Topalov won Game 1 yesterday. Anand is the current champion.
Follow the match here:
The other day I watched an episode of the Daily Show with John Stewart.
10 minutes and 30 seconds into the show there is a clip where FoxNews asks what the Nuclear Security Summit’s symbol has in common with the flags of the Muslim nations shown below.
Fox News suggests that President Obama chose the symbol to please the Muslim nations as it is ‘similar to Muslim image’.
Jon Stewart did the obvious thing, he called the White House and asked them how the logo was chosen.
The answer is found in any Chemistry text book. The logo was inspired by the Niels Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom.
Stewart’s conclusion:
It turns out that it is worse than we thought. It turns out that the people in the White House are not Muslims, they are nerds!
To mock Fox News further Jon Stewart finds Fox News’ logo looks like 3rd Reich poster and the Kamikaze flag.
To me it is refreshing to see how Stewart use satire and under statement to bring his points across. He must have read Kierkegaard.
The secret of communication is to liberate the other. Therefore one should not communicate in a straight forward fashion, yes it is even ungodly to do so.
Update: New York Times had this article today. By the way, I wrote the above last week.
Colour the map with four colours, so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour.
Nice interface. My four-year old son likes it a lot.
From Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. Play it here.
You overhear a conversation in which it becomes known that one person has two children, one of them a boy who was born on a Tuesday. What is the chance that the other child is also a boy?
(The answer depends on how one interprets the relevance— or lack thereof—of the reference to Tuesday. So an interesting meta-question is: how many plausible contextual backgrounds to the conversation can you specify that lead to different answers?)
Problem source: The Emissary.
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions. – Robert A Humphrey
a, b, and c are sides in a triangle, but not just any triangle. In the triangle we are thinking of the above expression is true!
If you don’t mind, tell us about the triangle we are thinking of.
Problem source: Math Central, Problem of the Month.
One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. – Robert Boynton
a) True or false: If you have a string 1 metre long, there is only one shape that you can make with it that has the biggest possible area.
b) True or False: There is one shape with an area of 1 square metre, that has a larger perimeter than all other shapes of the same area.
Problem source: Maths by email.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. – Bill Watterson
Consider three horses, each pulling a cart filled with hay. The horses are in a row, walking down the road. As it walks, the second horse gets to eat from the hay that the first horse is pulling. The third horse gets to eat from the hay the second horse is pulling. Which horse would you prefer to be?
The question is taken from Cliff Pickover’s Galactic Question Center: ‘We search the world, asking questions. Sometimes we get answers that change the way we look at our lives and the cosmos.’
You could claim that the problem is not clearly defined and on top of that the problem is not mathematical.
The first step in coming to grips with math is to knock it off its pedestal. The real-life problems that are important to us are problems like these: Whom should I marry? Should I marry? Should gays be allowed to marry? What career should I go into and how should I prepare for it? If I invent gizmo X, will people buy it? Should corporations have the same constitutional rights as individuals? What’s the best way to unplug the toilet? Math plays little if any role in solving such problems, nor do such problems have clear-cut right or wrong answers, demonstrable by some formula. Human intelligence and reasoning reside in wisdom, not math. Wisdom is the ability to bring one’s values, likes and dislikes, knowledge about other people and their likes and dislikes, and general knowledge of the world together in a manner that leads to workable solutions to the problems that confront us–solutions that promote our own and others’ happiness and decrease our own and others’ miseries. – Peter Gray. More