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.
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 problem with real numbers is to decide whether their digits (in whatever base)…
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,…
With the national fair over, the regional Big Bang Fairs are taking place. These aim to “inspire and enthuse the next generation of engineers and scientists”. This year the Nottingham Maths Jam group will be at the East Midlands fair repeating our puzzles stall, previously seen at the East Midlands Big Bang Fair 2011. Maths…
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”.
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…
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…