Nao robots are a programmable standard model of small scale humanoid robot by French firm Aldebaran Robotics, and they are used for, among other things, the RoboCup soccer tournament to provide a standard platform to compare programming skills. Anyone paying attention to robot/dancing-related news on the internet will be aware that Nao robots have been…
Ask a mathematician: “Where should we live?”
Dear Mathematician, My partner and I are trying to buy a house. We both work in different places, and neither of us enjoys commuting. How could we decide where to live? Fictionally yours, Norman Mettrick Norman, Thank you for your intriguing and entirely imaginary letter. The short and not terribly useful answer would be:
Carnival of Mathematics 87
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of May, is now online at Random Walks. 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.
How the shape of the glasses causes bubbles in Guinness to appear to sink
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.
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 problem with real numbers is to decide whether their digits (in whatever base)…
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,…
National Science & Engineering Competition at your local Big Bang Fair
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…