One embezzler within a bank wrote software to take twenty or thirty cents out of accounts at random, never hitting the same account more than three times in a year. Mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills', but we would all be better off, he argues, if we saw it as a practical ally.

Misplaced decimals, misunderstood calculator quirks, bridges and buildings that resonate at unfortunate frequencies, and everyday folk who lack the understanding of how to divide numbers with units, make up many of the fascinating anecdotes in this book. This happened to the Patriot Missiles that were deployed to protect against incoming missiles during the Desert Storm operation. It undergirds most of the technology that we are so dependent upon and the structures that we inhabit.

The managers and high-up people in NASA were saying that each shuttle launch had only a one in 100,000 chance of disaster. The area looks as safe as safe can be … until you check the LAPD’s online map of reported crime locations. I loved his rant on why phone numbers aren't numbers at all (would it be meaningful for someone to ask you what half your phone number is? Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. You can get upset about these things, but 2-d representations of 3-d phenomena are, well, you know, 2-d.

Progress in science and engineering often involves someone needing to go beyond the cutting edge, on to the bleeding edge. In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and a time when humankind may no longer exist. The first story is about the Pepsi points contest where you could win a Harrier (military) jet if you were able to get 7 million Pepsi points. A building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? People at the top of the building felt it start to shake, as if someone had banged the bass and turned up the treble.To avoid being deleted as unwanted test data, when Brian Test started a new job, he brought in a cake for all his new colleagues to enjoy. It’s not often sunny in London, but when a sun-filled day in summer 2013 lined up with the recently completed windows, a death heat-ray swept across London. Also, it's numbered backwards, which made it tricky to track my process through it here, since Goodreads won't let you update to Page 141 when you started on Page 316. Plaintiff’s insistence that the commercial appears to be a serious offer requires the Court to explain why the commercial is funny.

He put forward the Swiss Cheese model of disasters, which looks at the whole system, instead of focusing on individual people.I’ve found that in the modern era many science bloggers online can provide up to date light or serious reviews of technical problems in a digestible and easy to understand form.

Originally a maths teacher from Australia, Matt Parker now lives in the overly quaint British town of Godalming.Each chapter houses its own topic that is largely unrelated from one to the next, and various pieces of trivia are launched with Parker’s witty commentary for some interesting discussion.