How Many Slices Does a Mandarin Have? A Three-Year Household Investigation Conducted Under Conditions of Seasonal Citrus Oversupply by David Balmer¹, Gabriel Balmer¹, Siegfried Hapfelmeier², Maria Luisa Balmer²* ¹ Citizen scientists, ² Institute for Infectious Diseases, University of Bern, Switzerland, *Corresponding author Abstract During the European winter months, mandarins and oranges achieve near-monopolistic status in the […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Double standards— World Standards Day 2023 will arrive soon, two days after it arrives. As Feedback noted last year (17 September 2022), having double Standards Days is standard behaviour. This year, most of the world will officially celebrate […]
Counting moths is not as easy as it may seem. Jamm Hostetler, and collaborators at the University of Florida’s Natural History Museum, created a system to count moths more indefatigably than most people would be able to do it. It’s called AutoMoth. The heart and eyes of it are an Android app called BioLens. Biolens […]
Mathematician Jim Propp connects the counting numbers — the concept of them, not particular, specific numbers — to the seemingly unconnected Lake Woebegon Effect. Propp’s essay appears in his Mathematical Enchantments blog: Beneath and Beyond … The twentieth century weekly radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” had a recurring feature called “The news from Lake […]