’re told?
A. Compliance.

Here's an easy to understand geometric question, with a purely look-and-see solution. It comes from YouTuber Michael Penn but I have modified it slightly.

To be in the spirit of the traditional wooden Japanese temple offerings, called Sangahu, I have added decorative colours.

Question

If the larger square is 1 x 1 and so has area 1, what is the area of the smaller square?

Oh Rose thou art sick

A famous poem by William Blake. It tugs at the fringes of our understanding; we can agree its meaning is important but we each one have a different interpretation of what that is; and we all think anew every time we read it.

This strange surreal landscape, like a Salvador Dal Dali painting, is the work of the wind.

I knew that there are rocks that have been shaped by the wind, sandblasted in effect, and something put that into my mind, so I looked it up. The objects so formed are called ventifacts and are formed when the wind has one or more prevailing directions and the landscape is barren so rock pillars are unprotected. The mushroom shape of rocks like that in the picture comes about because the wind cannot lift the sand grains very far off the ground, so the parts higher up are affected much less.

Amazlingly it's believed ventifacts have been identified on Mars, see https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/22401.

Picture credit: Thomas Wilken, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventifact#/media/File:Im_Salar_de_Uyuni.jpg

Friends, I jail broke a vegetable. I sprung a leek.

Our alfalfa is alpha

Nothing can beta it

Or even gamma close.

This is a Sangaku-like puzzle (see https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=230691)

We have a square inscribed in a triangle of known base b and height h, as shown. What is the length s of the square's side?

I called this a Samurai puzzle because many of the original sangaku were the work of Samurai.

(Solution in Comments.)

Errm...