I understand why someone living in the city might get a slice of pizza - they don't want to carry a box of pizza back to the office, and there is something nice about sitting down and having a quick bite.But I have never understood why anyone buys a medium pizza, much less a small. If you understand what a circle is, and you understand what a dollar is, it makes no sense.First, the dollar. The...
read moreThere are a lot of conferences out there. If you are in science, or even science media, you have gotten emails soliciting papers. The benefit for them is you pay a big registration fee, the presumed benefit for the contributor is you get to say you did a paper at a conference.Likely inspired by the Sokal affair, where a hippie physicist got tired of hippie, anti-science nonsense in philosophy and...
read moreDuct tape, or duck tape if you are old school (1), can fix anything, according to the public. Well, according to men in the public who are often too lazy to do it right.But it has to have limits and engineers love to find out where things go from linear to nonlinear.So if you give engineers the same amount of duct/duck tape, who could make their friends stick to the wall the longest? The...
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At a young age, I gave up on trying to master the latest high-fives, hand signs and generally trying to be cool. I couldn't do the math.But math geeks can, and Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings is apparently the coolest. He can show you how all of the various high fives relate to math.Just one sample, since I put germaphobes in the title:The Asymptote. This representation of one of the...
read moreIn the early part of the 13th (XIII) century, Europe was still using Roman numerals. You can imagine what that did to advance math education.Fibonacci is famous for the number sequence that bears his name today (I am not certain, but I believe the first program I wrote in Fortran on a Univac 1100/60 was for Fibonacci squares) but the Plus magazine team says he would be surprised by that; rather...
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