Wobbly tables wobbly no more – mathematics to the rescue

Another tip-off from Scientific American – the long-awaited mathematical proof of how to stop a table wobbling. Read the preprint here. (Quite by coincidence, the first author of this paper occupies the office next to mine – an office I only moved to when I came to this country two weeks ago.)
Comment posted by jae’than [...]

Of rats and equilateral triangles

A new blog from Scientific American magazine begins with the amazing story of how rats – and possibly humans too – project an array of equilateral triangles onto their visual field, and use it not only for navigation but for episodic memory too.

Physicists make religion crystal clear – physicsweb

Physicsweb has a great little article about a peer-reviewed study showing how
[t]he rise and fall in the popularity of major religions can be described using the same mathematics that is used to model crystallization processes . . . The researchers have modelled the time evolution of the numbers of adherents to religions and claim that [...]

James P. Pinkerton – rhetoric and the use of logic

The Japan Times recently reprinted a Newsday article by James P Pinkerton “Christmas lives, thanks to atheism, Islam“. I recommend this article as a study in rhetoric and logic.
I use the word rhetoric here with the intended unfavourable nuance implied by one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions: “Speech or writing expressed in terms calculated [...]