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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Different surfaces have different n-color map theorems
Via Cliff Pickover’s entertaining and educational Twitter timeline, we discovered this beautiful essay by Evelyn Lamb, a promising postdoc at the University of Utah. Dr Lamb describes the fascinating and paradoxical topology of a strange surface–the Möbius strip–a surface with … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics
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Randomness and the Iowa Caucus
For reasons that are obscure to us, the State of Iowa holds the first presidential primary in the nation every four years. (Shouldn’t the first presidential primary vote be allocated at random to a different State every four years?) This … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Probability
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Bargaining and Betrayal in Breaking Bad
Last fall, we posted the abstract to our work-in-progress titled “Breaking Bad and the Natural Law Tradition.” Originally, we were going to write about the conflict between meth kingpin Walter White (alias Heisenberg) and DEA agent Hank Schrader from a … Continue reading
An offer he could not refuse (Lessons 3 & 4)
Because our business law class meets only once per week, we are combining Lessons 3 & 4 into a single lecture. As it happens, both business law lessons have something important in common: contracts. In the film “The Social Network” … Continue reading
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Flat-Earth map (circa 1892)
This is what the one particular flat-Earth paradigm looks like … Any questions?
Posted in Maps
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Where did the “I’m feeling lucky” option go?
Can you solve the case of the missing “I’m feeling lucky” feature? For starters, check out this screenshot taken from our iPhone 5 earlier in the day (Jan. 30, 2016): Did you notice that the “I’m feeling lucky” feature on … Continue reading
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Theoretical and empirical analysis of airline boarding
We understand why so-called “security” checkpoints at airports are so slow and horribly inefficient? But why are airline boarding procedures (which are implemented by the for-profit private sector) so slow and horribly inefficient? This short video (it’s only two and one-half minutes long) … Continue reading
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Cartoon family resemblance
Via kottke, check out this crazy table of cartoon characters drawn by artist Jaakko Seppälä. The diagonal from top left to bottom right (shaded gray) portrays a variety of familiar cartoon characters; the rows contain re-interpretations of these characters based … Continue reading
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Edge-matching puzzle with no logical solution
Check out the “edge-matching” puzzle pictured above. The setup of this game consists of seven contiguous hexagons arranged inside a circle. The edge of each hexagon is assigned a number from 1 to 6. The goal of this game is to match the numbers … Continue reading
Posted in Games
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prior probability 