A paper in the arXiv, discussed on the Physics arXiv Blog, investigates what the blog post called “one of the more intriguing conundrums in fluid dynamics”: why bubbles in Guinness appear to sink as the drink settles and the head forms.
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WLTM real number. Must be normal and enjoy long walks on the plane
Something that whipped round Twitter over the weekend is an early version of a paper by Francisco Aragón Artacho, David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein, investigating the usefulness of planar walks on the digits of real numbers as a way of measuring their randomness.
A million step walk on the concatenation of the base 10 digits of the prime numbers, converted to base 4
A problem with real numbers is to decide whether their digits (in whatever base) are “random” or not. As always, a strict definition of randomness is up to either the individual or the enlightened metaphysicist, but one definition of randomness is normality – every finite string of digits occurs with uniform asymptotic frequency in the decimal (or octal or whatever) representation of the number. Not many results on this subject exist, so people try visual tools to see what randomness looks like, comparing potentially normal numbers like $\pi$ with pseudorandom and non-random numbers. In fact, the (very old) question of whether $\pi$ is normal was one of the main motivators for this study.
Aperiodcast – 3/6/2012
After an unexpectedly long wait of over three weeks, here’s the third Aperiodcast, discussing what’s happened on the site between 13/5/2012 and 3/6/2012. You’ll notice that we recorded this podcast four days ago – we were all having too much jubilee fun to find time to upload it! Anyway, we had lots to talk about, so please do have a listen.
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Model for processing language in context
New research looks at how language is used to convey information in context, something which is, according to its abstract “one of the most astonishing features of human language”. Apparently there have been “many” theories providing “informal accounts of communicative inference” but few have succeeded in making “precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning”.
First International Data Journalism Awards winners announced
The Royal Statistical Society reports on the award of the first International Data Journalism Awards (DJA) organised by the Global Editors Network (GEN).
Data journalism is described in the piece by DJA jury leader Paul Steiger, who said that “digital techniques for capturing and making sense of data are taking their place among the most critical tools of journalism around the globe”.
A complete list of winners and honourable mentions, with links to the winning stories, is given on the RSS eNews website.
The mathematics examinations faced by school leavers in the Republic of Ireland
This Friday, close to 13,000 students in the Republic of Ireland are set to take higher level maths in the Leaving Certificate, the state exams for 17-18 year old school leavers. That’s the highest number for two decades, and a 25% increase on last year’s all-time low of 10,400 who registered to sit the higher level exams. Typically, only about 80% of those show up for the higher level paper on the day–last year just 8,200 did–the rest playing safe and switching at the last minute to the ordinary level exams.
In 2011, a little over 55,000 Irish students overall, in a country with a population of 4.6 million, sat the Leaving Certificate in their final days of secondary education. This year, just under 54,000 school leavers are taking the Leaving, as it’s known. I hope they’ve studied hard, and wish them every success!
New York Museum of Mathematics will open on December 15th, 2012
An announcement has been made on Twitter that the long-awaited Museum of Mathematics will be opening on Saturday, December 15, at 11 East 26th Street in New York City.