This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Double standards— World Standards Day 2023 will arrive soon, two days after it arrives. As Feedback noted last year (17 September 2022), having double Standards Days is standard behaviour. This year, most of the world will officially celebrate […]
Counting moths is not as easy as it may seem. Jamm Hostetler, and collaborators at the University of Florida’s Natural History Museum, created a system to count moths more indefatigably than most people would be able to do it. It’s called AutoMoth. The heart and eyes of it are an Android app called BioLens. Biolens […]
Mathematician Jim Propp connects the counting numbers — the concept of them, not particular, specific numbers — to the seemingly unconnected Lake Woebegon Effect. Propp’s essay appears in his Mathematical Enchantments blog: Beneath and Beyond … The twentieth century weekly radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” had a recurring feature called “The news from Lake […]
Here are some strange counting questions, gathered under the informative headline “Strange Counting Questions.”
Many humans have spent days, months or years counting feathers. Here are exciting highlights from some of their reports. In 1936 Alexander Wetmore, of the US National Museum in Washington, gathered all the published reports he could find about someone or other counting how many feathers were on particular birds. “The work of feather counting […]
“Of all the presidents we have had, George Washington was the only who really counted.” That single sentence with its double meaning comes at the end of a four-page monograph published in 1978 in the Alabama Journal of Mathematics. The report’s title is, George Washington: He Liked to Count Things. The author Pete Casazza, a mathematician […]
Here’s a message to count on. Behold this book. Does it add up? Why We Want You to Be Rich: Two Men – One Message. Four authors. EXTRA ASSIGNMENT: Write a fifty-word essay explaining why the book should simply be titled simply Why?