/podcasts/wbu4.mp3

In this episode, [twit handle = “reflectivemaths”] (who is Dave Gale in real life) and I talk about…

  • Comments on our last episode
  • Weinstein-gate: full coverage via [twit handle = “peterrowlett”] (Peter Rowlett in real life) at the Aperiodical
  • A boy called Tutankhamun: Owen Daniel’s TEDx talk, a variation on the Tuesday’s Child problem ((Colin referred to a quote that was neither Bohr or anyone like that, but Asimov: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “that’s funny…””))
  • Making your cousin cry while playing Monopoly and Pascal’s tetrahedron
  • Coca-Cola names, ways of saying “unpopular” and Irn-Bru
  • Scone news! First from Dr Eugenia Cheng and then the brilliantly-named sconic sections
  • Google’s dictionary of numbers and listening to the budget and XKCD
  • Colin becoming a flash-in-the-pan celebrity thanks to this article, and stealing Dave’s thunder on the chi-squared test.
  • Dave’s puzzle from last time. A much better explanation after Dave’s garbled attempt: Hexagon Puzzle solution
  • Colin’s puzzle for this time: You have ten identical balls at one end of a smooth horizontal ((not stated in the podcast, but assumed)) track, and ten identical balls at the other. You set the two groups rolling towards each other (with plenty of space between them). All of the collisions are perfectly elastic. How many collisions are there?
  • What Colin doesn’t understand: how to calculate $\pi$
  • A long and rambling ending…