Some Mathy Reading for the Weekend

The nation presses on through week 32 of Trumpian antics… and the math bits continue coming:

1)  Mathologer, covering a lot of ground in 15 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFwSIdLSosI&feature=youtu.be

2)  A compendium of math games (h/t Sherri Burroughs):

http://maths-resources.com/games.php

3)  Two doses of Ben Orlin in a single week (I feel like a glutton):

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/11/the-noncombustive-property-of-skulls/

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/13/literatures-greatest-opening-lines-as-written-by-mathematicians/

4)  NY Times obituary for the father of ‘fuzzy logic’ (h/t Steve Strogatz):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/science/lotfi-zadeh-father-of-mathematical-fuzzy-logic-dies-at-96.html

5)  The latest London Mathematical Society Newsletter available online here (h/t Peter Cameron):

http://newsletter.lms.ac.uk

…and latest issue of “The Variable” from the Saskatchewan Mathematics Teachers’ Society (h/t Egan Chernoff):

http://smts.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/The-Variable-2017-September-October.pdf

6)  H/T to Keith Devlin for tweeting out “please read” this March post by Tracy Zager (read the comments as well) on the interplay of math and language:

http://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathematics/Blog/“This-is-easy”_-The-little-phrase-that-causes-big-problems/

7)  Taxicab geometry via Futility Closet:

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/13/taxicab-geometry/

8)  Robert Talbert’s one-year plan for converting to flipped learning:

http://rtalbert.org/one-year-plan/

9)  An introduction, from Deborah Mayo, to Charles Peirce’s take on induction:

https://errorstatistics.com/2017/09/13/peircean-induction-and-the-error-correcting-thesis/

[p.s… for anyone deeply interested in Peirce’s work, Jon Awbrey’s blog often addresses it:

https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/category/c-s-peirce/ ]

10)  The one-and-only Jordan Ellenberg is featured this week on the “My Favorite Theorem” podcast, and he explains a linkage between Fermat's Little Theorem and Pascal's Triangle:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/jordan-ellenbergs-favorite-theorem/

11)  Brian Hayes' latest book of essays, "Foolproof, and Other Mathematical Meditations" should start showing up in bookstores any day now.

On a side note, lest anyone hasn't heard, by the time you read this, and after a 13-year journey of discovery, the Cassini spacecraft will have crashed into planet Saturn this morning, with a lot of coverage on the Web (not of the actual crash event).

Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest): 

1)  Well, this Twitter thread gave me waaay more laughs than I was expecting:

https://twitter.com/MarkHarrisNYC/status/905897399146696704

2)  For sheer entertainment, a Japanese Rube Goldberg machine on steroids: