If you’ve ever been cured of a stomach ulcer, you can be thankful for the work of an Australian scientist, Dr Barry Marshall. As a young researcher, he and a colleague developed the idea that stomach ulcers were not just caused by stress, but by a bacterium that somehow managed to survive the hydrochloric acid in our digestive system.
Author: Dr Mike
Logical Proverbs
“No news is good news”… “You can’t have your cake and eat it”… if you consider things perfectly logically, these should bother you. After all, if no news was good news, logically speaking, all news would be bad news, yes? And that would be bad news.
The Polar Bear
Just like the Cartesian bear, but with a change of coordinates.
Picture below :
[DMMGFK #65] Try This Math Puzzle
[This is a back issue of this site’s newsletter]
Happy New Year! (One month late, I know!)
Here’s a nice puzzle to start the year. Take a 3×3 grid of squares. Now, black out the middle square. Now there are two rows of three cells each, at the bottom and the top, and two columns of three cells, at the left and right.
Making Tough Puzzles Easy (Or Less Tough, Anyway)
My in-laws in Singapore called up, asking for a solution to this puzzle. A short while later they called again to say that they’d solved it, but only after a long period of trial and error, asking me if there was a more systematic way.
Continue reading Making Tough Puzzles Easy (Or Less Tough, Anyway)
Amazing Math Fact
Here’s something interesting : work out the cubes of 1, of 5 and of 3, then add them together.
Adding (and Subtracting) Fractions Tips
The “standard” way to add (or subtract) fractions is to put them over a common denominator first. So, the fraction problem
is
Math At The Beach
Well, it was a sunny day, my youngest son wanted to head to the beach to make sandcastles. Why not join in, I thought?
Does Math Make You Seem Smarter?
Often movies include scenes showing math. Often, the math is on a blackboard or whiteboard in a character’s room or office, or in the background of the credits roll at the end of the show. The intended effect is, I guess, to tell the audience “this character is a genius of some sort, he or she is going to provide the hero with some amazing invention or information that will help defeat the villain”.
[DMMGFK #64] Word Games and Holiday Games
[This is a back-issue of this site’s newsletter]
Holiday time is approaching!
I’m starting a brand new site of games – Dr Mike’s Word Games for Kids. It’s really too early to launch it yet, but the first two games on there are great games for the holiday season.