Some Reads From the Week

1)  “Visualizing the Riemann zeta function” from Grant Sanderson (video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0NjbwqlYw

2)  Couple of problems from DataGenetics this week:

http://datagenetics.com/blog/december32016/index.html

3)  Keith Devlin contemplates the secret of changing a bicycle tire and doing mathematics:

http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2016/12/you-can-find-secret-to-doing.html

4)  Andrew Gelman once again on Bayesian statistics:

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/13/bayesian-statistics-whats/

…and in another post Andrew discusses skepticism in science, and the viewpoint of science-writer John Horgan:

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/12/14/science-journalist-recommends-going-easy-on-bigfoot-says-you-should-bash-of-mammograms-instead/

5)  Love the game of Monopoly?… Matt  Parker & Hannah Fry report on some math behind winning Monopoly strategies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubQXz5RBBtU

6)  I’ll drop a quick plug for a site I just heard from this week (but don't know that much about); an educational videos site covering lots of subjects (the breadth of videos and few clips I looked at seemed impressive). The math selections are here:

http://study.com/academy/subj/math.html

7)  h/t to Steven Strogatz passing along this long NY Times piece on AI:

http://tinyurl.com/zewkug5

8)  ICYMI, a few jottings I’d made over time, about Martin Gardner, General Semantics, and dysgenics, all came crashing together after the Presidential election:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2016/12/martin-gardner-helped-wreck-my-country.html

...and in a post with some similar underlying concerns, Brian Hayes wonders how we deal with fakery and truth in a world where so many people seem unable (or unwilling) to recognize the difference between the two:
http://bit-player.org/2016/truth-trump-and-trisectors

On Sunday, by the way, I’ll be squeezing in one more interview for 2016, right here at MathTango, so check back then.

Potpourri BONUS!:

Natalie Wolchover looks at where Grand Unification theories in physics stand today:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161215-proton-decay-grand-unification/