Florilegium

Alice wants to play a game with Bill. She has just bought some new and rather strange dice. The average of each die is 3.5, just like a normal playing die, but the numbers on each face have an unfamiliar distribution.Die P has the numbers 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6.Die Q has the numbers 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5.The game itself is very simple: whoever rolls the highest total wins a sweet from the candy box. If the box becomes empty, the winner can take one from the other player’s pile.

It is somewhat surreal to see the discovery of the largest prime number paraded on prime time broadcast media. Mathematicians around the world are asked to explain the significance of this discovery in layman’s terms, which is up there with physicists trying to explain what the Large Hadron Collider actually does.Below you’ll see a pretty sparky Sky News interview by Eugenia Cheng, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Just notice at the very end how jolly pleased with themselves the newscasters seem to be.

I think there is something deeply wrong with our view of science. The word itself, Science (with a capital "S"), sits alongside other monoliths such as Religion, Art, Music, Literature, Politics and so forth that require constant defining just to ensure we're talking about the same thing. The problem with science is that we are taught a myth... and then complain when the myth is incommensurate with reality.

Benoit Mandelbrot died on 14 October 2010 in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85. His name is synonymous with the study of fractals, a term he himself coined in the 1970s. Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension was published in English in 1977 (the original French came out two years earlier) but the book that sealed Mandelbrot's fame as an original thinker was the 1982 classic, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. It is one of those rare books that can be read both by professionals and lay readers. It also helps that it is copiously illustrated so that even if the mathematics may appear esoteric just relax and enjoy the visual candy.

Drug trials conducted by the very pharmaceutical company with an obvious vested interest in a positive result are far more likely to yield a... positive result!Perhaps not earth-shattering news to anybody with a gram of cynicism in their body but is still an orchestrated effort to undermine the credibility of science as anything higher than the distortion of data in the name of money.

A new book, just about to be published, has already caused a stir in the blogosphere. “Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think” by Elaine Ecklund, a sociologist from Rice University, claims that scientists are less atheistic than previously thought.The dustjacket blurb explains:”In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion…..only a small minority are actively hostile to religion.”

There was a time when kids dreamt of being astronauts - a time when going up to the Moon was sexy and being a spaceman was the coolest job on the planet. As astronauts became global heroes they themselves were only too aware that there were many more heroes whose feet remained firmly on the ground but without whom those Moon missions would never have happened: Guenter Wendt was one of those heroes.

The UK has a General Election looming on 6 May, thereby giving newspapers enough hot air to puff up their websites. But what should their science writers talk about during such times? With the launch of Britain's Science Party, science journalists can now also join in the ritual inflation of unlikely promises, although in science's case it is more likely a desperate attempt to be heard at all. Mark Henderson of The Times has, however, launched into this with a certain relish, without forgetting that the science reader also wants some data to bite on.

Welcome To The Science PartyToday, 20 April, sees the launch of The Science Party, a new political party led by bestselling author and New Scientist consultant Dr Michael Brooks. Brooks is standing for the party in the forthcoming British general election in the East Midlands constituency of Bosworth.Brooks launched The Science Party, whose slogan is “Because Science Matters”, at a Skeptics event in Leicester on Tuesday evening.

"Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist who has vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion while also calling for mutual respect between the two, has won the 2010 Templeton Prize." Yet again the prize has gone to a scientist who says nice things about religion."Ayala, 76, a naturalized American who moved from Spain to New York in 1961 for graduate study and soon became a leader in molecular evolution and genetics, has devoted more than 30 years to asserting that both science and faith are damaged when either invades the proper domain of the other.

Quantum mechanics has been around for a hundred years and continues to fascinate and astonish scientists. It has been phenomenally successful at explaining the microscopic universe at the level of atoms and elementary particles and yet classical mechanics has survived to model the macroscopic world of everyday objects. But at what level do these two theories meet? Is there a region in which they could overlap; that is, can macroscopic objects display quantum behaviour?

Easter is the most important festival in the Christian calendar as it defines a number of theological doctrines. However, Easter has always been a movable feast which can take place on any date between 22 March and 25 April inclusive. The actual methods for calculating Easter have changed down the centuries and, whereas the Gregorian calendar is probably the simplest solar calendar we will ever have, the ecclesiastical calendar on which Easter is based seems to have got ever more obscure and intricate.