Posted by tpc at July 27th, 2006
A very nice guardian article on how the British used statistics to count German tanks. (via Mathforge.) I particularly like this bit:
The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced.
Posted by tpc at July 12th, 2006
An article on finding a formula to calculate the optimal time to soft-boil an egg. It’s pretty interesting and novel, but unfortunately it begins with
To obtain a simple formula the problem must be idealised somewhat, so the egg will be treated as a spherical homogeneous object of mass M
Spherical! It’s almost like a bad mathematics joke.
Near the bottom of the page, he explained why the yolk of hard-boiled eggs sometimes looked green. Interesting.
Posted by tpc at July 2nd, 2006
The latest advertising campaign of a local internet service provider is tauting their service as the Fat Green Pipe. (Allusions to Super Mario Bros?) It is classical Darrell Huff.
The numerical data states 95% vs 65% which is measured by the length of the pipes. Yet, in the illustration, their own green pipe is at least 4 times as wide as the competition’s.
Related: An article on Huff and his book. Linked via wiki.
