jack

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/a-second-experiment-concerning-mathematical-writing/

Prof Gowers writes about co-authoring a computer program that does simple mathematical proofs. It works only in some specific circumstances, but I was interested to see what it included.

Via mathcathy, an interactive map of london boroughs showing the most common surname in each. If you look at the most common, it's basically a sea of smith, but the default is to show something like 8th, where you can see an imperfect but striking map of ethnic makeup.

Website: http://names.mappinglondon.co.uk/

Blog post: http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2011/01/mapping-londons-surnames/

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/105134/risk-legacy

I recently discovered there had been a new version of risk published, which is explicitly designed to be build up over time for people who play multiple games. That is, when you meet some condition (some happen when we start a game, some when I win a game, some when the group as a whole meets some limit) you open a little packet with a bunch of stickers in, and get to apply them to the board.

These can make your current position better, but remain in place for the following game. Sometimes you can rename a major city to whatever you want, and then have preferential rights for starting in that city. You can both add stickers which increase/reduce the value of a territory just because you prefer the game like that, or to bolster a position you are likely to start the next game in.

Obviously lots of people have suggested vaguely similar things, but I was still extremely pleasantly surprised by (a) the company had the chutzpah to expect people to irrevocably alter the game board (literally tearing up unused stickers), possibly even buying ANOTHER set to experience different choice, and people went ahead and tried it.

And (b) it seems to actually work. When I heard it, I would have wagered money that it would be gimicky and unbalanced, that as stickers accumulated it would get overcomplicated and some territories would get unbeatably good. But apparently, according to reviews on board game geek, it's actually really fun (for people who WANT to play 15 games of risk in the first place :))

Obviously there was a lot of playtesting to make this work, more than I'd usually expect for a board game even to just make sure that the most likely choices didn't lead to degenerate behaviour. But I'm heartened that they tried something innovative and it worked!

(I don't know if I ever want to play risk or not.)

PS. For the record, what you see above is what I get when I post a "short post, just a link" :)

Following Pter's link to the technology quiz, I browsed several of the other GCSE quizzes. In general I approve of raising awareness of knowledge, and inviting adults to demonstrate a GCSE or greater standard of knowledge in fields they may have no connection to.

However, the examples given weren't necessarily academically rigorous, so I had a number of quibbles I'm now going to rant about:

1. All but one of the quizzes have three result categories. 7/7 is "excellent". 4-6/7 is "not up to scratch" and 0-3 is "awful". This seems like an unfortunate granularity when you might optimistically hope many adults would fall into the range of "good", somewhere between 6 and 7.

2. However, for the maths quiz, 6-7 out of 7 are listed as "top marks" [sic] and below that as "could do better". Someone had a lot of gumption to label 6/7 as "top" marks in a maths exam.

3. In the English Literature exam, five of the seven questions are simple factual observations on a common book or play or English word, and one requires you to have the ability to psychically read the mind of dead people to find out their reasons for certain choices. It would seem nice if more questions had represented a balance between these two extreme extremes.

For the record the factual questions required you to have read the work, or at least have a vague recollection of the plot a few of the most famous lines. Presumably, in the course, you would have studied this specifically, although most adults who read extensively have probably read most of them. As it happened, I'd read Macbeth, Kill a Mockingbird, Mice and Men, and enough of Romeo and Juliet, but not yet Jane Eyre (I know the plot from Jasper Fforde, but not all of the details. I will soon!) And also embarrassingly fluffed applying the exact definition of "malapropism" to a series of quotes.

Presumably the psychic medium "why did the poet choose this word" question had the answer taught by rote at some point in the curriculum. Possibly a longer study of the poem would establish that one of the options was incontrovertibly more dominant. But I would imagine that Alfred Lord Tennyson, world-famous poet, might in general have more than one reason to choose a word, and might attempt to convey both danger and noise with the same words.

4. Doing the maths exam entirely in your head is probably showing off, though I bet most people I know did that, and bet that in the actual exam calculators (or at least pencil and paper) are allowed or even required. To be fair, I only knew 6/7. One required a theorem of plane geometry I'd long forgotten, and I managed to rule out two answers from simple examples before I managed to re-derive the theorem.

ETA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/default.stm, scroll down to "Complete quiz archive" in sidebar.

Saraphale asks here: http://saraphale.livejournal.com/184863.html Imagine you MacGuyver-like find a sealed evil science lab, and want to throw in stuff made from office supplies to measure what's on the inside and if it's liveable. The full conditions are there: go, help!