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FRACTIONS CAN BE MEATY—SO SLEEP ON IT
MATH FUN CAN appear in the oddest places: in quick-food marketing or in mattress sales, to name two. McDonald’s was ahead of its time in 1972 with supersizing a hamburger into the Quarter Pounder,...
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MASSIMINO AND THE HUBBLE
THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE “stands right up there with the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China as one of the great engineering triumphs in human history.” This assessment comes from Mike Massimino,...
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THE (MIS?)RULE OF THUMB
I RECENTLY posted a Facebook comment mentioning “rule of thumb” as contrasted with more scientific methods of measurement. Think crowd size, for instance. Before doing so, I felt compelled to research...
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WATSON’S WAR WOUND
THERE’S A LOT OF scholarship, some of it contradictory, regarding the war wound of Dr. John H. Watson, chronicler of the world’s greatest consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. Exactly where was Watson...
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EXPLORING RATIONALITY, PART 1
THE WORD “RATIONAL” is wondrous. One meaning is “having reason or understanding, balanced.” Another, in mathematics, describes the ratio of two numbers, a fraction. In my continuing fractional fun,...
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EXPLORING RATIONALITY, PART 2
IN MY CONTINUING exploration of rationality, I offer the completed Decimal Exploration table of rational numbers 1/2 through 1/17 expressed in decimal form. Sorry about 1/17. I cannot speak for the...
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A MOCKING APOLOGY
RECENTLY I mentioned the Wizard of Oz in an item On Satire, Self-Inflicted and Otherwise. In retrospect, after more research, I owe an apology to the Wizard. True, the Wizard is a bully who must devise...
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MAKING AMERICA GREAT—AND TASTY TOO!
FOR THE FIRST time in its 15th biennial existence, the Bocuse d’Or, the Olympics of international chefdom, has been won by an American team. Head Chef Mathew Peters and his crew beat 23 other teams in...
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CROWD-COUNT CROWING
IN THESE DAYS OF alternative facts, I realize that anything scientific may be a hard sell to some. However, recent brouhahas over counting people make this an irresistible topic of scientific research....
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THE PERIL TO EARTHBOUND ASTRONOMY
PITY POOR Earthbound astronomers. Their telescopes have to gaze through more than haze. Other perils include L.E.D. street lighting, the Internet and then there is the prospect of autonomous cars....
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