Check out this piñata – claimed to be the largest in the world. Now,where’s my stick….
Congratulations to Hugh for winning the May Cartoon Caption Competition.
Click here to see the runners up
Hugh was inspired by the following mathematical discovery, in the making of this winning caption above and this other entry ‘Bill and Ben didn’t really understand the Double Bubble Conjecture, but they did throw themselves wholeheartedly into a practical demonstration.’
“When two round soap bubbles come together, they form a double bubble as on the right in Figure 1. Unless the two bubbles are the same size, the surface between them bows a bit into the larger bubble. The separating surface meets each of the two bubbles at 120 degrees. This precise shape is now known to have less area than any other way to enclose and separate the same two volumes of air, even wild possibilities as on the left in Figure 1, in which the second bubble wraps around the first, and a tiny separate part of the first wraps around the second. Such wild possibilities are shown to be unstable by a new argument which involves rotating different portions of the bubble around a carefully chosen axis at different rates. The breakthrough came while Morgan was visiting Ritoré and Ros at the University of Granada last spring. Their work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spanish scientific research foundation DGICYT.” (Link) Got nothing to do tonight? Why not read the paper?
Congratulations to Bonita for being the first winner of the ‘Create a cartoon caption’ competition. Your prize is in the mail!
To see the fantastic submissions, click here to view them all. I must admit it was close, so I created a ‘Runners up’….and for those of you who I know are rather competitive, they are not listed in any particular order.
If you didn’t win this time, don’t worry, there’s always next time, and next time starts tomorrow! Yep, due to popular demand I’m having a competition every month.
In the event you are not aware of geocaching (I only stumbled upon it this year whilst hunting for something completely different on Google – isn’t that always the way?), it’s effectively a 21st century approach to orienteering (apologies to geocachers who may disagree with my simplified interpretation).
It involves a GPS (rather than compass) and people hunt to find the ‘cache’ (treasure). If you’re that way inclined, check out the official Geocache website for more details. Better still, read the history page to find out how it all started, when one lone computer consultant (it could only be that, or maybe a software engineer) thought he would devise a cunning plan and put to the test the now publicly available GPS selective availability mode.