Category Archives: Uncategorized

Buffon’s puzzling numbers

Posted on 11/01/2015 by

In a book about the celebrated French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (best known to mathematicians for his needle), I found the following picture, apparently without explanation (unless I missed something): Apologies for the poor quality of the picture. … Continue reading →

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Happy new year

Posted on 31/12/2014 by

HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone reading this! As the report from the WordPress monkeys makes clear, it has not been a good year for this blog, if measured in terms of visitor numbers (3000 down on last year). These have … Continue reading →

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2014 in review

Posted on 31/12/2014 by

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here's an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 86,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at … Continue reading →

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Immigrants, 2

Posted on 31/12/2014 by

Can there ever be too many immigrants? If climate change makes heavily populated regions of earth uninhabitable, then we will not be able to stop the people from these regions heading for other places. Borders will come under extreme pressure; … Continue reading →

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Immigrants

Posted on 26/12/2014 by

Because of our neotenic development, we humans tend to be a charge on the state for the first couple of decades of our lives, but more than repay this in the remainder of our lives. This means that, if a … Continue reading →

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“Paradise Lost”, abridged

Posted on 07/12/2014 by

The extraordinary Gothic Town Hall in Leuven has 236 statues in niches on the outside. The building was constructed in the fifteenth century, but the niches were not filled then; the statues were not installed for four centuries, until in … Continue reading →

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Read this and weep

Posted on 04/12/2014 by

David Colquhoun has published some details of the case of Professor Stefan Grimm, a professor in the Department of Medicine at Imperial College. He was sacked for not getting enough grants. Now he is dead. At the link above you … Continue reading →

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