Simon programmed a presentation to explain why 28×28 is not the same as 20×20 + 8×8 geometrically. The code is quite complicated and involves some trigonometry and conditional statements: the grid is divided into different parts every time Simon clicks and depending on how many times he has already clicked. This is typical Simon – coming up with an inherently arduous and complex system to visualise the beauty of the world around him, even of the seemingly trivial things. By the way, the inspiration for the 28×28 grid came from Simon’s favourite math channel, 3Blue1Brown and its latest video on Neural Networks (the grid was used to explain computer vision).
Simon is doing quite a lot of sums in his head nowadays, looks like it’s a new trend. Today, while bathing in the fountain outside, he was calculating how long 1/16th of a minute lasted. And a couple days ago, while waiting for his appointment at the hospital, he calculated how long it would take someone to read a whole page of random numbers, taking an educated guess that one takes 4 seconds to read out one number and remembering Daniel Shiffman mentioned there were 100×5 numbers per page in his book.
Geeks out of the box 