I thought this was a sick joke, playing on the tendency of small children to put objects in their mouths. Does the back of the box have diagrams of the Pediatric Heimlich Maneuver?
Maybe not. The Kelloggs web site lists the product.
TTB sends a link to a story about a crop circle in Wiltshire, England that seems be a coded representation of the first 10 digits of Pi:
3.141592654
Looks like the math bears are venturing out from the woods.
A 2-dimensional animation of a 3-dimensional projection of a 4-dimensional convex regular polytope rotating in 2 different directions at the same time. Don’t try this at home.
Wonkette accuses Cindy McCain of stealing recipes, one for oatmeal butterscotch cookies in particular.
I don’t know which is more pathetic, Cindy McCain pretending to be an apron-wearing, cookie-baking homemaker, or the self-appointed Recipe Police googling everybody’s recipes to detect plagiarism.
Here is an interesting illusion. The image above is static, but it appears to move. For me, it works better if I move my eyes around the image.
This stationary image appears to wave without effort. The elemental illusion is our revised version of the peripheral drift illusion, in which the direction of illusory motion is black-to-dark-gray and white-to-light-gray (Kitaoka and Ashida, 2003). In this image, blue and yellow correspond to dark gray and light gray, respectively.
Not much of an explanation. I note that the letters all have black and white shading, and that the shading varies from letter to letter and from group to group. The motion seems to come from the cues in the shading. I have no idea what ECVP means, or if other letters might work too. If it works with numbers, I could generate some really irritating sudokus.
I also note that this illusion survives resizing. I reduced the image a bit to fit in the blog, and the illusion still works.
There is a new academic study of Prosper, the peer-to-peer loan platform, by economists Seth Freedman and Ginger Zhe Lin of the University of Maryland. Among the findings:
My own experience is that I am getting about 12.5% on AA and A loans. Mentally I discount my return to 10% to allow room for defaults, and attribute the extra 2.5% to luck. I suspect that it is not so difficult to beat the averages because the averages are lowered by clueless newbies bidding on loans that they will see as hopeless mistakes after they get a bit of experience.
Even though I think I could earn 9 or 10% on Prosper, I have not put in additional funds, mainly due to a lack of confidence that Prosper is growing fast enough to be viable.
Here is the animation, complete with sound effects. What a great way to teach number theory to kids! I even learned three words of Finnish.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
AFTER 105 witnesses and three months of evidence, a drug trial costing $1 million was aborted yesterday when it emerged that jurors had been playing Sudoku since the trial’s second week.
In the District Court in Sydney, Judge Peter Zahra discharged the jury after hearing evidence from two accused men, one of their solicitors and the jury forewoman, who admitted that she and four other jurors had been diverting themselves in the jury box by playing the popular numbers game.
Will sudokuholism be the latest excuse to avoid jury duty?
