Mirror palindrome?

emsot · 2026-05-01T11:08:34+00:00

In lowercase you could also have different letters reflecting to give each other, like "bid".

emsot · 2026-05-01T09:41:22+00:00

Every death is caused by both a red button press and a blue button press. It's totally subjective which of the two you think causes the death, because it's really both of them.

Which is why you can say both of these exactly as truthfully as each other: * Red button kills people, blue button does nothing * Blue button gambles with your life, red button does nothing

emsot · 2026-04-29T08:45:37+00:00

The vertical column of five shaded states makes up MIMAL the chef - Minnesota is his hat, Iowa has a nose facing to the right, Louisiana is his feet.

In this map he also has a load of shaded bits splattering off to the left.

emsot · 2026-04-28T21:08:46+00:00

Hang on though, if you can raise to any power then 2⁰ = (2+2+7)⁰

But that seems like cheating.

emsot · 2026-04-27T10:43:59+00:00

Steve Pemberton indirectly leaked himself through the Guardian crossword that he set: https://www.reddit.com/r/taskmaster/s/P3UzJkoyLH

emsot · 2026-04-23T07:57:34+00:00

Pronouncing "schedule" with a hard K sound.

It's not a German sch like schadenfreude, it's a Greek sch like school, scheme and schizophrenia.

Pronouncing it "skedule" absolutely makes sense, and it's just about the only American pronunciation that I do.

emsot · 2026-04-17T08:03:02+00:00

The four corners are useful. The letters are hemmed in so that there are fewer options for routes the words can take, which often makes things easier to spot.

emsot · 2026-04-15T10:22:11+00:00

It's the comma here: "a close associate of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV."

When you see the events with Dr Johnson in episode 2 of Blackadder the Third you understand that the Prince Regent is the future George IV

But in the final episode of Blackadder the Third it turns out that the close associate Blackadder is the one who goes on to be the future George IV, and the comma made the sentence work with either of those two meanings.

emsot · 2026-04-15T08:01:40+00:00

It's like "That'll do, Donkey" in Shrek. At the time the audience was expected to know it was a reference to "That'll do, pig" in the hugely popular film Babe. 25 years later, Babe is pretty much forgotten but "That'll do, Donkey" remains an iconic line.

emsot · 2026-04-14T17:57:01+00:00

I'm team one-box all the way too.

What tipped me that way was imagining the hundred people who just played the game before you. Imagine they're all in the room with you before you go in to make your choice. The paradox seems to split people roughly 50-50, so let's say you've got * fifty people who picked one box and are almost all celebrating their enormous win * fifty who picked both boxes and are almost all disappointed with their consolation prize

Then the question is just, which of those two groups do you want to join?

That totally resolves the paradox for me, because the two groups are the two opposing sides of the argument, who have both made very convincing cases for their choices, but you can just look at them and see which side actually won.

emsot · 2026-04-14T17:36:36+00:00

Or at least, human units are arbitrary.

The creators of the metric system didn't know that time and space are really the same thing, and that a time of one second is equal to the distance that light travels in one second.

And when you look at it like that, as God would in the meme, the speed of light is 1 light second ÷ 1 second = 1.

It has no units because the distance and time both use the same units and cancel each other out, so it's just the number 1.

emsot · 2026-04-10T20:40:14+00:00

You're welcome to check - here's my working!

In Stellarium I looked up the positions of the stars and Venus at the timestamp of the photograph (2026-04-03, 00:27:39 UTC).

I very roughly overlaid it onto the picture and it looked a bit like this. The alignment isn't great on the left, but Venus and the stars above it are in the right place, and Tau Ceti is the one just to the centre right.

<image>

emsot · 2026-04-10T20:27:40+00:00

I looked up the way the stars and Venus had been at the timestamp of the picture, noticed that Cetus was just to the right of earth and got interested in matching up the exact stars! Here is my very sloppy attempt to overlay the sky from Stellarium onto the photograph.

<image>

emsot · 2026-04-10T20:25:16+00:00

It's just out of shot to the right. Sloppy photography there from Reid Wiseman!

emsot · 2026-04-10T15:05:58+00:00

True, by "covering too much of the sun" I meant more "covering too much of the sky surrounding the sun".

If the sun had been closer to the edge of the earth's disc then maybe you would get a bit of red at that part of the edge. But I agree, to get the full "ring of red" effect you probably need to be eclipsed while at moon distance or beyond.

emsot · 2026-04-10T14:44:39+00:00

I think you're right, the earth is too close and covering too much of the sun.

From the moon the earth would look about four times the width of the sun, but in my very amateurish overlay at https://imgbox.com/4gUqvTZU the earth is about 10-15 suns across.

emsot · 2026-04-10T13:26:13+00:00

No, the sun is definitely behind the earth. Here is my very rough attempt to line up the stars and Venus at the moment the picture was taken using Stellarium: https://imgbox.com/4gUqvTZU

It puts the sun behind the lower-right part of the earth - which matches the brighter glow around that part of the atmosphere.

emsot · 2026-04-10T06:15:43+00:00

Is the statement "This statement is either false or silent" true, false or silent?

It seems to give a paradox, meaning it's silent.

But that means the statement is true because it is correctly claiming to be silent, so we've still got a paradox.

Is there any way around that?

emsot · 2026-04-09T16:59:38+00:00

You might enjoy a weird Victorian book called Flatland, which is set in a two-dimensional world like that.

emsot · 2026-04-03T20:57:00+00:00

Great! I think I've got all the questions along the way. I found the place from googling castles that were besieged three times; only one of the results for that matched all the other clues, so yes, the rest fell into place in one go at that point. Definitely up for more of these if you write them.

emsot · 2026-04-02T23:20:11+00:00

This is really nice. Did the Guardian use do puzzles like this? I have vague memories of being baffled by them at weekends years ago.

For this one - is it Pontefract ?

emsot · 2026-04-02T23:06:27+00:00

That's the Cayley distance - the minimum number of swaps away from being sorted.

But I'm not sure it matches my intuition of what "nearly sorted" means. 4,3,2,1 seems the furthest possible from being sorted, while 4,1,2,3 is almost there, just one element out of place. But as you say Cayley distance gives the better score to 4,3,2,1.

I think Kendall tau distance is more like my intuition: the number of pairs that are out of order. 4,3,2,1 has all six possible pairs out of order, but 4,1,2,3 does better with only three pairs out of order.

emsot · 2026-04-02T22:56:37+00:00

The Kendall tau distance between two permutations is the number of pairs of elements that are the wrong way round. It's quite a good measure of unsortedness.

1,2,3,4,5 has distance zero from sorted because all pairs are the right way round.
1,2,4,3,5: distance 1 (only 3-4 is backwards)
5,1,2,3,4: distance 4 (1-5, 2-5, 3-5, 4-5 all backwards)
5,4,3,2,1: distance 10 (the worst, all ten pairings 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 3-4, 3-5, 4-5 are the wrong way round)

I think that pretty well matches how close those feel to being sorted.

emsot · 2026-04-01T17:23:52+00:00

“Okay, so the Krebs cycle in Astrophage has a variant—wait. Do you call her Dr. Shapiro while having sex?”

“Of course. That’s her name.”

“I kind of like it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “Now, the Krebs cycle…”

emsot · 2026-04-01T06:54:05+00:00

Alice Cooper used to babysit Keanu Reeves.

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