Miscellany From the Week

ICYM any of these...

1)  Evelyn Lamb explains a bit about RSA encryption, via the latest prime number discovery:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/psa-do-not-use-the-new-prime-number-for-rsa-encryption/

...and Dr. Lamb's latest on planet topology and "the Euler characteristic":
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/how-to-tell-the-earth-is-a-sphere-without-going-into-space/

2)  Educational behemoth Pearson affected by controversy over Common Core:
http://tinyurl.com/hyga2ta

3)  Podcast interview with educator Dan Meyer:
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-01-27-famed-math-teacher-dan-meyer-on-the-state-of-math-education-today

4)  plus Magazine gives you a minute's-worth of Bayes Theorem:
https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-bayes-theorem

5)  81-year-old math teacher gettin' the job done in Wash. DC.:
http://tinyurl.com/z4u9gmz

6)  Conspiracies (unraveling) and mathematics (h/t Egan Chernoff):
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684

7)  Like many this week, R.J. Lipton and Ken Regan paid tribute to Marvin Minsky:
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/minsky-the-theorist/

8)  In big Artificial Intelligence news, a computer defeated a world class "Go" player. Jason Rosenhouse, among many, covered the story:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2016/01/28/computer-go-player-defeats-top-human-player/

...and a skeptical look from Gary Marcus (also bringing Marvin Minsky into the discussion):
http://tinyurl.com/h5mc69e

9)  An interactive "guess-the-correlation game" (h/t  the Aperiodical):
http://guessthecorrelation.com/
  

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

1)  Alan Lightman (in Harper's) on quantum cosmology:
http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/what-came-before-the-big-bang/?single=1

2)  I'll just drop this here for the humor... and hope it doesn't outrage anyone:
http://fxdiebold.blogspot.com/2016/01/strippers-jfk-stalin-and-oxford-comma.html