A New Stroke: Why Australian crawl is on its last laps

Up-and-coming swimmer Bada Choi, along with his unorthodox support team, is poised to disrupt the entire sport of freestyle swimming. We investigate Bada, the minds behind his success, and the novel machine-learning code that has enabled it.

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Fourth Year Blues

Schedule: Fourth Year, Semester 2

Week 3

Monday

  • Produce a spreadsheet of your grades for the semester to calculate a running mark. Fiddle with the pending assignment marks to determine the minimum required for a distinction. Reason that Excel is an important workplace skill and that this is not a waste of time. Suppress the anxiety of looming assignments.

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A Map of Every Place I've Ever Been

You could fit a linear trend to the points on this map, if you wanted, and probably get a pretty good χ2. If you follow that through logically, I must be destined to travel to northern India, Greenland, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Maybe I can go other places where the line wraps back around the Earth.

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Some kind of trout

The fish was minding her own business when a fissure opened in the ice above her, and she was sucked unceremoniously upward.

She wasn’t really a fish, of course. But she had fins, she had gills, her shape was ideal for slicing through Europa’s subsurface oceans. The obvious difference, biochemistry aside, was her lack of eyes, and some deep-water Earth fish don’t have those anyway.

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Essay: "Tens and tenths: decimalising calendar and angle"

Way back in first year, for an elective about soft mathematics (that wasn't the official description), I wrote an essay about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting further decimal units. I tidied it up a little, and here it is!

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Which Nintendo characters would burn in holy water? A comprehensive study

Yesterday, Simon Belmont (of Castlevania fame) was announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. One of Simon’s attacks is holy water. The only possible conclusion to is that, in some way, every character in Smash is an unholy monstrosity that must be vanquished. Here, we try to work out why.

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The Ultimate* Cheat Sheet for Astrophysics Students

At some point during my undergraduate degree (Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics, with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing) I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if I collected all the physics and maths formulae I've learnt into a notebook?" This became three notebooks, then, when I realised how untidy they were getting, a LaTeX document. In the hope that others might find it useful, I decided to put it up here. Three years after it began, here it is!

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Legacy - Sign of the Limbless

This symbol has a few different meanings throughout my Legacy universe (under construction). Within the universe's fictional history, it's been passed down from civilisation to civilisation, symbolising different things to each.

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