MOZART SELLS! BUT SO DOES WILLY NELSON
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS have studied the music congruity effects on consumer behavior; loosely, how background music affects sales of one thing or another. Not surprisingly, it depends on what’s being sold … Continue reading
TAKE MY MATH TEXT, PLEASE
FROM TIME to time, people tell me that mathematicians are a humorless lot. This, despite my having a tee-shirt (I’m wearing it at the moment) that says “Another day with … Continue reading
MYSTERIOUS MALAY MAMMAL SHOWS ITS SPOTS
THE LEOPARD, Panthera pardus, is found from Russia’s frozen north to southern Africa’s scorching Kalahari Desert. It is the world’s most widely distributed large cat as well as a keystone … Continue reading
ON THE VIRTUES OF (HIGHLY SELECTIVE) CONNECTIVITY
WE LIVE in a highly connected world. (Otherwise, of course, SimanaitisSays wouldn’t exist.) But a couple of happenings suggest we have reached a tipping point. The two I have in … Continue reading
MAZDA LAUNDRY GOES “HMMMMMM”
BACK IN the 1970s, Mazda made the excellent point that conventional engines went “boing boing boing,” whereas its rotary powerplant went “hmmmmmm.” Today, high-efficiency laundry facilities may go “hmmmmmm” as … Continue reading
IMPRESSIONISM, SACRÉ BLEU AND CADMIUM-SULFIDE YELLOW
THIS IS triply a celebration of an era, a book review and a scientific tidbit. The era is the Belle Epoque, 1871 to the outbreak of World War I, when … Continue reading
ENGINEERING THE SEAHORSE
THERE’S A joke about God’s engineering background: He’s an Electrical Engineer because of the brain’s neurological wonders, a Mechanical Engineer because of the skeleton’s elegant efficiency, a Chem Eng because … Continue reading
NIKUMARORO PERSON? KENNEWICK MAN?
WITHOUT SCIENCE, the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, I wouldn’t know the latest in the search for Amelia Earhart. Nor would I know who … Continue reading
A CLOSE SHAVE WITH SET THEORY
YESTERDAY’S ITEM on countability mentioned Russell’s Paradox, but, in the interests of set-theoretic sanity, side-stepped details. Now that we’re rested, what the hey, why not delve into it? Among Bertrand … Continue reading
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME—OR MAYBE NOT
COUNTING SEEMS the most basic of mathematics, so isn’t it puzzling that lots of things are genuinely uncountable? To make any sense of this, let’s begin with the essence of … Continue reading
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