Ben North's blog

I have a box of cassette tapes from the mid to late 1980s containing, among other things, the programs I wrote for the Dragon 32 when I was younger.

In my increasingly-distant youth, my family had a Dragon 32 home computer, which I spent many hours with.

One of many identities within Pascal’s triangle goes, I recently learnt, by the name of The Hockey-Stick Identity, or sometimes The Christmas Stocking Identity.

A little while ago, Zach inherited a barograph, and spent some time cleaning it, including the mechanism and all the woodwork of the case.

In the first Harry Potter book, our heroes have to find two useful potions hidden in a collection of seven bottles.

In the same way that there are magic squares, where every row and column add up to the same sum, it turns out there is also exactly one (non-trivial) magic hexagon.

On the TV gameshow Countdown, there’s a round where six number cards are chosen, along with a target number.

Flashing lights in a wooden frame I’ve always liked the effect you get when two lights are flashing at not quite the same frequency.

One of the sports in the Wii Sports Resort game is Island Flyover, where you get to pilot an aeroplane round the island and its surrounding waters.

A previous post described a Lego implementation of an escapement mechanism similar to one I’d seen in the British Museum.