This Week's Math Potpourri Serving

Things catching my attention this week:

1)  This is actually pretty fascinating from a mathematical standpoint (water-saving faucet); h/t Tim Skellett:
http://www.sciencealert.com/this-tap-saves-water-by-creating-incredible-patterns

2)  Congratulations in order for Ian Stewart and Steven Strogatz for sharing the 2015 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science:
http://giveandjoin.rockefeller.edu/events/lewis-thomas
(quite an honor for two mathematicians to win this!)

3)  And from the "p-values no longer get any respect" Dept.:
http://tinyurl.com/mb843zk

4)  Film review of "X + Y," about the International Math Olympiad:
http://tinyurl.com/m8lmwcy

5)  In honor of tomorrow ('Pi Day''), a simple question posed by Futility Closet, 'Does the binary expansion of pi contain more 1s or 0s?':
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/03/11/portions-of-pi/
Also an old Martin Gardner problem via Futility Closet this week:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/03/07/time-and-distance/

6)  When it comes to area calculations, Ben Orlin points to a prevalence of rectangles:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/03/11/the-secret-to-all-areas/

7)  The latest "Devlin's Angle" blog post is largely about that certain transcendental number in the news...:
http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2015/03/pi-day-cyclical-motion-and-great-video.html

8)  And Math Drudge was among the MANY others with Pi Day coverage:
http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2015/03/i-prefer-pi-background-for-big-pi-day-31415/

9)  Just around the corner (April 18) is the first (and FREE!) National Math Festival in Wash. D.C.:
http://www.mathfest.org/

10)  A blogger has put together a list of 8 FREE (yeah, I like that word) YouTube channels devoted to SAT test preparation (I'm not endorsing the channels myself, since I've not reviewed them, but looks worth checking out if SAT preparation is on your horizon):
http://moomoomath.blogspot.com/2015/03/8-youtube-channels-to-help-with-sat-math.html

11)  Mike Lawler's place on the Web:  https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/
I'm especially a sucker for nice geometry problems, and Mike worked through a couple two days ago:
https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/geometry-problem-solving/

12)  Over at Math-Frolic this morning I've linked to a simply wonderful Erica Klarreich piece in Quanta Magazine, on deep connections in mathematics:
http://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2015/03/mathematicians-drunk-on-moonshine-so-to.html

13)  Them's fightin' words... "Are Physicists Saner Than Mathematicians?" from CosmosMagazine:
http://blog.cosmosmagazine.com/blog/2015/3/13/are-physicists-saner-than-mathematicians
[p.s.:  Happy Birthday to Albert Einstein tomorrow!!]

14)  And perhaps my favorite bit of humor from the week:
https://recursivelyrecursive.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/didnt-we-say-thered-be-no-more-self-referring-signs/


Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):

a)  To get you into a bit of a physics-y mood for an interview I may have up this Sunday, here's news of the approaching re-start of CERN's LHC near Geneva:
http://tinyurl.com/oxjvybw

b)  And will end again with another simple feel-good story that went viral, but ICYMI:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/06/dancing-man-found-bodyshamed-dance-party_n_6817794.html