I’m not going to complain to the BBC about this ‘cos… well obvious reasons really. I’ll just mention it here to distract you from the fact that the comments still aren’t working.

On University challenge last night there was a set of questions that claimed to be about hyperbolic functions (sinh, cosh, tanh) but were actually about sin, cos and tan*. Anyway the team’s mathematician had worked this out by the last question of the three and gave the correct answer “tan”, Jeremy Paxman was like “tan?” as if expecting more and after some muttering the team slightly sheepishly offered the wrong answer “tan^-1,” or something (I think they actually said “to the minus one” rather than inverse as they’d realised by this point that they were dealing with a bit of a dulard) anyway it turned out that the answer Paxman was expecting was actually “tan of x” (I’m guessing it was written like that on the card rather than simply “tan x”) which as anyone who’s done GCSE maths knows is pretty much the same as just saying “tan” which was the original answer. I wonder if he’d have accepted “tan of q”**. Whatever, you can imagine the annoyance this all caused in the Tom and Emma household.

Anyway comments should be working by er… let’s say Thursday.

But don’t hold me to that.

*actually, I’ve just realised I wasn’t really paying enough attention to know if the answers were even correct, Paxman could just have been reading “sinh” as “sin”. I don’t know, and come to think of it it’s a bit wierd to define sin and stuff in terms of e whereas for the hyperbolic functions it’s perfectly normal. Either way, Paxman is a big dummy when it comes to maths and should be told to hurry up in a condescending way.

**very lame pun comes to mind about tanh(q)