thnik again!

This blog will take a break till January 5.

- Care to admire my new digital camera?
- Why not?
- It can take pictures with ten million pixels.
- That is impressive! Mine can only do half of that.
- Imagine I take a picture using all ten million pixels.
- And I take a picture of the same motif using my fem million pixels.
- Be my guest.
- Thank you.
- Then I crop out a part of the image 340 pixels wide.
- And I crop out the same part with width 170 pixels.
- Finally I reduce the pixels width of my cropped out part to 170 pixels.
- That is a lot of cropping and image size reduction.
- The question is, of course, will by image 170 pixels wide be of better quality than yours?
- The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

I started out as a child. - Bill Cosby

I read the 1907 original ‘An Episode of Flatland’ by Charles H Hinton in James R Newman’s 1956 collection ‘The World of Mathematics’. It did not impress me. A K Dewdney’s book ‘The Planiverse: computer contact with a two-dimensional world’ from 1984 on the other hand impressed me a lot. Now the two dimensions have reached the cinemas and will reach your download folder if you buy the 30 minute film online.

Here is a page on math fiction that may interest you.

From donkey to horse - an old puzzle by Sam Loyd he claimed he sold millions of.

Print the image above and cut out its six parts. Can you arrange the six pieces in such a way that it resembles a horse and not a donkey?

- The box above is as wide as it is high as it is long. 
- OK, uncle, but what is inside it?
- What is the angle between the two yellow strings?
- Is it a toy?
- Each string bisects a face of the cube.
- Then they must make 45 degrees each. The answer is 90 degrees.
- It doesn’t look like 90 degrees to me.
- May I shake it to find out what’s inside?

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.  Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.  - W S  Anglin

The needle on a grammophone travels from the edge of the record towards the center when a LP record is played. If there are 630 tracks with the closest 6 cm from the center and the one furthest 15 cm away, how many cm does the needle travel?

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.  - Carl Boyer