As we approach the much ballyhooed era of the so-called ‘internet of things‘ where pretty much all our devices will be connected to the internet and thus remotely accessible and controllable, on the surface this looks great. But the catch is that this also allows hackers to access them and that can be problematic.
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Anyone who has seen classical statues of male nudes, such as Michelangelo’s statue of David, would have noticed that they have quite small penises. Nowadays, this is often the subject of humor, such as Stephen Colbert recently showing an image of the statue and then commenting that it must have been quite cold when David posed.
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When he was the weekly humor columnist for the Miami Herald, Dave Barry found the area’s weirdness a fertile source of material, writing about the venomous snakes and other wildlife that he would find in his backyard. One can only imagine what he would have done with the reccent news that three human-eating crocodiles that are native to the Nile river in Egypt have now been found in that state.
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According to NASA, , the record-breaking temperatures continue.
The latest NASA data reveals that April was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. The new record marks the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, as the scientific consensus remains that human activity is contributing to detrimental climate change across the globe.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver gives an excellent segment on the nature of science and how the relentless drive to hype it so as to provide sensationalist headlines has resulted in a highly distorted view of how it works. (Thanks to reader Jeff Hess for the tip.)
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Suppose you have N people and one cake. How can you cut the cake such that each person is satisfied that the pieces have been distributed fairly? This is an old problem that Martin Gardner wrote up in his column for Scientific American and in the case of two people it is quite simple: One person gets to cut the cake into two and the other person gets to select the piece they want. (But see later for a problem with this.)
But what if there are more than two people? Below the fold, I give Gardner’s explanation on how to do it, starting with the case where N=3, quoted by Walter Stromquist in an issue of The American Mathematical Monthly.
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Via Mark Frauenfelder, I came across this fascinating little video that informs me that being in possession of a particular number is now illegal in the US and why. I cannot tell you the full number because I don’t know it but apparently knowing it and even writing it on a piece of paper could land me in prison. All I know is that the number is a prime number that has 1419 digits that begin with the sequence 85650789657397829.
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There are a total of 49 terrible wildfires currently blazing away in Alberta, Canada. While fortunately there have been no deaths and injuries, the damage has been extensive. This news report begins by describing the extent of the fire.
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Jimmy Kimmel takes to task all those who ignore the scientific consensus and deny that global warming is occurring and that it is largely caused by human activity. The compilation of scientists at the end speaking about the issue is great.
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The sudden and unexpected death of Prince at the young age of 57 naturally arouses curiousity as to the cause. Although he was a Jehovah’s Witness and reportedly abstained entirely from recreational drugs and alcohol, the fact that he was part of the popular music world immediately fueled speculation that drugs were involved. He supposedly had prescription painkillers, needed because he refused to have double hip replacement surgery due to the fact that it would require blood transfusions that are prohibited by his religion, and an overdose of these might be a possible cause.
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