I don’t know why this question popped into my head, but it’s been sitting there for the past week and showing no signs of moving on.
Suppose an enemy of mine threw a friendly blue whale at me. Being a friendly whale, it makes the blue-whale-noise equivalent of “DUCK!” to warn me it’s coming.
How quickly does the whale need to be travelling for its warning to be useful?
This article on BBC News caught my eye because it has “maths” in the headline. Yes, I’m that easily pleased.
Somewhere in the middle, it says that myHermes requires the “volumetric area” of a parcel to be less than 225cm. That’s right: the “volumetric area” is neither a volume nor an area but a length. Anyway, the formula for volumetric area of a package with sides $a,b,c$, where $a \leq b \leq c$, is
\[ 2(a+b) + c \]
(Importantly, $a$ and $b$ are always the two shortest sides of the package)
So the constraint is
\[ 2(a+b) + c \leq 225 \]
In the next paragraph is the puzzling statement that the maximum allowable volume for a package is $82.68$ litres, or $82680$ cm3. How did they get that?
I decided to do some calculus of variations, or whatever it’s called.
Just a little note to let you know that there’s a new StackExchange Q&A site for “History of Science and Maths”. Some of the maths questions that have already been asked include:
So if you’ve got a burning question about Maths in the Past, there’s now a place to ask it.
Visit the site: hsm.stackexchange.com
The Imitation Game is the new film starring Sherlock Holmes as Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, and Keira Knightley as Kate Winslet as Joan Clarke. Together they are two mathematicians in World War II trying to build a bombe. The film will soon be available on DVD, blu-ray, and as an animated GIF set on tumblr.
These are the Imitation Game FAQs.
Stardate November, 2014. These are the continuing adventures of the website The Aperiodical. Its mission: to explore the pages of strange newspapers, to catalogue nonsense formulas, to boldly disapprove of them in ways no blog has done before.
What a joy it was to open my browser this morning and see this delicious headline waiting for me:
(by the way, most of the links in this post contain Downton Abbey spoilers. You have been warned.)
In a way, I’m beginning to like nonsense formula stories. You could say that
me + nonsense formula x q = happiness x 2
So, what’s going on this time? Who commissioned it, who sold their soul, and most important of all, does the formula make the least jot of sense?
You may remember a couple of years ago there was a conviction of seven men in Italy, widely reported as being for failing to predict an earthquake. Actually, there was a little more to it — the conviction related to a supposed “falsely reassuring statement” given to the public — but, still, the scientific community’s outrage centred around the impossibility of accurately predicting earthquakes based on earlier tremors.
It was reported this week that the manslaughter conviction for six of the men has been overturned in an appeals court, with the seventh — then deputy head of Italy’s Civil Protection Department Bernardo De Bernardinis, who made public statements that the tremors posed “no danger” — having his sentence reduced from six to two years. Physics World says it is likely that these verdicts will be challenged in Italy’s Supreme Court, which may not hear the case until 2016.
Physics World: L’Aquila verdict quashed.
Aperiodical: L’Aquila seismologists found guilty of manslaughter connected to earthquake risk assessment.
Ariel Procaccia and Jonathan Goldman of Carnegie Mellon University have taken it upon themselves to make fair division problems easier to solve with a flashy new website called Spliddit (eyy, fuhgeddaboudit).