Swans on Tea

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Heh, heh.
Find x. Here it is!
via Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat

Actual Age of Men Who Claim to Be 29 Online

A side comment by Matt about quizzes triggered a thought (so many of these interactions are induced rather than spontaneous)
I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice [...]

Do grocery stores give us the right mix of nuts?
Does anyone like Brazil nuts? Anyone?
Taking a look at the data from the other direction, we can ask another question. Is there anyone who likes Brazil nuts and doesn’t like any other nut? In other words, how many people might not find any nuts at all [...]

Awesome megapost over at Science after Sunclipse, covering many overlapping issues on the topic.
To use mathematics in the natural sciences, we first decide how we wish to represent some aspect of the world in mathematical form. We then take the diagrams and equations we’ve written and manipulate them according to logical rules, and in so [...]

Ketchup
A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.
It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000″
What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of [...]

McNugget numbers

I just read that the Chicago Bulls won the NBA draft lottery, meaning that the team with the worst record did not gain the first overall pick in the draft. Color me shocked. It was termed a “surprise” in some stories. Maybe it was a surprise that they won it, but not [...]

The candy weighing demonstration, or, the unwisdom of crowds
Get some candies of different sizes and shapes and put them in a bag. Have students estimate the mass of the ensemble by choosing 5 candies, finding their average mass, and multiplying by the number of candies. Their estimate will be too large because their [...]

Long but interesting NSA article: Solving the Enigma, including the American contribution of solving the Navy four-rotor Enigma codes.
(And recall a previous post about making a paper Enigma machine)

The Red Baron’s streak was partly skill but mostly luck. “Theory of aces: high score by skill or luck?” by Simkin and Roychowdhury, from the arxiv blog
We find that the variance of this skill distribution is not very large, and that the top aces achieved their victory scores mostly by luck. For example, [...]

I notice a slowdown in blog posts this weekend. I wonder if anyone has investigated the posting habits of US bloggers as it correlates with the weekend before April 15, which is tax day in the US. I did most of my heavy lifting a few weeks ago, and finished up the last [...]