jvvw

Sorry I skimmed through a bit too quickly when I first looked - I do totally agree you know enough to be able to evaluate this stuff btw. Although pro players are better, I don't think what they do is that qualitatively different on the whole - at Masters you are going to know meta, you are going to be able to vibe guess and you are e.g. going to know some specific roads.

I'm Master level at Geoguessr - it's a rank where you have to definitely know what you are doing but it isn't as high as it probably sounds from the headline.

Masters is about 800-1200 ELO whereas the pros are 1900-2000ish. I'll know the country straight away on 95% of rounds but I can still have no idea where I am in Russia or Brazil sometimes if there's no info. Scripters can definitely beat me!

Definitely. The season that coverage was done can be a big thing too. In Russia you'll be looking at the car, antenna type and the season as pretty much the first indicator where you might be.

Copyright year and camera gen is a big thing in some countries too.

Obviously they can still figure out a lot without all that and NMPZ obviates aspects of it (you can't hide camera gens, copyright and season and there are often still traces of the car in some manner). It's definitely not all 'meta' but to be competitive at that level you really do need to be using it. I think Gingey is the only world league player who doesn't use car meta.

Even as a fairly good but nowhere near pro player, it's weird how I associate particular places with particular types of weather. I think if saw Almaty in the summer for example it would feel very weird. I've decided not to deliberately learn car meta but still picked up quite a lot without trying and your 'vibe' of a place can certainly include camera gen.

This sounds weird to me. What's the context? Toddler group? Play date? Playground?

Also as somebody said, if you are male which from your username I guess you are, then that will change the dynamic - it will be easier for an older person to make conversation without there being any worries of sending the wrong message.

If there are lots of children playing together then parents aren't always social but at a play date I would definitely expect them to be. Also looking after young children is intensive and it might be the only break they get.

I mostly went to toddler groups when mine were young so that I could socialise not them!

I definitely learned about the Irish Potato Famine when I did GCSE history in the UK (England) in the early 90s. I learned a lot about British colonial history too in my GCSE.

I have two and it has never been a big problem. Anything official will have a 'middle name(a)' section and you just put both in there. I think it is sufficiently common that official systems deal with it. I have occasionally had the second one dropped but not on anything very official.

A quick google suggests that only 35% of US adults have 20/20 vision (although I guess it might be higher if you restrict to the population of the age required) which is one of the requirements so that by itself limits the pool of applicants significantly regardless of education, parenting etc?

I agree on the grades part. And I was just thinking that the university that I went to never gave us grades during the year (the only exception I can think of was when we did practice exam papers so we had an idea how we were doing).

I think homework is more than a guide to what you should review though. It's partly so that the teacher can find out what students have learned/understood so they can adapt their teaching appropriately. It's also because using class/contact time to do work that can be done independently isn't always the best use of that time (at least once students are willing and capable of doing that work independently).

I don't think they have entered last in the current UK series so far have they?

I do wonder how much meta gaming is going on though. As a faithful, given that new traitors are recruited, your goal isn't actually to eliminate a traitor but to survive, ideally knowing who the remaining the traitors are at the end (and making sure they don't end up in a majority at any point too). If you are confident that somebody is a traitor, there is something to be said for keeping them as a traitor so you know who the traitors are at the end.

I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily.

It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that.

I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.

Just to confuse things, some former grammar schools turned into private schools but kept 'grammar' in their name.

But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.

My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.

Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.

I agree wholeheartedly about the beauty of doing mathematics. I will add though that the author of this article, Kevin Buzzard, doesn't need to do this for his career and from what I know of him is somebody who very much cares about mathematics and the future of the subject. The fact that a mathematician of that calibre is interested in this makes me more interested.

Another PhD in maths here and I would say not to worry. It's the process of doing and understanding mathematics, and thinking mathematically that is ultimately important.

There's never been the equivalent of the 'bench scientist' in mathematics and there aren't many direct careers in mathematics, or pure mathematics at least - so very few people ultimately become researchers. Instead, I think you take your way of thinking and apply it to whatever else you do (and it certainly doesn't do any harm to understand various mathematical concepts incredibly well).

This sounds interesting. As a mathematician (in the sense that I have a PhD in group theory), is there a good guide to music theory for mathematicians?

There seems to be lots of stuff along the lines of 'if you understand music, here is some mathematics to help you think about it' but not much 'if you understand mathematics, but not so much about music, here is how to think about music'.

Mathematicians regard 'symmetries' as algebra (as in group theory etc rather than high-school algebra) rather than geometry and I suspect this is about the use of the word geometry in part.

When I read the article when it came out, I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford as it's the same at all the universities. It's also been that for a long time - I earned comparable amounts as a DPhil student and post-doc teaching at Oxford and another UK university. More recently I've worked as a tutor for The Open University and the pay for that has felt in a similar ballpark once you take into account all the marking and prep you need to do.

When I did it, I had my DPhil grant/post-doc salary and it felt like side money rather than being my 'job' and I was partly doing for the experience, for my CV (good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it!) and partly because I enjoyed it. I felt quite lucky to be offered tutoring jobs at Oxford as they were much sought-after by DPhil students.

I think it's also worth pointing out that not all Oxford colleges are 'rich' and many have buildings and grounds that are expensive to maintain. I don't think most of them are better placed to pay more than other UK universities.

There's an argument to be made that people teaching at universities should be paid more, but it does feel unfair to single out Oxford.

There is an updated version by the way. Don't know if that bit has been updated.

I still think doing your whole food shop at M&S is 'higher class' than doing it at Waitrose, but it's weird because of the M&S Simply Food shops which are more geared I think to somebody in a city buying a day or two's food.

And you are right, class is much much more complicated than just money :-)

I've done lot of volunteering programming with children and also have an 11 year old. Three obvious options: Unity, Scratch and Python with PyGame.

Unity sounds like the best fit to me - some code but a lot of interface. Code Club has a series of Unity projects which form a good getting started series: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/collections/unity As a Python programmer myself I found it fine helping my other son with those.

My 11 year old makes lots of stuff on Scratch by himself and has lots of fun. Scratch has pretty much become the default coding platforms for that under-12 age group. There are lots of resources and it's very easy to get making games, but it's limited in various ways and I have reservations about how great an introduction it is to programming beyond the real basics like variables and loops. If your child was seven or eight I would recommend Scratch, but feel like an 11 year old would probably be better off starting with something else.

Python is another option because you can help there and PyGame is the obvious library to use. It's quite a bit of work for somebody new to Python to make anything that feels like a game, although not impossible (I've been making a flag guessing game with my 11 year old in Python but using Tkinter instead) so more delayed gratification is definitely needed. You'd probably have to help a lot and there are a lot of concepts to learn - just becoming confident in how things like lists, dictionaries and objects work takes some time at that age. There are some books that lead you through making games with Python and PyGame though - Mission Python and Python Hunting spring to mind, with the caveat that I haven't worked through all of either of them. I think most 11 year olds would struggle to work through those books by themselves though, but if you skim through them and use them as a road map for making a game together, then they could be worth a go.

I got a photo of my great-great grandfather as a result of a DNA match as well as lots of other information about him - so I suppose it depends if that sort thing interests you or not.

I assumed that everybody did this when trying to solve a maths problem they are stuck on (thinking university type level maths rather than school maths) and when I was teaching I would always get people to go back to the definitions.

I wasn't amazing at maths research (did a PhD and post-doc and then gave up) but my experience was that it was partly thinking hard about things and grappling with what was going on and trying to break it down somehow, but also scanning everything you know related to the problem, trying to find other problems that resemble it in some way that you can steal ideas from etc.

I walked it the year before last and it is indeed! It's interestingly varied, remarkably quiet and a nice length and amount of effort.

I confess I also read this thinking 'this person hasn't tried learning Finnish'.

It's also trickier with more unusual languages because there aren't resources out there to the same extent as for more widely-spoken languages. I don't think there is an 'official' Memrise course for Finnish for example.

One of the things that puzzles me is when I see say Anki flashcards for mathematics things that I never learned like that. I never intentionally learned anything in mathematics in that was and it feels very 'wrong' to me when I see people trying to learn like that. I did a lot of practice looking back, but there was absolutely no conscious memorisation - the nearest I got was at university level when I would sometimes run through the main steps in a long proof before the exams, but it would be at quite a high level when I did.

I don't know if I'm just lucky in terms of how my brain works in some way and I found I had a pretty good 'natural' memory when it came to things like learning languages, and I appreciate that this is totally anecdotal. That book looks interesting however and as somebody who teaches, I'm interested in what works for everybody, not just me.

Likewise. It's also really useful having some self-catering facilities with children and other self-catering options are often unavailable totally or only in week blocks outside Airbnb in many places. Plus the cost is often the same or less than two hotel rooms.

Is this partly about norms I'm different countries?

If I were renting a holiday cottage in the UK (airbnb or otherwise), I'd expect to do the washing up and take our rubbish, and possibly strip the beds. I wouldn't expect to clean ovens or put laundry on.

Staying in Finland recently we had to make our beds at the start - no idea if that is normal there but wouldn't expect that in the UK unless you were at a youth hostel.

I assuming the cleaning feel covers mopping, hoovering, cleaning bathrooms, making up beds with fresh laundry. Some places do feel like they overcharge nonetheless for the number of hours required and I presume that it is more an overhead person stay charged to discourage short stays.

Parents definitely still take young children to the local playground - at least where I am in the UK!

I never felt I properly understood a proof unless I understood it both intuitively and formally. The formalism is to make sure your intuitions are water-tight. But there are proofs you can accept are formally correct without intuitively understanding them - I would accept the truth of such proof but not feel like I understood them.

I felt really sad reading this. I did mathematics contests at school - a team contest where our school's team reached the final and maths olympiads, where I did well enough to go to the IMO selection session. I loved them and have lots of fond memories of them. I wanted to do well obviously, but mostly did them because they were fun and loved beautiful mathematics problems and trying to solve them.

I wonder if part of the difference is that universities here in the UK aren't too worried by extracurriculars, especially for maths and science subjects.

I don't think my participation in contests was a factor in getting a place at Oxford - only the exams and to a lesser extent the interviews were. There's a short section on your general university application form where you write about such things, but unless you write something totally daft, it's general not a big factor. I interviewed people applying to Oxford for maths one year, and we really didn't pay any attention to the candidates' 'personal statements', although if any had been remarkable I guess we might have noticed. My mother was the maths admissions tutor at Imperial for years, and again they really didn't worry too much either - they cared about A-level grades mostly.

I think the model that the film industry has where films have a director and producer is an interesting one, and one that might be interesting to see followed more in software. The 'vision' for a product is a different skillset from the more logistic skills that are also needed to make good software.