A Few From the Week Gone By

 Friday potpourri:

1)  Andrew Hacker, no stranger to controversy, returns to the NY Times for an interview about math education:
http://tinyurl.com/gradssr

2)  Taking off from Mike Lawler, who took off from James Propp, "Three J's Learning" explores surreal numbers with kids:
http://3jlearneng.blogspot.com/2016/02/surreal-numbers-and-whole-body-integers.html

...and just today Mike L. reports on his night of exploring the surreals with 4th & 5th graders:
https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/sharing-the-surreal-numbers-with-kids/

3)  NPR's RadioLab re-ran their segment on "Turing's Machines" this week. Certainly worth a listen if you've not heard it before:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/turings-machines/

4)  From Arthur Clarke to learning to P vs. NP (via RJ Lipton & KW Regan):
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/magic-to-do/

5)  Not all the math literacy news is bad... article (The Atlantic) on the increase in advanced math clubs in U.S.:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855/

...you may also want to peruse Cathy O'Neil's concerns about such programs having an elitist bent:
http://mathbabe.org/2016/02/09/how-do-we-make-math-enrichment-less-elitist/

6)  The "Union-closed sets conjecture" via Futility Closet (in case, like me, you'd never heard of it):
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/02/09/the-union-closed-sets-conjecture/

7)  David Wells has begun the "Archimedes Mathematics Education Newsletter" (h/t to Alexander Bogomolny); looks promising:
https://t.co/iAqKIFbUt0

8)  'Uncle Colin' works out an inequality for a reader:
http://www.flyingcoloursmaths.co.uk/ask-uncle-colin-absolute-mess/

9)  You dear reader, are most likely exceptional (...at something); so Keith Devlin tells us in his latest blog post:
http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2016/02/theorem-you-are-exceptional.html

10)  Another probability conundrum from DataGenetics:
http://datagenetics.com/blog/february32016/index.html

11)  Feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't pass along at least a few of the huge plethora of articles on the new LIGO gravitational wave finding; as one quote puts it, "We’re saying that we made a measurement that is about a thousandth the diameter of a proton, that tells us about two black holes that merged over a billion years ago.” ...MIND.... BLOWN!....:

From The New Yorker:  http://tinyurl.com/jftsnzh
Dennis Overbye in the NY Times:  http://tinyurl.com/h4yp5kd
And Natalie Wolchover via Quanta Magazine:  http://tinyurl.com/jm2xfyq 


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

1)   Fascinating 7-minute episode from TEDRadioHour on filming, for the first time, a giant squid in the deep ocean:
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=373978671&m=375892022

2)  Natalie Angier tells NY Times readers about the human brain's special affinity for music:
http://tinyurl.com/hbmx34s