New Year, Fresh Potpourri

After a nice 2-week respite from the Friday math-mix (hope everyone caught most of the GREAT math that was out there though), starting the new year with this fresh set of weekly picks:

1)  Resourceaholic offered up a selection of 10 favorite 2015 blogposts for teachers from math education blogs:
http://www.resourceaholic.com/2015/12/2015blogs.html

2)  Speaking of math education, in his own newsletter, James Tanton offered his take, following recent experiences, on the ongoing "math wars" over math education reform:
https://t.co/JHUaEGmoJX

3)  Teaching discrete math... and having fun:
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/12/27/why-is-discrete-math-hard-to-teach/

4)  Lance Fortnow wrapped up the year in computational complexity thusly:
http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2015/12/complexity-year-in-review-2015.html

5)  Another fabulous post from Evelyn Lamb on 2 recent stories in the math news-sphere:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/contrasts-in-number-theory/

She quickly followed that post with an instructive-and-speculative one on the "three-torus":
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/a-few-of-my-favorite-spaces-the-three-torus/
Dr. Lamb is just hitting one home-run after another with her posts these days.

6)  NPR did a story on "the gambler's fallacy" this week:
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/29/461352879/how-the-bias-known-as-gamblers-fallacy-effects-our-lives

7)  Worth noting that academic publisher Springer recently made MANY college-level math books (and others) freely-downloadable (pdf):
https://gist.github.com/bishboria/8326b17bbd652f34566a

Included is "The Joy of Sets" from Keith Devlin:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-0903-4

8)  When Ben Orlin resolves... I dissolve... into laughter:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/12/30/a-mathematicians-new-years-resolutions/

9)  "Coding For All"... this seems pretty obvious to me, but some apparently take issue with it (...I, on-the-other-hand, take issue with Shakespeare or English lit. for all):
http://blog.mathedpage.org/2015/12/coding-for-all.html

10)  Kevin Knudson wraps up the year in math with a focus on the "Graph Isomorphism Problem":
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinknudson/2015/12/31/2015-the-year-in-math/

11)  This week, American Scientist magazine named the below post, on using mathematical modeling in teaching, as one of its favorite postings for the entire year:
http://www.americanscientist.org/blog/pub/5-reasons-to-teach-mathematical-modeling/

12)  Dylan Kane posts about "Project-based Learning":
https://fivetwelvethirteen.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/thinking-through-project-based-learning/

13)  A recent conference on methodology in physics that was covered initially by Natalie Wolchover for Quanta Magazine has now also been summed up a bit by the Math Drudge blog:
http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2015/12/data-vs-theory-the-mathematical-battle-for-the-soul-of-physics/
...and Mathematics Rising blog also ended the year contemplating the same conference:
http://mathrising.com/?p=1364


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

1)  For Seinfeld fans, his new coffee-infused Web season began this week in the company of a certain world leader:

http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/president-barack-obama-just-tell-him-you-re-the-president

2)  And finally I'd hate for any of you to miss this week's viral story of the dog with a slice of ham on his face (is the Internet a wonderful thang or what!):
http://mashable.com/2015/12/30/dog-with-ham-on-face/#8AdKb0IvKOqr