Carroll originally invented his Doublets in 1877, they were published in "Vanity Fair" (the magazine, not the Thackeray novel) in 1879. Some years later, in an 1892 letter, Carroll added another rule: that permutations were allowed. This allows very neat chains such as: roses, noses, notes, steno, stent, …

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Apparently there's a version of Doublets (see previous post) which allows you to add or delete a letter each turn. Thus we can go from WHEAT to BREAD as WHEAT, HEAT, HEAD, READ, BREAD which is shorter than the ladder given in that previous post. However, we can easily adjust the material from that post to implement …

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Lewis Carroll's game of Doublets Such a long time since my last post! Well, that's the working life for you. Anyway, recently I was reading about Lewis Carroll - always one of my favourite people - and was reminded of his word game "Doublets" in which one word is turned into another by changing one letter at …

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Plagiarism, text matching, and academic integrity Every modern academic teacher is in thrall to giant text-matching systems such as Ouriginal or Turnitin. These systems are sold as "plagiarism detectors", which they are not - they are text matching systems, and they generally work by providing a report …

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What this post is about In the previous post we showed how to set up a simple interactive map using Python and its folium package. As the example, we used a Federal electorate situated within the city of Melbourne, Australia, and the various voting places, or polling places (also known as polling "booths") …

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Message about the underlying software NOTE: much of the material and discussion here uses the Python package "folium", which is a front end to the Javascript package "leaflet.js". The lead developer of leaflet.js is Volodymyr Agafonkin, a Ukrainian up until recently living and working in Kyiv. Leaflet version 1.80 was …

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In this post we look at two Divisions from the recent Federal election: the inner city seat of Melbourne, and the bayside seat of Macnamara. Up until the recent election, Melbourne was the only Division to have a Greens representative. Macnamara, previously known as "Melbourne Ports" has been a Labor …

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This continues on from the previous post, trying to make some sense of the voting in my electorate of Wills and the neighbouring electorate of Cooper. Both these electorates (or more formally "Divisions"), as I mentioned in the previous post, are very similar in their geography, demography, and history. Last …

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So the Australian federal election of 2022 is over as far as the public is concerned; all votes have been cast and now it's a matter of waiting while the Australian Electoral Commission tallies the numbers, sorts all the preferences, and arrives at a result. Because of the complications of the voting system, and of all …

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This post illustrates the working of Ramanujan's generating functions for solving Euler's diophantine equation \(a^3+b^3=c^3+d^3\) as described by Andrews and Berndt in "Ramanujan's Lost Notebook, Part IV", pp 199 - 205 (Section 8.5). The text is available from Springer. Ramanujan's result is that if \[ …

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