Scott Hanselman has an interesting interview with James Marcus Bach, author of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Bach lives Mark Twain’s advice to never let school interfere with your education.
After listening to the interview, I enjoyed reading Bach’s book.
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Brian Hayes has a blog post entitled The birth of the giant component. Random networks explain why staples stick together into a giant clump.
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Clay Shirky looks at the future of bookstores in his thoughtful post Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization.
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Bill the Lizard has been interested lately in math problems that are easy to understand but have not been settled. Here are his posts on two unsolved problems: the perfect cuboid problem and the Collatz conjecture (hailstorm numbers). In a related discussion on Twitter, Mark Reid suggested Bill and I take a look at the union-closed sets conjecture. See also Easy to guess, hard to prove.
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I’ve been trying out f.lux the last few days. The f.lux site describes the software this way: “it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.” I usually start my day long before sunrise, and it has been nice to not be blinded by my monitor first thing in the morning.
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Check out the new gallery of fractal images from @mathheadinc.
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