Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/test-yourself-math-july-11-2011/
This problem is based on the number of home-schooled children in the U.S.
One bright, blue-sky day I happened to look up and notice this triangular intersection of wires. Configurations like this always put me in mind of the Exterior Angle Theorem, one of my favorites from elementary geometry.
This website offers a number of categorized links to various mathematical resources around the web:
http://www.intute.ac.uk/mathematics/
With links to hundreds of external resources on Applied Mathematics, Calculus, Math History, and other topics, there are plenty of e-books to download and websites to interact with.
It seems that the organization that runs the website, Intute, has run out of funding, and so no new content will be added, but the resources that are already there should remain.
I love scrutinizing menus. It appeals to me both as a math person and as someone with a long history of food-service employment.
Typically, my favorite menu deconstruction activity is finding inconsistent pricing among the menu items: for example, there are numerous different prices for the value meal upgrade on this Wendy’s menu. On the other hand, this Five Guys’ menu is remarkable for its pricing consistency.
So on a recent Spirit Airlines flight, I grabbed the on-board menu and took a look. Apart from the price-gouging that has become commonplace nowadays (including a $3 charge for water), the menu was relatively uninteresting until I got to the Value Meals.
Conveniently, this Spirit menu shows you exactly how much you save with each Value Meal purchase. While verifying that the numbers were accurate, I noticed something peculiar: three of the four Best Deal Values Meals were entirely comprised of alcohol!
I personally don’t consider 3 beers to be a meal, but maybe this is all part of Spirit’s unconventional business model.
Related Posts
This is a comprehensive and insightful look into the NBA’s claims of financial distress from Nate Silver:
As the NBA prepares to battle the player’s union over revenue, the league has made several public claims about how they have been losing money for years.
Silver takes a deep look into those claims. He crunches the numbers and compares player revenue as a share of league revenue across the four major sports leagues; he looks at salary growth relative to league growth; and he also discusses some of the dubious accounting tricks teams and leagues use to make profits disappear!
As usual from Nate Silver, this is a very interesting and readable application of mathematics and statistics. His conclusion is summed up best by a recent message from @fivethirtyeight on Twitter: “If David Stern really thinks the NBA lost $370 million last season, shouldn’t he have fired himself?”