More daft ideas

[pozorvlak]

I keep getting assaulted by daft ideas for things to make - you may remember the achiral fan¹, the board games, the telescopic juggling clubs, the reimplementation of TeX in Caml... Sometimes, I get as far as starting to make them before abandoning them uncompleted, but I'd love to finish one one of these days. I blame dynix².

Anyway, the last couple I've come up with are as follows:

Mathematical fridge poetry. Why write nonsensical bad poetry when you can write nonsensical mathematics? The idea is to get a load of mathematician's names, common terms, prefixes and suffixes, and then to mix them up and produce sentences like "Theorem: for all semi-connected Grothendieck-Riemann lexicography spaces x that are cohomotopically étale, there is a non-gauge-equivalent Erdos matroid Ξ_x such that ∂Ξ_x ≈ ∫√O(x). Proof: exercise." For bonus points, combine it with a tabloid-headline fridge poetry set :-) I reckon there could actually be a market for such a thing: Thinkgeek could probably sell a few (speaking of which, this game looks dead interesting). Of course, the magnetic poetry folks probably have a patent on the whole idea of putting words on bits of magnetic paper, but that doesn't stop me making a set for myself. I've bought a sheet of printable magnetic paper: now I just need to choose the words for it.

My first cut at the wordlist for such a thing is as follows: maths/science types (I'm particularly looking at you here, michiexile, weaselspoon, benparker and elvum), what do you think?

Symbols: Let's just save time and say all of these plus the semidirect product and normal subgroup symbols, big and small letters in the Greek and Roman alphabets, lots of brackets, lots of hyphens, a few numbers and common index variables in script size, names of common sets (N, R, Q etc) and lots of accents: primes, haceks, overbars, circumflexes, etc.
Mathematician's names: Čech, Euler, Mac Lane, Brouwer, Euclid, Pythagoras, Grothendieck, Lagrange, Laplace, Lebesgue, Lefevre, Legendre, Mersenne, Fermat, Wiles, Poisson, Cauchy, Stokes, Green, Taylor, Artin, Galois, Klein, Archimedes, Leibniz, Newton, Noether, Dirac, Birkhoff, Lobachevsky, Erdos, Kirkmann, Sutherland, Lie, Cayley, Hamilton, Einstein, Schrodinger, Cantor, Cartesian, Johanssen, Parker, Jolly, Smith, Wells, entirety of Glasgow maths department. Edit: Hilbert and Gauss, of course. D'oh! And L'Hôpital.
Prefixes: co semi partial quasi weak iso meta mono epi endo auto bi multi poly homo non a anti well natural equi Edit: sur in homeo hetero
Suffixes: ary y ly ify ification al ed ion ic 's ative oid ent ce ence ing ant ance adic ian Edit: wise ism
Boilerplate: Theorem Remark Proof Proposition Exercise Lemma Principle for all every each given there exists some such that therefore by trivial obvious canonical passing to from by arguing we see shall show prove QED QEF and easy induction consequence verify is the reader should result this fix if then in which a an
Stems: space metric differential integral deriv domain étale connect correspond compact category group ring monoid field abelian commutative associative distributive geometr poset set matrix matroid transform linear (Edit: morph) order functor homolog homotop (or just log and top?) equival var symmetr permutation map function graph point model algebra gauge invari real complex octonion quaternion higher dimension theory theoret algorithm logarithm quotient limit scheme variety projective norm product inner outer polynomial tensor energy free coefficient ordinate pullback pushout preserve reflect create respect

Plus most of the other stuff from the comments... good ideas, chaps.


Travel Go board You know those magnetic travel games that lose their magnetism slowly and don't stop the pieces sliding into the wrong position? There is a better way, which used to be standard. Instead of using magnets, you keep the pieces on the board using pegs and holes in the board. My parents have travel chess and Scrabble sets that work on this principle. Also, I have a Go board that rolls up, which makes it much more transportable, but the stones are still a bit too bulky. I'd like to combine the two ideas, by having a (small) cloth board with the male half of a snap fastener at each intersection. The female halves (complete with white or black plastic covers) would be the pieces. I'm not sure what I'd put the pieces in when not in play, but hopefully they'd be small enough to fit in a mint/boiled sweet tin (thus getting my own back on everyone who's told me that Go stones "look like Mint Imperials").

The downside is that there are 361 intersections on a full-sized Go board, which is (a) potentially more money than I'd like to spend, (b) a lot of sewing. It turns out that you can get snap-fasteners with bendy metal teeth that can be pressed into place without sewing: I can also find eBay folks selling snap-fasteners in lots of 180 for about £3. Unfortunately, they're the sew-on kind :-(

¹ Speaking of which: azrelle, could you please be a bit more specific about where you get your fan guards from? I've tried in a couple of art shops and had no joy.
² I wonder what would happen if dynix (who among my South London friends can be and is blamed for anything) were to meet James Needham (who fulfils a similar role among my Light Entertainment friends). Possibly a gigantic scapegoat made of electricity would materialise and suck all the atoms in the Universe into itself, ushering in a new order of things. But come to think of it, why haven't they ever met? What are the odds of two people being blamable for any conceivable thing and yet never appearing in the same room at the same time????? I shall watch them closely: maybe one day dynix will say "What-ho", or James will let on that he's not so ignorant about computers, and then I will know their secret...

Comments

Re: It's a great idea.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

"I would prove it here but would have to leave marks in the butter"

*snort* *giggle*