The march of the righteous towards victory over the rent-seeking publishers continues apace, so here’s another Open Access round up. I’m not even going to bother trying to remain impartial any more, for the following reasons:
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‘RightingBot’ simulates the way lizards right themselves when falling
RightingBot. Credit: Tom Libby
Lizards, just like cats, have a knack for landing on their feet when they fall. But unlike cats, which twist and bend their torsos to turn in the air, lizards swing their large tails one way to rotate their body the other, according to a recent study. And the longer the tail, the smaller the movement needed. The study used high-speed video, developed a mathematical model and finally used this to develop a lizard-inspired robot, called ‘RightingBot’, which replicates the feat.
More and Less
I’m currently reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, presenter of Radio 4 maths show More or Less. It’s very good, but one thing is stopping me from giving it an unqualified recommendation: it’s full of passages like this:
[T]he government spends three hundred dollars per person (five times less than the British government and seven times less than the American government)
Because of its lousy education system, Cameroon is perhaps twice as poor as it could be.
The poorest tenth of the population spends almost seven times less on fuel than the richest tenth, as a percentage of their much smaller income.
Puzzlebomb – July 2012
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 7 of Puzzlebomb, for July 2012, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 7 – July 2012
The solutions to Issue 7 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 7 – July 2012 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Carnival of Mathematics 88
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of June, is now online at cp’s mathem-o-blog.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
Carnival of Mathematics 88
Better late than never, here’s the 88th Carnival of Mathematics. As an editor of The Aperiodical, I’ve been press-ganged into interrupting my holiday to write this month’s edition.
Before I start with the real submissions, I think I’ll abuse this bully pulpit to link to some of my recent blogging efforts. I found each letter’s favourite words, recorded a video proving a nice fact about grids of fibonacci numbers, and wrote an Aperiodical Round Up. I also wrote a jQuery and WordPress plugin to give blog commentors instant previews of LaTeX in their comments. You can try that in the comments section here, if you’d like.
Continue reading “Carnival of Mathematics 88” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
Etienne Ghys, 2012 LMS Hardy Lecturer
It was a couple of weeks ago now that I saw Étienne Ghys deliver a lecture titled On cutting cloth, according to Chebyshev at Newcastle University, as part of his lecture tour as Hardy Fellow for 2012. I had no idea what the talk was about and only a faint idea of who Prof Ghys was but I was persuaded to go by my ex-supervisor, who also happens to be Newcastle’s LMS rep. It turned out to be an enormously interesting and entertaining talk on a very accessible problem (in the sense that you can easily understand what the problem is and why the solution works, if not how you get there) by one of the most eminent mathematicians working today.