By Alex Bellos Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: “I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?” The event was the…

'This is awful. I feel as if my brain has entered a school zone and has to slow down to 25mph.' Photograph: Christopher Lane Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 07.38 EDT This article has been removed as our copyright has expired.

I've been in Oil and Gas Production (all upstream) and Exploration for over 30 years. My salary is a little bigger than God's, which is okay because I'm more useful than he is. I'm a better cook than God is too, but lets get back on subject here. Booming School. Not only is Oil Spill Booming a large…

Bill Bryson: 'I was startled and appalled to realise how little I knew about the domestic world around me.' Photograph: Linda Brownlee for the Guardian Bill Bryson Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 07.38 EDT This content has been removed as our copyright has expired. This is an edited…

In the months before the invasion of Sicily, British spies fooled German spies with a caper inspired by a detective novel. Credit Illustration by John Ritter On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The…

us-election-minute opinion Opinion The US just bombed Yemen, and no one's talking about it Moustafa Bayoumi We need answers from the candidates on how they would deal with a deadly conflict in one of the Middle East’s poorest countries. We’re not getting them The US just bombed Yemen, and no one's…

Fanfares, ticker-tape parades and pompom-wielding cheerleaders failed to greet the news that the UK economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the quarter-year to December. That’s as it should be, because this is as fragile as a recovery can possibly be, after six quarters of economic contraction. This is…

Drawers containing homeopathic remedies. Protesters are to stage a 'mass overdose' of such remedies outside Boots stores. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Hundreds of sceptics will stage a "mass overdose" outside Boots stores around Britain tomorrow to protest against the chain's continuing…

I was in the gifted program up until I was 10 or 11 or whatever age it is when children can still be deemed extraordinary without having to prove themselves too much. A few times a week they’d bus me to a little school on the bad side of town where our teacher would do wonderful little useless…

Business Stripped Bare - by Richard Branson ISBN: 1905264429, READ: 2010-02-17, RATING: 6/10 (See my list of 200+ books , for more.) Amazon page for details and reviews. A real and specific description of the inner workings of the Virgin companies. Every entrepreneur, investor, and manager should…

Anthill by E.O. Wilson Mark W. Moffett/Minden Pictures Leafcutter ants on Barro Colorado Island, Panama; photograph by Mark Moffett from his book Adventures Among Ants , which will be published by University of California Press in May. For more images, see the NYR blog, blogs.nybooks.com. 1. Anthill…

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke working on 2001: A Space Odyssey in Kubrick’s apartment in New York (from Moonwatcher’s Memoir by Dan Richter) In the early 1960s, I wrote an appreciative essay for The New Yorker about the science fiction of Arthur Clarke. Not long after I got a letter from…

Hovering at the fringes of psychiatry, a possible indicator (but then again, possibly not) of what the mental health industry now calls Social Anxiety Disorder, shyness doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. How very uncomfortable for shyness. (Full article: 822 words) This article is available…

Home Opinion Life The Big Idea 7 April 2010 By Fred Pearce USHI OKUSHIMA is the oldest resident of Ogimi, the most elderly community in Japan – the country where the average age is higher than anywhere else in the world. At 108, she still takes to the floor for traditional Japanese dances.…

8:10 a.m.: My co-worker Michelle was planning to swing by my house and reconnect my computer to the Internet after dropping off her kid at day care. But I couldn't wait till she got here. I jumped onto my wife's laptop. Sitting at the kitchen table, I checked on some logistics for my upcoming trip…

Sir Clement Freud at home in the 1980s. Photograph: David Reed/Corbis Sir Clement Freud , who has died suddenly aged 84, was one of those rare characters who managed to excel in several spheres: caterer, theatre club owner, journalist, broadcaster and politician. These diverse activities were…

A system in Colorado uses wastewater from tilapia to nourish tomatoes. The tilapia are also food. Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times THERE’S a “Beyond Thunderdome” quality to Rob Torcellini’s greenhouse. The 10-by-12-foot structure is undistinguished on the outside: he built it from a $700…

If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it. Credit Illustration by Yan Nascimbene The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning,…

"I am chaotic and lazy" Interview by Maik Grossekathöfer SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be…