Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Something for the Young, the Older, and the Conspiracy Theorist


A few items you may have already seen, but if not...:


1) Sherlock-Holmes-wannabes are still trying to figure out who "Satoshi Nakamoto," creator of Bitcoin really is. The NY Times piece below draws an unconvincing (I think) link to the former proprietor of the Silk Road website. The guessing game may be more fun than learning the true identity will ever be.

http://tinyurl.com/otavjw3

2) Another great post from MathMunch covering several matters, but what most interested me (because I'd not heard of it) is a Scrabble-like game called "Numenko" that helps young people learn/practice arithmetic:

http://mathmunch.org/2013/11/04/numenko-turning-square-and-toilet-paper/

3) And finally, my favorite recent read from the Web, the always excellent Natalie Wolchover attempts to explain (better than I've ever seen done before, though still a tough-read) two different approaches to solving the infinity "continuum" problem:

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131126-to-settle-infinity-question-a-new-law-of-logic/

Set aside some brain-time to take in this account of "forcing axioms" versus "V = ultimate L".


No comments: