Cafe

Should you take the bet?

You and nine other individuals have been captured by super-intelligent alien overlords. The aliens think humans look quite tasty, but their civilization forbids eating highly logical and cooperative beings. Unfortunately, they're not sure whether you qualify, so they decide to give you all a test. Can you solve this hat riddle? Alex Gendler shows how.

Taking that internship in a remote mountain lab might not have been the best idea. Pulling that lever with the skull symbol just to see what it did probably wasn't so smart either. But now is not the time for regrets because you need to get away from these mutant zombies...fast. Can you use math to get you and your friends over the bridge before the zombies arrive? Alex Gendler shows how.

The of and to. A in is I. That it, for you, was with on. As have ... but be they.

Holy moly I'm gonna tear my $100 bill into five and rearrange it and boom! I have $200.

The Infinite Hotel, a thought experiment created by German mathematician David Hilbert, is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Easy to comprehend, right? Wrong. What if it's completely booked but one person wants to check in? What about 40? Or an infinitely full bus of people? Jeff Dekofsky solves these heady lodging issues using Hilbert's paradox.

This is the solution to: http://youtu.be/QD3hbVG1yxM

This problem has made the rounds on the internet but I felt it deserved a treatment like this.

Honeybees are some of nature's finest mathematicians. Not only can they calculate angles and comprehend the roundness of the earth, these smart insects build and live in one of the most mathematically efficient architectural designs around: the beehive. Zack Patterson and Andy Peterson delve into the very smart geometry behind the honeybee's home.

Can folding a piece of paper 45 times get you to the moon? By seeing what happens when folding just one piece of paper, we see the unbelievable potential of exponential growth. This lesson will leave you wanting to grab a piece of paper to see how many times you can fold it!

Light always travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. But if you're in motion too, you're going to perceive it as traveling even faster -- which isn't possible! In this second installment of a three-part series on space-time, CERN scientists Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie use a space-time diagram to analyze the sometimes confounding motion of light.

Song from ?.

How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory - looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that didn't follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn't getting them anywhere.