Chicken or egg?
WHICH CAME FIRST, the chicken or the egg? It’s an old problem. The chicken had to come from an egg; but the egg had to come from a chicken. Or did…
Category: Maths & Logic
Giant spiders
WHY CAN’T PEOPLE BE TWICE THE SIZE? Why don’t we see giant spiders, like we do in the movies, in real life? It’s staple of science fiction movies, after all….
Conspicuous lack of aliens
IF THERE IS INTELLIGENT LIFE out there, why haven’t we been visited by aliens yet? It’s a question that every child, and most adults, will ask at some point or…
Damned lies and statistics
WHAT’S THE MOST DANGEROUS SPORT? By which I mean, which sport has the most fatalities during play? It’s not motor racing, or hang gliding, or extreme ironing, or potholing, or even mountaineering….
Baked bean lies
“A MILLION HOUSEWIVES CAN’T BE WRONG.” So ran a TV commercial for Heinz Baked Beans in the 1970s. But a million housewives can be wrong. Every last one of them….
Yes, and no
ALL OUR MATHEMATICS, and consequently all our science, is based on the logical concept that philosophers call the Law of the Excluded Middle. This states that every proposition is either true…
Finger counting
HOW HIGH CAN YOU COUNT on your fingers? 10? Pah. I can count up to 1,023. Here’s how it’s done. It’s useful if you want to count the number of people…
6 billion names
I CALCULATED RECENTLY that 267 (in other words, 26 multiplied by itself seven times) is 8,031,810,176. Which means that, as there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there would be enough…
How much is a million?
We use numbers like million and billion every day, without really thinking about what they mean. Apple sold 70 million iPhones in the last quarter. There are 13 million people…