Big Helping of Potpourri

...First off, biggest news of the week was the death of Alexander Grothendieck on Thursday, which I referenced (with links) in my Math-Frolic post earlier this morning:
http://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2014/11/to-thine-own-self-be-true-legend-passes.html

Otherwise, bunch-of-links from the week:

1)  A post from RJ Lipton on Stanislaw Ulam and an unproved conjecture:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/a-conjecture-of-ulam/

2)  Chris Harrow explored some geometry of squares and octagons in this post:
http://casmusings.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/squares-and-octagons/

3) Several miscellaneous resources for teachers linked to from another blogger:
http://www.resourceaholic.com/2014/11/gems13.html

4)  Via the Sante Fe Institute, the mathematics of scaling from physics to biology to beyond:
http://tinyurl.com/qcc3zro

5)  Another piece on Common Core, but what's really telling are the 100+ vociferous (mostly-anti) views in the comments section:
http://tinyurl.com/mkc97g4
(...hard to see how this ends well :-((

6)  With Mersenne Primes in the news this week, Mike Lawler took the opportunity to explore them with his boys:
http://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/a-new-mersenne-prime-confirmed-today-well-sort-of/
(I don't remember how old I was when I first heard of Mersenne Primes, but I know I was a LOT older than Mike's kids! -- wonderful that they can be introduced to the subject at such an early age!)

7)  Another new video from Ed Frenkel on the secret world of math:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnqQ-BWMHrE

8)  Vanity Fair and Arne Duncan cover Sal Khan (Khan Academy) here:
http://tinyurl.com/ol8qx29

9)  A new Carnival of Mathematics here:
http://cavmaths.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/carnival-of-mathematics-116/

10)  Princeton Alumni mag. profiles recent Fields Medalist Manjul Bhargava:
https://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2014/11/12/pages/7752/index.xml

11)  Nautilus covers the amazing, award-winning work of Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara on optical illusions:
http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-illusion-machine-that-teaches-us-how-we-see

12)  Wow! Terry Tao appearing on "Colbert Nation" this week:
http://tinyurl.com/mfdfoo9

13)  Interesting Andrew Gelman take on the massive-online Facebook experiment from awhile back:
http://tinyurl.com/pqugsuv

14)  I'll end with this somewhat tangential (but I think highly important) piece to mathematics... NEJM addresses the crucial topic of communicating scientific "uncertainty" to a public that largely misunderstands science:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1413816