Bernie Sanders won a convincing victory 51.4% to 36.0% over Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary. The 15-point margin of victory was well above what the poll averages predicted. This follows his victory in Indiana last week.
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It looks like every late night comedian wants the chance to say a not-so-fond farewell to him and who can blame then? There is something about his smug expression that just begs to be ridiculed. Bee also got Michelle Branch to sing farewell to a montage of the greatest visual hits.
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Suppose you have N people and one cake. How can you cut the cake such that each person is satisfied that the pieces have been distributed fairly? This is an old problem that Martin Gardner wrote up in his column for Scientific American and in the case of two people it is quite simple: One person gets to cut the cake into two and the other person gets to select the piece they want. (But see later for a problem with this.)
But what if there are more than two people? Below the fold, I give Gardner’s explanation on how to do it, starting with the case where N=3, quoted by Walter Stromquist in an issue of The American Mathematical Monthly.
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Later today, the Philippines will officially declare the winner of its presidential elections. There are five candidates running and since there is no run-off, the winner needs only a plurality to become president. I had not been aware until today that the candidate currently leading in the vote count and expected to win, Rodrigo Duterte, has a horrific record and platform and has made no secret for his disdain for democratic checks and balances if they stand in the way of his agenda.
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Right wing commentator Charles Krauthammer is no fan of Donald Trump and in his latest column tries to understand why Republicans voters have chosen him as their standard bearer.
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By now pretty much everyone must have heard about the academic who was taken off a plane and questioned by authorities because the passenger seated next to him while the plane was waiting to be cleared for takeoff had alerted the authorities that he was behaving suspiciously, concentrating on writing strange symbols on a piece of paper and rebuffing her attempts at conversation as she tried to find out what he was up to. It did not help that he was youngish, swarthy looking, and bearded.
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It is clear that under the guise of religious liberty, opponents of same-sex marriage are determined to wage a kind of long-term guerrilla warfare against it, even if it seems futile to the rest of us since not only has the US Supreme Court struck down any bans on it, public sentiment is also shifting in favor of it.
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When Donald Trump was threatening to win the Republican nomination for president, it spawned the response of some people saying that if he won, they would leave America, and the usual destination mentioned is Canada. Now that he has won the nomination, the threats to leave if he wins the presidency can be expected to increase.
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The late comedian was a wonderful raconteur who was born into an Irish Catholic family but became an atheist. On his show he was fond of telling jokes about religion, especially Catholicism. Here is a collection.
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Via Mark Frauenfelder, I came across this fascinating little video that informs me that being in possession of a particular number is now illegal in the US and why. I cannot tell you the full number because I don’t know it but apparently knowing it and even writing it on a piece of paper could land me in prison. All I know is that the number is a prime number that has 1419 digits that begin with the sequence 85650789657397829.
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