Suppose you're a crude materialist who believes that moneyis the secret to happiness. You're estimating an equation of the form: Happiness (in Standard Deviations) = a + b * ln(income) How big should you expect b to be? Well, you'd probably think thatincreasing income by 100% would increase…

In " Whom loves ya? ", 2/12/2014, Geoff Pullum riffed on one of the outcomes of "a large-scale statistical study of what correlates with numbers of responses to online dating ads", namely that "men who use 'whom' get 31% more contacts from opposite-sex respondents". It suited Geoff's rhetorical…

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, Amit Sahai was fascinated by the strange notion of a “zero-knowledge” proof, a type of mathematical protocol for convincing someone that something is true without revealing any details of why it is true. As Sahai mulled over…

On May 13, an obscure mathematician — one whose talents had gone so unrecognized that he had worked at a Subway restaurant to make ends meet — garnered worldwide attention and accolades from the mathematics community for settling a long-standing open question about prime numbers , those numbers…

Human secondary sexual characteristics include a large difference in the pitch* of the voice, caused by a large difference in the average size of the larynx. This larynx-size difference is about five to seven times larger, in proportional terms, than the average difference between the sexes in…

In the course of exploring their universe, mathematicians have occasionally stumbled across holes: statements that can be neither proved nor refuted with the nine axioms, collectively called “ZFC,” that serve as the fundamental laws of mathematics. Most mathematicians simply ignore the holes, which…

December 30, 2013 What’s wrong with in-browser cryptography? Above image taken from Douglas Crockford’s Principles of Security talk If you’re reading this, then I hope that sometime somebody or some web site told you that doing cryptography in a web browser is a bad idea. You may have read “…

Views The Good Grain The Ultimate Bowl of Rice Serving Tips from a Master of the Grain Daily life Culture [2012.01.11] Read in: 日本語 | 简体字 | 繁體字 | FRANÇAIS | ESPAÑOL | العربية | Русский | Rice expert Nishijima Toyozō answers questions on how to prepare a delicious bowl, with tips on the best way to…