To be honest, I haven’t been following the Carnival of Math much since it’s inception; my new job keeps me busy enough that I barely have time to keep the blog going, and so I haven’t really looked much at recent editions. In fact, I completely forgot that I was hosting it again until I started receiving
submissions.

Much to my disappointment, it appears that spam has managed to invade even the carnivals. Close to half of the submissions that I received were blatant spam, including one for a penis-enlargement pill. But hey, when a theme hits me in the face, I run with it. So, welcome to the Carnival of Math: Spam Edition!

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For those of you who just want to be able to see the articles, here’s the list, in table form.

I’ve been seeing articles popping up all over the place about a recent
PLOS article called Order in Spontaneous Behavior. The majority of
the articles seem to have been following the lead of the Discovery Institute, which claims that the article demonstrates the existence of free will, which they argue is inconsistent with naturalism and darwinism.

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I came across this while looking through the referrals to GM/BM. This is an incredibly cool video of a strange phenomenon called the Kaye effect. It includes high speed video of the effect, and a demonstration of their mathematical analysis of the effect, and their prediction and verification of the effect.

The Kaye effect is an incredibly bizarre phenomenon. Basically, if you take a substance like liquid shampoo, and allow a thin stream of it to pour down from a height onto a smooth surface, the stream will periodically “bounce”, producing a stream leaping up from the point of contact. Watch it – it’s seriously cool.

I’m currently reading “I am a Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ll be posting a review of it after I finish it. A “strange loop” is Hofstadter’s term for a Gödel-esque self-referential cycle. A strange loop doesn’t have to involve Gödel style problems – any self-referential cycle is a strange loop.

Reading this book reminded me of my favorite strange-loop story. It’s actually
a story about software security, and the kinds of stunts you can play with
software if you’re clever and subtle. It’s the story of the Unix C compiler, and the virtually invisible back-door security hole inserted into it by Ken Thompson – a story he told in his Turing award lecture..

(Idiot that I am, I originally said it was Dennis Ritchie who did this… Leave it to me to link to the original lecture, and not notice that I got the author wrong!)

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As an alert reader pointed out, a major mathematical prize was awarded recently. Since
2002, the government of Norway has been awarding a prize modeled on the Nobel, but in
mathematics. The prize was originally suggested by Sophus Lie, he of the Lie group, back in
1897, when he heard that Nobel was setting up his awards, and was not including
mathematics. The prize is named after Niels Abel, the Norwegian mathematician who
discovered the class of functions that are now known as Abelian functions; the same person
that Abelian groups are named after, etc.

Anyway, this year, the Abel
prize was awarded to Srinivasa Varadhan, an Indian mathematician who is currently a professor at the NYU Courant Institute.
Professor Varadhan’s specialty is probability theory – in particular, the theory of large
deviations. In honor of Professor Varadhan’s award, I thought it would be interesting to
very briefly explain what the theory of large deviations is, and why it’s so
important that it justified the award of a million dollar prize.

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Orac has posted a really good description of a recent paper discussing how
interaction between different antibiotics effects the evolution of antibiotic resistance in
bacteria populations.

It’s a mathematical analysis of experimental results generated by combining drugs which normally interact poorly with one another, and analyzing the distribution of resistance in the resulting populations. It turns out that under the right conditions, you can create a situation in which the selective pressure of the combination of drugs – which are less effective when combined – can select in favor of the non-resistant variant of the bacteria!

Check out Orac’s post for details; I may also try to get a copy of the paper and post a more detailed look at the math later this week.

Please make sure you read to the end. A couple of late submissions didn’t get worked into the main text, and a complete list of articles is included at the end.

Oy. So I find myself sitting in my disgustingly messy office. And I’ve got a problem. The Math Carnival is coming to town. All those geeks, and the chaos that they always cause. Oy.

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