Come an' Get It: Big Delicious Weekly Roundup

A HUGE and varied math mix this week!....

1)  "Lincos," a math-based artificial language for communicating with extraterrestrials:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/math-language-extraterrestrials/477051/

2)  Since you shouldn't ever miss an entry from Ben Orlin (especially if you're thinking of getting an MBA):
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/04/13/mba-master-of-business-arts/

3)  Economics as astrology:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers

4)  Interesting post on Singapore mental math:
http://morethansums.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/singapore-mental-math.html

5)  Review of forthcoming Ken Ono biography of Ramanujan (h/t Steven Strogatz):
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/LAKvGPYtR58X7Iag7iGL1I/Book-review-My-Search-for-Ramanujan.html
...and an excerpt from the book here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-i-learned-the-art-of-math-excerpt/

6)  In the distant past I've touched on the controversy over the Daniel Tammet savant story; this week Simon Singh addressed it here:
http://simonsingh.net/2016/04/brainman/

7)   "Zip-apart Mobius Bands"... well, of course!:
https://divisbyzero.com/2016/04/11/zip-apart-mobius-bands/

8)  Evelyn Lamb with a little poetic... and cubic, history:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/an-italian-poem-about-solving-the-cubic-equation/

9)  New math paper from Jo Boaler on 'visual mathematics':
https://www.youcubed.org/visual-math-network/visual-math-paper/

10)  A primer on p-values from Plus (magazine):
https://plus.maths.org/content/stop-taking-p

11)  Michael Harris on Perelman, honesty, and crossing the 'finish line':
http://tinyurl.com/qx3zqz2

12)  For the advanced, the latest intro to category theory from nLab:
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Introduction+to+Stable+homotopy+theory+--+P

13)  h/t to Egan Chernoff for passing along this piece on risk-benefit perception (and mostly just risk-perception)... no math involved, but still an important math-related read:
http://undark.org/article/know-this-first-risk-perception-is-always-irrational/

14)  Michael Pershan on Sweller's "cognitive load theory":
https://problemproblems.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/cognitive-load-theory-explains-answer-getting/

15)  "The Sleeping Beauty Paradox" is one of the most hotly-debated paradoxes of all time; Pradeep Mutalik tried to offer some resolution for it at Quanta; go read the comments to see what he's stepped into:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160331-why-sleeping-beauty-is-lost-in-time/

16)  At Scientific American, Steve Mirsky interviews (~35 mins.) Adam Kucharski about his new book, "The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling":
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-perfect-bet-taking-the-gambling-out-of-gambling/

17)  So much for this Friday carnival of mathy things; if you need still more don't miss the latest monthly blog "Carnival of Mathematics" up here:
http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/carnival-mathematics-133/


  And, personal aside, just a couple questions I have for Mac users (surprised how few responses I got when I previously asked this, but will try once more):

a)  is anyone using free downloadable anti-virus/malware software that they're happy with and recommend? (Avast, Sophos, ClamXav, are the ones I see most frequently referenced, but there are others as well -- and I recently used Onyx to "clean up" an old Mac and was pleased with the results)

b)  if you are now using the El Capitan OS on your Mac are you happy with it? (earlier on, it seemed to have a lot of naysayers)


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

1)  Great article (and longread) on the controversy over diets (even if you're tired of reading about such debates, I'd recommend this one):
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin

2)  This re-run from NPR's RadioLab last week, on "Space," was wonderful:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91520-space/