Getting Fit & Fundraising for Cancer Charities - Completed!

May 2022's fitness challenges are now complete: the results are in!

This is over for 2022. Maybe I'll have a go next year? You can see how I did below...

Calculating Day Rates for Freelancers

This day rate calculator was created by me and is based on Paddy McNulty's advice given during GEM NE's training session ""How Much!" Know Your Value - Pay and Conditions of Freelancing", 12/01/2022. It was initially produced as a spreadsheet but this might be quicker and easier for people who don't want to download their own version to play with. It also gave me an opportunity to play around with some coding¹.

To use it, just change the numbers in each of the editable fields. Totals and rates will be updated automatically as you do so. If you're not sure what to put in any of the fields, just experiment with some different numbers. and see what happens:

IMA Workshop (online): Python for A-Level Mathematics and Beyond

On Friday 21st January 2022 I attended an online training course hosted by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and delivered by Dr Stephen Lynch. The course was titled Python for A-Level Mathematics and Beyond, and was marketed at delegates with "no prior knowledge of programming".

At the beginning of the workshop I started to live-tweet...

I'm gearing up to take part in a course from @IMAmaths on "Python for A-Level Mathematics". I'm woefully under-skilled on the Python front so I hope I can keep up...

— Tom⇒maths AMIMA (@TeaKayB) January 21, 2022

... but very soon needed to concentrate too much to be able to continue. As a handful people seemed to be interested in the content I thought I'd write up my experience here.

Redundancy: One Year On

Today marks one year since my redundancy from Bletchley Park. ⅓ of the workforce was in the same boat (notably, ⅔ of the Learning Team, following the general narrative of education being hit particularly hard with redundancies across the cultural sector). I was lucky in being able to walk straight into two part-time teaching roles within days of leaving, but many struggled to find work in a highly competitive sector with drastically reduced funding.

Calculating 5th Roots - IN YOUR HEAD!

Multiplying a number by itself (e.g. $ 6 \times 6$, or $6^2 $) is relatively easy. Going back the other way - finding out what number has been squared to get a particular result (or finding the "square root", e.g. $ \sqrt{36} $) - is tougher: you need to either just know the answer or just guess it (and, of course, square it to see if you were right, and then if you're wrong have another guess, informed by the outcome of your first one).