Erin
Zach WeinersmithSo this happened
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spheres-part-1
jexner 🏳️🌈@ZachWeinersmith a work of utter beauty!
Jernej Simončič �@ZachWeinersmith … so that's what Hamming distance is :)
Ozzelot 
@jernej__s
I was vaguely aware of Hamming distance. I was chronically unaware of its relation to oranges and cannonballs. Now I am aware.
@ZachWeinersmith
I was vaguely aware of Hamming distance. I was chronically unaware of its relation to oranges and cannonballs. Now I am aware.
@ZachWeinersmith
Phosphenes@ozzelot @jernej__s @ZachWeinersmith
Other than that Hamming distance is the radius of a sphere on a binary cube, and stacked oranges are spheres, what do the two have to do with each other?
I missed something, or something is missing.
Walt Mankowski@ZachWeinersmith Brilliant! And if I can put on my radiology department hat for a second — MRI machines are claustrophobic, expensive, and a limited resource, so anything that can speed them up even a little bit is a big deal.
Tobias@ZachWeinersmith Incredible.
Alex, the Hearth Fire@ZachWeinersmith "only true of Claude Shannon" lol
Led By Gilded Fools@WizardOfDocs @ZachWeinersmith A Flame-throwing trombone?
Cool, I want one. Does Claude have a supplier he can connect me with?
Tom Forsyth
Unicycling Darth Vader upgrades to Flaming Bagpipes - Keep Portland Weird - The Unipiper *Official*
@MHowell @ZachWeinersmith it occurs to me that a class action lawsuit of people named Claude against Anthropic would not go amiss
seeing this in my mentions and not remembering what I'd said, the first thing I think of for "Claude" is not Shannon, or any other human for that matter
@WizardOfDocs @ZachWeinersmith Perhaps, rather than lawsuits, a flame-throwing trombone could be used to reduce some data centers to a smoldering ruin.
Alexander Knochel
Nazim Bharmal@ZachWeinersmith The last panel 🐪! (Obscure Terry Pratchet ref.)
Skyr@ZachWeinersmith so much love for this comic series 😍
Jon Bosak@ZachWeinersmith More like this, please. Are you planning a book?
@bosak No such plans, right now :)
@ZachWeinersmith Small niggle - it wasn't clear that the narrator was a specific person (Mr. Tao) rather than an abstract character. I only realised at the end and had to go back to find their name.
Oblomov
Grégoire Locqueville@ZachWeinersmith How come you had an imaginary Erdös number? 🤔
Stylus@ZachWeinersmith How do you tile a hexagon with polyominos?
@ZachWeinersmith i hope to see thompson and jenkins return, probably in a prequel so they still have that story driving conflict.
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@ZachWeinersmith ::clap clap clap clap clap::
David Cantrell 🏏@ZachWeinersmith oh so *that's* how Hamming codes work. Pretty picture make better pedagogical tool than entire chapter in text book.
webhat
pyrrhlin@ZachWeinersmith @webhat the topologists however, are doing fine
evildrganymede@ZachWeinersmith moral of the story: mathematicians don't know when to *stop* answering the question (bless 'em) :)
Scott Francis@FMarquardtGroup this is the second time sphere packing has randomly appeared in my attention space in the last 24 hours (the other was Grant from 3B1B giving at talk at UC Santa Cruz on it, kinda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsLh-NYhOoU )
The most beautiful formula not enough people understand
W6KME@ZachWeinersmith I'm no math whiz (EDIT: that's wrong; I have minimal education in math but I find it absolutely beautiful) but I AM a trombone player who has put a propane burner into my instrument. Do I count?
I have a fascination with people who do mathematics and other sciences, I've been an artist my whole life and those other arts are so interesting if foreign to me.
sluggard 
@ZachWeinersmith is the crypto challenge in a patreon panel?
Maybe I just missed it looking on my phone
Maybe I just missed it looking on my phone
gjm@sluggard @ZachWeinersmith It's on the last page, in plain text and also in the bonus thing you get by clicking on the big red button on that page.
@gjm @ZachWeinersmith I wasn’t having any luck seeing that on my phone. On my tablet, I can see it
I’ll give it a shot
@sluggard @ZachWeinersmith Here's the actual thing. I hope it isn't too much of a spoiler to say that you will want to have looked at the actual comic before solving it.
011100101 011111111 110100110 101111010 100010011 010101110 000000000 010011010 001100001 100110001 101111011 011100001 010110111 001111011 111101011 100000000 001100001 011111111 110100110 110101011 000000010 001100100 100001101 001001010 001110111 101111010 111100001 110111000 101010100 100110101 001111011 001110110 011111111 111100001 011010010 001110110 101110011 100001101 001100101 001110110 010101110 111010100 010110101 101110011 001100101 111100000 101111011 110101011 111100001 000101111 010100110 101111011 111110000 000000000 001100100 100001111 011100110 010111000 001101101 101111011 010110101 111100001 111010100 101010100 111100001 111010000 010100110 000101110 001110110
Crovanian@ZachWeinersmith I press the forward arrow, but nothing happens! I don’t computer very good.
Mad B@Crovanian
I think the comic intends to indicate the buttons on the webpage below the comic? I was also confused for a moment
@ZachWeinersmith
I think the comic intends to indicate the buttons on the webpage below the comic? I was also confused for a moment
@ZachWeinersmith
snowpaw@ZachWeinersmith
I thought mathematicians mostly help insurance companies to rip people of.
(Awesome comic btw. Much love!)
Oriel Jutty 
@ZachWeinersmith ... did you forget to finish panel 1 in part 2? 😃
@ZachWeinersmith I think I'll just stop at the sorcerer thing, that should do to strike fear in the hearts of my students
Colin BeveridgeI note that it has been decreed that an imaginary component to one's Erdős number is conferred by wearing the coat of Paul Erdős (or the coat of someone who has worn it, etc.) Mine is 5+i. Cc @ZachWeinersmith
@Oaktag I get that... not a lot, but once in a while :-) Thanks!
Counting Is Hard@ZachWeinersmith I've often found it slightly amusing that I run into so many people who are the brown-haired guy in panel 1, and yet who really love puzzle games of all descriptions. My dude, if you can finish "Baba is You" you can definitely handle Calc 1
Jon Wilson@ZachWeinersmith Do you consider yourself a co-author on Bahfest presentations? Because if so, my Erdos number just dropped!