The eternal debate on when decades start In the comic above, Ponytail accuses White Hat of being pedantic. Hah. I’ll show you pedantic. The 21st century began on the first day of 2001. This has nothing whatsoever to do with … Continue reading
British mathematician, humorist, and author Matt Parker (whose YouTube channel is “standupmaths“) describes how rounding can have unexpected effects, even on how the Trump administration tried to get around a provision in the Affordable Care Act to please insurance industry … Continue reading
The Boston Public Schools have embraced a bad map projection, specifically Gall-Peters. The so-called Peters projection is promoted as “more accurate,” but this is at best misleading. Even The Boston Globe, in most respects a pretty good newspaper, neglects to … Continue reading
Suppose you’re designing a language course. All else being equal, you’d probably want to teach the most common words first, and there are a number of references you can check for that purpose. (For example, Wikipedia’s page for the most … Continue reading
(Updated 2016 April 1 to add some additional point and try to improve the explanation below the video.) Here’s a video with a surprise ending — a big surprise, in fact. The question addressed is this: What if you’re take … Continue reading
Research published in the 29 January issue of the journal Science shows that more than 2000 years ago, Babylonian astronomers in what is today Iraq were using unexpectedly advanced mathematics to predict the position of Jupiter. This is based on … Continue reading
This is an interesting musical composition based on assigning digits to notes in the A-minor scale and adding a complex left-hand accompaniment. There’s also some pi trivia on the visual side. As a bonus, here’s an entertaining (for math enthusiasts … Continue reading