Posts Tagged mathematics
We did a Christmas
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights on December 26, 2023
I’m visiting Joey Marianer for Christmas, so we sang a slowed-down cover of a Worm Quartet song, as Joey is wont to do.
Worm Quartet is also known as Timothy F. Crist, so we wished everyone a merry Timothy F. Cristmas at the end. I hope you had one of those, whatever it means. I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t celebrate such a talented comedy musician.
I did actually try some of that eggnog (‘milk that have a alcohol and then we put a egg’ except that this one didn’t have a alcohol.) The few times I’ve had eggnog before, I’ve thought that the alcohol ruined what could have been a very nice drink, so I was excited to try some non-alcoholic eggnog. Not only that, but I tried it mixed with orange soda, as recommended on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I really like it both ways! It’s also good with orange juice.
In unrelated news, we went to the MathsJam Annual Gathering, where Joey gave a talk on the true prisoner’s dilemma, and at MathsJam Jam we sang Symmetry and Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road. Ben Sparks taught everyone the harmonies for the Eagles version of Seven Bridges Road to sing Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road, and it was fantastic.
We didn’t sing This Tiling Never Repeats, because nobody (not even me) knew the music well enough. But on the Saturday of MathsJam, Joey and I wore Cirque du So What ‘I Want TILE!’ shirts, and I did in fact come away with a few handfuls of 3D-printed spectre aperiodic monotiles. Surprisingly, there were no aperiodic monotile shaped baked goods in the MathsJam BakeOff.
This Tiling Never Repeats (Split Enz parody)
Posted by Angela Brett in News on October 29, 2023
I mentioned in a previous post that I was working on a parody of History Never Repeats, by Split Enz, about the aperiodic monotiles that have been found recently. I’ve finished it, so here are the lyrics:
This tiling never repeats
Unending plane the kite and dart complete
We wish to show we can improve
We may assume, there’s always more to prove
It was the best we used to know
From David Smith, a savage blow
Penrose is great, but now we sing
A monotile beats his tiling!
This tiling never repeats
But some might say, reflected tiles are cheats
We wish to show we can improve
We may assume, there’s always more to prove
You say we’ve all been played for fools
We can’t reflect, if that’s the rule
Better to work than make dispute
They made a change and now it’s moot
This tiling never repeats
There’s not a need the Spectre doesn’t meet
And there’s a way to make more and more
Leading us to a space we can explore
This tiling never repeats, this tiling never repeats
Infinite shapes, just turn the dials
Aperiodic monotiles
Pick one and all the plane is spanned
We think at last we understand
This tiling never repeats
A manifold with manifold defeats
And there’s a way to make more and more
Leading us to a space we can explore
Never repeats!
Never repeats!
Never repeats!
This joins Symmetry and Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road in Joey’s and my submissions for this year’s MathsJamJam. Joey Marianer (yes, the one that I’ve somehow ended up married to!) also sang (and sent for inclusion in the Jam) Polygon Pam, a parody of The Beatles’ Polythene Pam written by Chella Quint:
I look forward to seeing Joey at MathsJam (and then Chella afterwards) and singing them together! I also look forward to eating some aperiodic monotile confections which will inevitably be baked for the MathsJam BakeOff.
I mentioned in a different post that Joey had been working on some cover songs which I was excited to share. The one I was most excited about is a slow cover of Entire Dog by Worm Quartet. It lasts almost twice as long as the rather frenetic original, and Joey initially sang it this way completely off-the-cuff one day over FaceTime. After a few slight revisions, I declared it was so good it should be stolen and used on Glee. But Joey kept singing it to me and making it even better.
If you think Joey made a mistake with some SI prefixes, read the video description. To really tie the post together, here’s a slow cover of a frenetic Worm Quartet song that also mentions math — and other kinds of multiplication… let’s just say it’s NSFW — Tired Of Not:
Both of these songs are on Worm Quartet’s new album, Carpe Tedium, which I highly recommend. Joey has been practising genre-benring covers of several more tracks from it, too.
A few mathematical numbers
Posted by Angela Brett in News on August 14, 2023
My last post had Joey Marianer (to whom I was flabbergasted to be married) singing some lyrics I wrote, and mentioned that we would soon be at the MathsJam Annual Gathering, and that I’d uploaded all my JoCo Cruise footage for that year. Well, in my aperiodic compiling of blog entries, I have reached a familiar local pattern. Joey (to whom I am still gobsmacked to be married) has sung more lyrics I wrote, we are once again planning to go to the MathsJam Annual Gathering, and I have uploaded all my JoCo Cruise footage for 2023.
A Cake of Sets
At my first MathsJam Annual Gathering, I gave a talk involving one poem I wrote and several that I found. At the 2019 Gathering, Joey and I participated in the competition competition with a Hallelujah competition. At last year’s Gathering, we added some set theory to the Bakeoff with this (cheese(cheesecake)cake) Venn diagram:
It was mentioned in this excellent summary TikTok by Ayliean!
We assembled it on-site from store-bought cheese, cake, and cheesecake. What with travelling internationally to MathsJam, it would have been impractical to (cheesemake(cheesebake)bake) it ourselves.
A Set of Songs
At this year’s MathsJam, we will add to the set list of the MathsJam Jam.
Symmetry
To start with, we noted an existing theme of symmetric relations in the lyrics of The Beatles’ song ‘All You Need is Love’ and made it explicit. Here’s Joey singing our parody, Symmetry:
Here are the lyrics:
Symmetry!
Symmetry!
Symmetry!There’s nothing that is x that x is not
No ex where you’re not an ex they’ve got
The symmetry says that the relation goes both ways
It’s easy!If you’re my sibling, I’m your sibling too
You’re married to me and I to you
Each of these relations is the same as its converse
It’s easy!x relates to y
x relates to y
x relates to y, why? ’cause y relates to xIf one real number’s greater than the other
Or maybe I’m your son and you’re my mother
Such relations exist, but symmetric ones top our list
They’re easierWhen x relates to y
x relates to y
x relates to y and y relates to xx relates to y
x relates to y
x relates to y, why? ’cause y relates to x
Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road
I’ve also written a first draft of a parody of the Steve Young song ‘Seven Bridges Road‘ about the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. Joey hasn’t sung this one, but I intend to enter it into the MathsJam Jam songbook (where there is already a parody of ‘Lola’ about the same topic.) Here are the lyrics:
There are rivers in Königsberg
Cross them as you go
Don’t forget one and don’t you repeat
On the Seven Bridges Road
Now each land mass must have odd or even
Bridges to and fro
Arrive but don’t leave in the same way
And Euler’s work did show
Sometimes there’s an odd one out
How to turn from there and go?
No way for a path with these few rules
Down the Seven Bridges Road
There are rivers in Königsberg
And if ever you decide you should go
There is a way by backtracking only
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Note, this is purely based on the way Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm sing Seven Bridges Road when they’re not pretending to be tone-deaf. If other artists sing it differently, the prosody might not work out as well.
This Tiling Never Repeats (in progress)
I’m also working on a parody of History Never Repeats by Split Enz called This Tiling Never Repeats, about the recently discovered aperiodic monotiles, which I am sure will be a big feature of this year’s MathsJam. I expect there to be at least three sets of aperiodic monotile cookies entered in the Bakeoff. I’ve only just started with this parody, but figured I’d mention it in case anyone wants to give me ideas for it, encourage me to finish it, or even write their own. I don’t mind who writes it as long as it exists and is sung at MathsJam.
A Song of Cakes
This section title is just for completeness, and because I needed something to separate the last song from the outro. I know too many songs about cakes to pick one.
As many people contemplate the value of X, I’ve created an account at what is obviously the best-named Mastodon server, Mathstodon. Feel free to follow me there! I don’t know yet how frequently I will post on it and/or my Twitter profile, but at least now you know where to find me if you’re on those networks.
∎
My Poetry Show on JoCo Cruise 2021
Posted by Angela Brett in Performances on April 26, 2021
I’ve been going on the JoCo Cruise since the ‘shadow cruise‘ was just an iPhone handbell choir. As it developed into something people could book spaces and times for, and have on a schedule that packed 26 days of events into a week, I participated in a few friends‘ shadow events, but hesitated to run my own in case it conflicted with something else I really wanted to do, or had me nervous or practising instead of enjoying other events.
This year, the cruise went virtual, and my excuses went out the window. I registered to do a poetry show, promising that I would ‘recite some poems that rhyme, some that don’t, and maybe even sing a few things. Topics may include science, love, poop, and life.’ I came to realise I could not only read my poems from my screen to avoid any nervousness about remembering them, but I could also share my screen. There are projectors on the cruise, but they are in short supply, so I wouldn’t request one for just one or two poems in a shadow event. On the virtual cruise, I could share whatever I wanted, including things from the internet, which wouldn’t be reliably available on a ship. And I could use props that I wouldn’t bother to bring on a cruise. So I did! I made slides for poems that worked best with visual aids, I showed off my rhyming dictionary, and I closed with a cover song that requires a video. And of course, I recorded everything. Here’s my show!
I also performed a few poems at the open mic — hastily-adapted versions of a poem I wrote for the Vienna open mic Open Phil, and the one I opened my show with about the differences between the real cruise and the virtual one. Joey Marianer and Phil Conrad (who also hosts Open Phil) hosted the open mic, so the open mic videos are on Joey’s channel.
It sure was weird watching Joey upload videos, when usually I’m spending most of my free time from March to May processing videos from the cruise. On the subject of cruise videos, the videos of the official events will allegedly only be up until May 1, so watch them while you can!
Things I forgot to blog about, part n+1: NanoRhymo #2
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on January 21, 2020
In November 2018 I created NanoRhymo (inspired by NaNoWriMo), in which I wrote and tweeted a very short rhyming poem every day. I did the same thing in April 2019 for Global Poetry Writing Month. I started pretty late with NanoRhymo in 2019, and didn’t end up with a poem for each day of November, but I’ve started it again on January 1 and made up for the missing poems. In November, I mostly stuck to writing something based on a random rhyme from the rhyming dictionary I made, rhyme.science — either a new one I’d found each day, or one generated earlier for the @RhymeScience twitter feed. In January, I’ve often been inspired by other things.
I’ll continue writing a NanoRhymo a day for as long as I can. Here’s what I’ve written so far:
Day 1, inspired by the rhymes later, translator, and (in non-rhotic accents) convey to:
When you’ve got a thought to convey to
many mortals, sooner or later,
then you ought to get a translator.
Day 2, inspired by the rhyme chunked and bunked, and the folk etymology of ‘chunder’:
Sailors lying in their bunks
would shout “Ahoy there, mate… watch under!”
and then let loose digested chunks
on hapless seamen sleeping under.
That’s why even now, down under,
[I am lying; truth debunks!]
some refer to puke as chunder.
[This is half-digested junk
Please accept my weak apology
and not this doubtful etymology.]
Day 3, inspired by a friend’s experience learning flying trapeze:
My friend Robert Burke tried the flying trapeze.
It meant lots of work mulling hypotheses,
and then much amusement and catching catchees,
to end up all bruised on the backs of the knees.
Day 4, inspired by the rhyme spermicides and germicide’s:
Looking at small things up close and myopically,
one might prevent overgrowth with a germicide.
But looking at large things afar, macroscopically,
one must prevent unchecked growth with a spermicide.
Day 5, inspired by the rhyme explainable and containable:
As soon as the bug is explainable,
we can hope that it might be containable,
and our neural nets will be retrainable,
and our code is so very maintainable
that this progress is surely sustainable!
Day 6, inspired by the rhyme freaking and unspeaking:
Mouth agape, stunned, unspeaking
Eyes wide open, silent freaking,
What could this strange vision be?
a music video, on MTV?!
Day 7, inspired by the rhyme trekked and collect:
Over much terrain they trekked;
specimens they did collect,
to show just how diverse life was
before we killed it off, just ‘cause.
Day 8, inspired by the rhyme interleaved and peeved:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
here, I tried ABAB.
Now the rhymes are interleaved!
This rhyme and rhythm’s reason-free.
Day 9, a rewrite of Day 8 that can be sung to a possibly recognisable tune:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
Then try to make them interleaved
Or don’t, and then just let the hate flow through ya
Just AAB, then CCB
This rhyme and rhythm’s reason-free.
At least it can be sung to Hallelujah.
The most Hallelujest Joey Marianer sang that version:
Day 10, inspired by the rhyme platitudes and latitude’s, and my general dislike of casual hemispherism:
I’m just fine with the end-of-year platitudes —
“Happy Holidays”, nice and generic,
but please, be inclusive of latitudes:
“Happy Winter” is too hemispheric!
Day 11, another Hallelujah, inspired by Joey’s singing of the previous Hallelujah:
A kitchen scale, a petrol gauge,
a cylinder, a final page
will tell you up to what things have amounted.
An abacus, a quipu string,
some tally sticks, to always sing,
are all things on which Joey can be counted.
Day 12, inspired by the rhyme deprecations and lamentations, some deprecated code I was removing from the software I develop at work, and also complaints about macOS Catalina dropping support for 32-bit applications. I imagine it sung to the tune of Camp Bachelor Alma Mater:
Hear the coders’ lamentations
over apps that will not run,
due to years-old deprecations,
updates that they’ve never done.
Day 13, inspired by the rhyme whoop’s and sloop’s, and the tradition on JoCo Cruise of ending the final concert with the song Sloop John B:
Have some more whoops on me,
hearing the Sloop John B
as JoCo Cruise comes to an end.
You still have all night.
Hang loose, or sleep tight.
Well, we feel so broke up
but you’ll stay my friend.
Day 14, to the tune of Morning Has Broken:
Something is broken;
look at that warning!
Unbalanced token.
Unknown keyword.
Raise the exceptions.
Erase all the warnings.
Raze preconceptions wrongly inferred.
Day 15, inspired by Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel:
The rooms are all full for as far out as they can see;
such a big guest house to fill, but oh well.
What’s this? Nonetheless, there’s a sign saying vacancy!
There’s always more room at the Hilbert hotel.
Day 16, inspired by the rhyme feeling’s and ceilings, and the song Happy, by Pharrell Williams:
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof. 👏
Please applaud if you think you’re a chamber with no ceiling. 👏
Clap along If you feel like happiness is the truth. 👏
Please applaud if you think there’s veracity in good feelings. 👏
For day 17, I let Pico, emacs, ed, vi count as the NanoRhymo, even though it does not mention the text editor nano.
November ended with no more rhymes, but I started it up again on January 1, simply because I was inspired to, and I continued to get ideas every day since. I’m not promising to keep this up daily all year (indeed, I promise not to keep it up during MarsCon and JoCo Cruise 2020) but I’ll post NanoRhymi whenever I feel inspired to.
Day 18 (on January 1, 2020) was inspired by the rhyme unworthy and incur the:
Don’t worry that you might incur the
sentence, “That person’s unworthy.”
Just try what you wish, and try plenty,
and have a great year twenty-twenty.
Day 19, inspired by the rhyme verb and kerb, but using the North American ‘curb’ spelling because it’s closer to the verb derived from the noun:
If you’d punch down, or kick to the curb
for verbing a noun, or nouning a verb,
researching the past will amount your disturb.
So many of the words we used today, including some in that poem, were once strictly parts of speech other than the ones they’re used as without a second thought today, and people objected to their shifts in usage just as they object to all manner of language change today.
Day 20, inspired by the rhymes occur to, Berta, and (in non-rhotic accents) subverter:
If it were to occur to Berta the subverter to hurt Alberta,
she’d prefer to assert a slur to refer to her to stir internal murder.
(Stones break bones but names make shame — heals more slowly, hurts the same.)
Day 21, inspired by the rhyme unconcealed and unpeeled:
While you’re growing in the field,
all your goodness is concealed,
till some lovely creature picks you,
doesn’t think they have to fix you,
lets you chill, let down your shield;
then, when you are fully peeled,
your sweetest inner self revealed,
that cunning rascal bites and licks you.
Day 22, inspired by the rhymes for fish, dwarfish, and (maybe in some non-rhotic accents with the cot-caught merger) standoffish, the ‘teach a man to fish‘ metaphor, and of course, my own poem, They Might Not Be Giants:
If a person’s always asking for fish,
don’t give them one, and go away, standoffish.
Teach techniques that they’ll expand on.
Be the shoulders they will stand on.
Not a giant — generous and dwarfish.
And then the same thing as a limerick:
There once was a man asking for fish,
who got one from someone standoffish.
Then shoulders to stand on
and tricks to expand on,
were given by someone quite dwarfish.
Day 23, inspired by… certain kinds of transphobic people, I guess:
Some folk seem to be offended
by the thought the queerly gendered
might themselves become offended
when they’re purposely misgendered,
so they’ve boorishly defended
all the hurt that they intended
towards the “easily offended”
who are “wimps” to try to end it.
Day 24, a double dactyl inspired by a conversation with someone who’s considering hormone therapy with one aim being a reduction of schlength, during which we noticed that ‘endocrinologist’ is a double dactyl, and also inspired by Paul and Storm’s habit of calling Jonathan Coulton ‘Dr. Smallpenis‘ (with the ‘e’ unstressed) which began on JoCo Cruise 2013:
Dr. Jon Smallpənis,
Endocrinologist,
helps you to shrink all the
parts that aren’t you.
Piss off, dysphoria!
Spironolactone could
soon make you tinkle the
whole darn day through.
Spironolactone is a medication that blocks the effect of testosterone, which as a side effect can increase urinary frequency.
Day 25, inspired by the rhyme eleven words and heavenwards:
Dear Father, a prayer I remember, amen.
Another, sincere from a vendor, again.
As if by reciting just ten or eleven words
I’ll lift myself quite transcendentally heavenwards.
Day 26, inspired by what I was actually told at my first comprehensive annual checkup:
Sit up straight!
Lose some weight!
Take these pills!
Cure your ills!
Your heart is beating!
You’re good at breathing!
With those two habits kept up,
We’ll see you at the next year’s checkup.
They really did seem impressed by how well I could breathe. I wasn’t too good at it when I started, but I have been practising my whole life, and if I’m good then I may as well continue the habit.
Day 27, inspired by this Smarter Every Day video about activating smart speakers using laser light instead of sound:
Here’s a technique that is quite underhand
to beam gadgets speaking they might understand,
and give an unsound and light-fingered command.
This one works best in accents without the trap-bath split, so that ‘command’ rhymes with ‘understand’ and ‘underhand’.
Day 28, inspired by a container of those little dowel things to hold up shelves, which was labelled ‘Safety trans.’, and the song The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats. This parody is presumedly to be sung by Women and Nonbinary People Without Hats:
You can trans[ition] iff you want to.
You can leave your assigned gender behind.
‘Cause your assigned gender ain’t trans and if you don’t trans[ition],
Well your assigned gender stays assigned.
Day 29, inspired by a video about Jason Padgett, who survived a vicious beating to end up with (among less attractive brain issues) savant skills and a kind of synaesthesia:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain.
Get a bump, or have a seizure,
then end up with synaesthesia —
not the grapheme-colour kind,
rather, an amazing mind!
Day 30 is a version of day 29’s poem which can be sung to the tune of Hallelujah, with a second verse reminding people that synaesthesia is actually pretty common, affecting about 4.4% of people, (I have the grapheme-colour kind) and doesn’t necessarily confer superpowers:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain
by healing from an injury or seizure.
They sometimes get amazing minds
associating different kinds
of input in a thing called synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia.
But synaesthetes are everywhere,
not magical, or even rare.
It doesn’t make them smart or make things easier.
It just makes Thursday forest green,
or K maroon and 7 mean.
Your ‘the’-tastes-like-vanilla synaesthesia
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia…
This refers to time-unit-color synaesthesia, grapheme-colour synaesthesia, ordinal linguistic personification (also known as sequence-personality synaesthesia), and lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, but there are many other kinds.
Day 31, a parody of ABBA’s Fernando for which I am deeply sorry:
Did you hear he goes commando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this.
In the firelight, commando,
he was wearing his new kilt and playing bagpipes by the fire.
I could hear his sudden screams
and sounds of mountain oysters sizzling in the fryer.
Day 32, inspired by two tweets I saw, each quoting the same tweet where someone had contrasted pictures of Prince Harry in the army with pictures of him with his wife, and claimed that getting out of the army and getting married was somehow emasculation caused by ‘toxic’ Hollywood feminism:
The two tweets happened to rhyme with each other and follow the same structure, from the ‘fellas, is it gay’ meme, so I put them together, and added a few lines:
Fellas, is is gay to have a wife?
Fellas, is it gay to be a human being with a life?
Fellas, is it gay to wear a suit?
Fellas, is it gay to dress to socialise instead of shoot?
(Fellas, is it toxic to be gay?
Fellas, why frame questions with a word she didn’t say?)
Day 33, another Hallelujah parody, inspired by Joey’s observation that NanoRhymo scans:
You want to practise writing verse.
The secret’s to be very terse.
You don’t have to try hard, just have to try mo’.
You write some dogg’rel every day
and some you’ll toss, but some will stay.
An atom at a time; it’s NanoRhymo.
NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo.
Day 34, inspired by a Twitter thread which began with my friend Rob Rix expressing frustration with type inference, and one of his followers suggesting the term ‘type deference’:
https://twitter.com/quephird/status/1217968127419416576
I love when it complies,
regards me with deference,
and bravely compiles
my unguarded dereference.
Day 35, inspired by… tea. I feel so rich when I make a pot of tea and top it up all day, having unlimited tea without feeling like maybe it’s wasteful to be using my eighth teabag of the day:
If hot tea’s an oddity,
the tea bag’s your commodity,
but if you drink a lot of tea,
you should make a pot of tea.
(To add some boiling water t’
whenever you want hotter tea.)
Day 36, inspired by my efforts to write an AppleScript to copy all my NanoRhymi and GloPoWriMo poems from Notes into a spreadsheet in Numbers, which initially failed because I had accidentally addressed the script to Pages instead, and Pages don’t know sheet:
👩🏻💻Hello there! Your finest Greek corpus, to go!
👩🍳The what now? Not understand corpus, no no!
👩🏻💻The active Greek corpus, the frontmost, the first, display all the corpora you have; am I cursed?
👩🍳I’m sorry? Your question is Greek to me… how?
👩🏻💻Okay then, just show me your bookcases, now!
👩🍳Bookcases? I have none; you’ve made a mistake.
👩🏻💻Ah, frack! You’re no linguist! You’re actually the baker!
The spreadsheet, by the way, shows I’ve written about a hundred of these small poems in total so far, in the course of my NanoRhymo and GloPoWriMo stints. I haven’t gone through it checking for notes that didn’t contain completed poems, so I don’t know the exact number yet. In the next roundup of these things, I’ll probably start numbering them based on that total, rather than the ‘days’ of any particular run of them.
Day 37 (today, as I write this), a parody of Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off‘ inspired by another tweet by Rob Rix, in which he notices that a calculation done in Spotlight Search which should give the result zero does not, and remarks, ‘computers gonna compute’:
’Cause the bugs are are gonna ship, ship, ship, ship, ship
And an on bit is a blip, blip, blip, blip, blip
I’m just gonna flip, flip, flip, flip, flip
I flip it off ⌽, I flip it off 🖕🏻
That’s all of the NanoRhymi I have so far; I’ll post more here occasionally, but follow me on Twitter if you want to see them as they happen.
∎
In other news, please consider buying one or all of the MarsCon Dementia Track Fundraiser albums, which are albums of live comedy music performances from previous MarsCon Dementia Tracks, sold to raise funds for the performers’ hotel costs for the next one. The 2020 fundraiser album (with the concerts from MarsCon 2019) is nearly four hours of live comedy music for $20, and includes my performances of Chicken Monkey Duck and Why I Perform at Open Mics.
For yet more music, Joey and I will be participating in round #16 of SpinTunes, a songwriting competition following in the footsteps of Masters of Song Fu. I’ve been following it since the beginning, but never had the accompaniment to actually enter.
NanoRhymo
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on December 2, 2018
November was National Novel Writing Month, which is a global event (‘National’ in this context means ‘More Official Than Other Made-Up Events, I Swear! Also, I Forgot There’s More Than One Nation’) in which people attempt to write 50000 words in a month. This is often abbreviated NaNoWriMo. I decided to go for an easier homophone, NanoRhymo.
Every day, I tweeted a short poem inspired by a rhyme I’d found using the ‘Random‘ button on the rhyming dictionary I made, rhyme.science. I’ve been tweeting interesting rhymes from this for a while, so some days I generated a new random rhyme, other days I looked through the @RhymeScience Twitter feed to find one that inspired me. Try it yourself! You might need to click a few times to get an accurate, interesting rhyme; I’m working on a new version that has fewer incorrect words or pronunciations in it, but don’t have enough spare time right now to get that up and running.
Some of them were fun little ditties, others were more inspired by current events or politics than my writing usually is. I’m not informed enough on most such issues to write on them, but that’s where the rhymes led me, and I have just enough of an informed opinion for a rhyming tweet. There are a few references to sexual assault and one to the Holocaust, so proceed with caution if reading such things is likely to be traumatic for you.
You can see all the NanoRhymos by clicking on the tweet above and reading the whole thread. But for those who prefer reading a blog, here they are. I’m considering continuing to write a NanoRhymo every day until I get bored of it, or until I have enough to publish a poem-a-day calendar. What do you think?
Day 1, inspired by the rhyme cloned and unowned:
It didn’t seem so wrong —
you wanted to prolong
the perfection of their hearts.
A collection of spare parts
was made when they were cloned.
They’re fêted and unowned,
but I’m a pair, impaired them-prime;
what’s mine is theirs, and theirs to mine.
Day 2, inspired by the rhyme no sin and close in:
A Jewish saviour way back
was questioned about payback,
and bade that those with no sin
grab stones and gather close in
to pelt a sinful other,
but then, the saviour’s mother
(whose immaculate conception
had made her an exception)
came forward — oh, Lord!
I would have ended that with ‘came forward, and Lord guffawed’, but I wanted to keep it in one tweet. The short version is probably better.
Day 3, inspired by the rhyme disguise and FBI’s:
This guy’s disguise will fool your eyes, but not the FBI’s.
They prize the wise who recognise through lies, despise the spies.
Day 4, inspired by the rhyme DVD on and neon:
Noise and darkness, stink and heat
Senses strained to find a beat
Shout to strangers lit by neon
…
Go home, put a DVD on.
Day 5, inspired by the rhyme young can and drunken:
Drunken groping long ago
Young can learn it’s wrong, and grow
Admit mistakes and make amends
Ensure the waking nightmare ends
Day 6, inspired by the rhyme enlighten’d and bite and, the election in the USA happening that day, and apparently also dogs:
Frantic voters running frightened,
Heavy hearts, but heads enlightened,
Two years on, they’ve seen his bite and
barking mad demeanour heightened.
Doggedly, they’ll put things right and
chase a future slowly brightened.
Day 7 (actually posted on November 10, because I missed a few days and made up for them by posting a few rhymes in quick succession) inspired by the rhyme promise’s and Thomas’s:
Don’t believe every Tom, Dick, and Harry;
Thomas’s promises won’t hold true;
Richard’s switch’d leave you hanging;
Trust Henry? Then regret that too.
Day 8, inspired by the rhymes rushes, crushes, and (in non-rhotic accents) ushers:
The wise one rushes,
Telling all their crushes,
Finding out the answers: yes or no?
No, they’ll only blush, or
Yes, follow the usher,
Make some more advances in the back row.
Day 9, inspired by the rhyme cynically and clinically:
After loving declarations,
you should not yet have relations,
but evaluate the information cynically.
Ask for terms and motivations,
and when provided with citations,
then concur, and place your arms around them clinically.
Day 10, inspired by the rhyme flattery and battery:
Some fake care to prime their victim:
soften and enlarge with flattery,
and while most juries don’t convict ‘em,
often they are charged with battery.
Day 11, inspired by the rhyme aghast and gassed:
See the harrowed and harrassed
Seething horrors of the past
Browse and mull, and be aghast
Thousands, millions, people gassed
This one has a different rhyme scheme in different accents: ABBA with the trap-bath split or AAAA without. It’s probably about the worst way I could have demonstrated the trap-bath split.
Day 12, inspired by the rhyme borders and marauder’s:
Halt, ye marauders,
attacking our borders!
Just following orders —
you can’t come in here!
If we don’t mistreat you,
we’re worried that we, too,
will soon have to flee to
another frontier.
(But they’d give us shelter;
they’d surely do well to!
We’re good folk, just dealt a
harsh blow; we’re sincere!)
Day 13, inspired by the rhymes (in non-rhotic accents) built a, kilter, and still to:
We’re all a bit off-kilter now;
we’ve lost a then and built a now,
but later’s what we’ve still to know,
and do we have the will to? No.
Day 14, inspired by the rhyme mathematician and proposition, and also Rudyard Kipling’s poem If—:
If⟹
If you see a proposition,
apply to it your intuition,
at length, exerting full cognition,
come to trivial fruition,
and restart with a new suspicion,
then you’ll be a mathematician.
Day 15 (actually posted on November 17, because I missed a few days), inspired by the rhyme compiling and unsmiling:
Robotic faces, cold, unsmiling,
hypnotic glaze of code compiling,
illuminating status lights
as humans wait for access rights.
Once it’s done, they wake anew —
the robots and their coders too.
Day 16, inspired by the rhymes amnesia and anesthesia, and whiskey and frisky:
Dull the pain with anaesthesia,
hoping for a brief amnesia
of harm sustained while he was frisky
(lapses blamed on too much whiskey)
Clear dark thoughts to fit some leisure:
dull clear thought with too much whiskey.
Day 17 (actually posted on November 18, because when catching up the missed days on November 17, I missed a day, so everything after this is a day late), inspired by the rhyme predestined and unstressed and:
If your plans have not progressed, and
stasis leaves you quite depressed, ind-
eed, you must stick out your chest, and
pray that you’ll be always blessed, and
loaf around, remain unstressed and
wait for that which comes predestined.
Day 18, inspired by the rhyme prick’d and afflict:
If Santa wanted Christmas cheer
to fill the Northern Hemisphere,
he’d send the elves to spread the word
to save yourselves and save the herd:
Inoculate yourselves; get prick’d!
Be those the flu will not afflict!
Day 19, inspired by the rhyme trustee can and deacon, although I ended up using 15 other rhymes for deacon and not trustee can:
Sea can weaken a Puerto Rican deacon.
We can be concerned, and we can sneak unspeakin’
or be concertedly connected shriekin’
so s/he can see kin be a freakin’ beacon.
Day 20, inspired by the rhyme Wozniak and Bosniak:
Once upon a time I met Steve Wozniak,
Who bought me a replacement when I lost me Mac
My life got weirder still; I saw a tokamak 🤷🏻♀️
And now I code for iOS to clothe me back
While Android code is handled by a Bosniak
It’s a pretty silly poem, but it is also 100% true (you can read the Wozniak story in even cheesier rhymes, if you like), and how could I ignore it when my random rhyme generator comes up with ‘Wozniak’?
Day 21, inspired by the rhyme xylem’s and asylums:
I’m committed to squeezing out a daily poem —
soon committed to a poetry asylum?
But pull enough good water up a xylem
and some day something sweet comes down the phloem.
Day 22, inspired by the rhyme Dulles’s and portcullises, and that time when I had about three hours to change planes in Washington Dulles airport but still only just made it, with an airport staff member running while pushing me in a wheelchair:
A change of planes is always an adventure
and no ride is as perilous as Dulles’s —
with far-off gates and queues there to prevent’ya
you’re sliding under plummeting portcullises.
This one is best read with low rhoticity and yod coalescence, to make adventure rhyme with prevent’ya.
Day 23, inspired by the rhymes routed, disputed, and (in non-rhotic accents) untutored:
In the untutored,
the pronunciation of ‘routed’
can be disputed,
so if you doubted
the pronunciation of ‘routed’
you’ve been outed.
(It depends on where you’re rooted,
so feud no more about it.)
Day 24, inspired by the rhyme fantoccini and Jeannie:
Jeannie, Jeannie, fantoccini
pulled the strings of her bikini,
made a pervy man look up it,
then she moved him like a puppet.
Day 25, inspired by the rhyme unstudied and ruddied, and the first image sent back from Mars by NASA’s InSight lander:
Freckled surface, still and ruddied,
sweeping spaces still unstudied,
far in space is InSight near;
insight can begin right here.
The freckles were actually dust on the lens, though.
Day 26, inspired by the rhyme Bernard would and hardwood:
A tree would never leave you;
it’s your steadfast, loyal bud.
A tree would never leave you;
it will root for you, come hail or flood.
A tree would never leave you;
it’s as solid as hardwood.
A tree would never leave you,
but Bernard would.
Day 27, inspired by the rhymes ultimata, weight a, and (in non-rhotic accents) eliminator:
The real eliminator
is bearing all the weight a
gazillion ultimata
can have on the enforcer.
Can they just divorce a
person they adore so
much because they made a
gaffe they said would force it?
Day 28, inspired by the rhyme conceal’d and kneeled:
They saw the violence, and they kneeled,
did not kowtow, and did not yield.
A shout of silence that conceal’d
the loudest power they could wield.
Day 29, inspired by the rhymes miss a, Alissa, and (in non-rhotic accents) kisser:
🙂: “Why would you miss a
girl named Alissa?”
🙃: “She’s a good kisser;
don’t you dismiss her!”
🙂: “But so is Melissa,
also Clarissa,
even Idrissa,
why just one Miss, huh?”
🙃: “Not gonna diss ya,
just not down with this, yeah.
I’ll follow my bliss, you
kiss them and I’ll miss ‘lissa.”
Day 30, inspired by the rhymes becharmed, unharmed, in non-rhotic accents calm’d, and in non-rhotic accents with the father-bother merger, glommed:
Onto magic guild they glommed,
vibes they quivered, nerves they calm’d.
Vicariously thus becharmed,
they came through escapades unharmed.
NaNoWriMo is over, but tune in on Twitter to see if NanoRhymo continues!
In which I appear content with content in which I appear
Posted by Angela Brett in News on September 24, 2018
I’ve been having a pretty relaxed month, but my life is ridiculous, therefore so far in September I have appeared in a music video, a radio broadcast, and a podcast.
The music video is Molly Lewis’s ‘Pantsuit Sasquatch‘, for which I recorded my feet walking up to a tortoise sculpture on a playground:
This joins the six other official music videos I have contributed to, and five unofficial music videos I’ve made. I guess I just like being in music videos.
The radio broadcast (which you can also listen to online) was episode #9 of the Open Phil Broadcast on Radio Orange. The broadcast mostly features regulars at the Open Phil open mic in Vienna. Each episode features an interview with and performance by two acts; I shared this one with Adrian Lüssing, also known as The Cliff.
It was an honour to be invited to participate in the broadcast, and it was made extra awesome by the fact that it happened while Joey Marianer, who has been setting a lot of my poetry to music, was visiting Vienna, so he participated too. I recited They Might Not Be Giants, then he sang his version of it, then we sang I Love Your Body, with Joey singing the first part and me singing the second part. Yes, me singing. This is about the first time I’ve sung for an audience, and the third time Joey and I had sung that song together, and it went on the radio. I think it went pretty well, though! We performed it again a few days later on the Open Phil stage, and I’ll post video of that once I’ve uploaded it.
The podcast was episode #60 of Wrong, but Useful, a recreational mathematics podcast by @icecolbeveridge (Colin in real life) and @reflectivemaths (Dave in real life). I was invited to be a special guest cohost. I’m not sure I contributed very much, but I once again recited They Might Not Be Giants, because the hosts had heard me perform that at the MathsJam Annual Gathering last year. I have to admit, I had not actually listened to the podcast until I was invited to be on it — podcast listening is something I usually do while commuting, and lately I’ve been noncommutative. However, before episode #60 was recorded, Joey and I listened to episode #59 together, and I’m happy to report that the answer we came up with for the coin-flipping puzzle was correct.
In hindsight, I wish I’d mentioned my linguistics degree while we were chatting about English and poetry and such. I also wish I’d said something about the fact that nobody on episode #59 noticed that the diameter of the Fields medal in millimetres happened to round up to the number of the podcast (that is, 64, not 59. You don’t expect mathematicians to give each podcast episode only a single number do you?)
This reminds me, I need to register for the MathsJam Annual Gathering soon. You should too, if you can get to it. It’s a lot of fun! And who knows? Maybe if you go, you’ll end up co-hosting a podcast.
≥3 (a poem and song)
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife, Things To Listen To on March 25, 2018
A while ago I wrote a poem about love, and how much more complicated it is than mathematics, and how the <3 heart symbol is a little oversimplified, or at least misleading to any mathematicians such as myself who come to believe that love is a strict inequality. I didn’t publish it here but I did perform it at my show in Café Concerto, while Johanna Van Tan improvised backing music:
I also performed it at A Bunch of Monkeys Read Some Stuff on JoCo Cruise 2017.
This is one of those poems that was always secretly a song in my head, so while we were on a train to Minneapolis I told Joey how the tune went, and when he was back in stationary accommodation he sang it to a slightly better tune:
So in a sense that’s two (which is less than three) musical versions of it! I can barely come up with anything coherent to say about this. ❤️
Here are the words:
They Might Not Be Giants: now a song!
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Things To Listen To on November 18, 2017
The other day I discovered that the ukuletrically charged Joey Marianer has once again set something I wrote to music! Truly, a Joey is an exciting kind of friend to have. (No, not a joey. Not everybody‘s got a baby kangaroo.) This time it’s They Might Not Be Giants.
On the subject of people who could conceivably be called Joey, and who make music, my friend Joseph will be singing a parody of a song I wrote on his patreon some time soon. I’m looking forward to it! If you support him on patreon you’ll see it as soon as it comes out — check out some of his recently-unlocked older posts to get an idea of what you’re in for. The patreon is his only source of income at the moment, so your contribution would mean a lot to him, as well as being good value for you.
On the subject of They Might Not Be Giants, I recited it at the MathsJam Annual Gathering last weekend. It was my first time at a MathsJam and it was great fun. At MathsJam, anyone can give a five-minute talk about anything mathematical, and newcomers were especially encouraged to, so I decided to present The Duel, a more mathematical poem than I would usually do at open mics. I even made some slides depicting what was going on. Eventually, though, I started to think The Duel wasn’t very good and I should do They Might Not Be Giants instead. After reciting both to a focus group of order two a few hours before my talk, I made the switch. With my remaining talk time, I showed some of the haiku I found in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It seemed to go down well. I had brought along a few of my posters in case people would be interested in them, and came back with none.
The rest of MathsJam was amazing, and I’m sure I’ll be back. There were all sorts of talks, including another mathematical poet, as well as magic, coin-floating, robotic cube-solving, juggling, puzzles, balloon animals, fancy yarn spinning, mathematical song parodies (I also sang Tom Lehrer’s Derivative Song for the people at the MathsJam Jam, since they hadn’t heard it), mathematical cakes, and a competition competition!
I won an origami double-stellated tetrahedron in a competition competition competition. It might not technically be a double-stellated tetrahedron, but the competition was to name it, and, inspired directly by the talk by the shape’s creator (Kathryn Taylor), that’s what I named it.
I was a bit worried that it was going to be a pain to get that home without damaging or losing it, since it would get crushed in my bag and I’m not used to carrying something in my hands constantly. At first it had a string or rubber band around it which had been used to tie it to the competition box, so I tied it to a belt hook. At some point it fell off and partly came apart, but I was having dinner with other MathsJam attendees at the time, and one of them knew enough modular origami to fix it (Kathryn had run a table devoted to modular origami on the Saturday night.) After that I held it by hand, until I realised that it could be suspended quite securely in the Acme Möbius scarf I was wearing.
I heard, repeatedly, that there’s a magazine called chalkdust which I should really be submitting some of my mathematical writing to, so I’ll do that. First, though, I will read the copies I picked up at MathsJam.
Forms and Formulae: Proof and Presupposition
Posted by Angela Brett in Forms and Formulae on October 16, 2014
This is the sixth in a series called ‘Forms and Formulae‘ in which I write about articles in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics using poetic forms covered by articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This installment’s mathematics article is entitled ‘Geometry’, and the poetic form is anecdote. This poem tells a true story I was reminded of by the discussion of the many attempts to prove Euclid’s parallel postulate from the other postulates, before people finally considered what would happen if it were false, opening up whole new geometries. This anecdote is not directly analogous, however, since I actually proved a statement to be false rather than proving it to be independent of the other axioms and then investigating what would happen if it were false.
A statement that the learned man had tried for days to prove
was set for students as a test
for four points extra credit,
to boost percentage marks assessed
of anyone to get it.
I mined brain gold with mind-brainpan, but things did not improve.
My efforts could not beat a path
from axiom to conjecture.
I sighed, and then let go of math
and headed to a lecture.
As I was sitting on the can, the shit began to move.
I saw the field with eyes anew
and found a boundary sample
that proved the statement was not true —
an outright counterexample.
To draw for years a foregone plan, for sure does not behoove
explorers hoping quests provide
not just what’s sought, but more.
Perhaps the field was opened wide,
but I scored one-oh-four.
∎
I’ve been sitting on a draft of this one for a while, because, as noted above, disproving something is not the same thing as proving that one axiom can neither be proven nor disproven from the others, and then launching new fields of mathematics in which the axiom is taken to be false. Besides that, it’s a poem mentioning poop (though written before Shit Your Inner Voice Says), and it has a really weird rhyme scheme and awkward rhythm, for no good reason. Then again, I did once credit my short-story-writing success to the mention of toilets.
It is a true story; my abstract algebra professor at university set a couple of problems he hadn’t managed to prove himself for extra credit, and after proving problem number one I happened to think of a counterexample for problem number 2 while doing number 2s, and ended up scoring more than 100% for that class. I felt like I couldn’t make up an entirely fictional anecdote (though that is allowed, according to to the encyclopaedia) and while I’m sure I could write all sorts of other poems about geometry (on top of at least one I already have), I don’t have a lot of anecdotes about it.
Unimpressed as I am by this particular effort, I have to publish this to get onto the next Forms and Formulae, which will be… oh, for the love of Gödel — a national anthem for the development of abstract algebra?! What have I let myself in for?! It will take a while, because I’m heading to a programming conference followed by a translation conference soon, and then I’ll probably have to exercise my fledgling musical skills again.
Meanwhile, you can enjoy the highlights videos from Open Phil, an awesome open mic night in Vienna, where I’ve been practising reciting my poetry for audiences, and other people have been doing amazing musical things and other performances. Also, here‘s a very Vi-Hart-esque video I found while searching to see whether Vi Hart had anything to say on non-Euclidean geometry:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 