Can Math Help You Find Love?

Bobby Seagull is a mathematician who became famous as he became a finalist on the University Challenge in 2017. Clearly, it can be said that he is an intelligent man, at least when it comes to math and science. Still, life can be tough sometimes, and we can’t have everything in his life. In the case of Bobby, he is unlucky when he comes to love.

A few years ago, he sat down to try to work out why he had been so unlucky in life. “I was 32 or 33, I was single, I loved maths and science – I thought: ‘Can I use maths and science to help me?’ It was a genuine, earnest attempt.” 

Inspired by Peter Backus – a Manchester University economics lecturer who in 2010 wrote a paper titled Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend – Seagull used the Drake equation, developed to estimate how many intelligent alien civilisations there might be in the galaxy, to determine his number of potential partners. “You start by assuming there’s infinitely many, then you keep on making the pool smaller and smaller.”

Find out what happened next in his aim to find love over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

The Origin of Siri’s Name

Have you ever wondered where the iconic virtual assistant of iPhone, Siri, got its name? Somebody asked the same question on Quora, and of all people, Adam Cheyer himself, the former engineering director at Apple, answered.

As a startup, when coming up with Siri's name, we wanted something that was easy to remember, short to type, comfortable to pronounce, and a not-too-common human name. And we wanted to be able to get the domain name for not too much money.

The name Siri have different meanings as well on various languages.

Head over to Quora to see Cheyer’s full answer.

Via Mental Floss


(Image Credit: JESHOOTS-com/ Pixabay)

By Franzified

The Universe of Words by Emmanuelle Moureaux

We use words in many different ways. We use them to express what we feel, to describe the world around us, and to communicate with other people. Words make our lives and our world colorful.

This masterpiece, made from approximately 140,000 hiragana characters, is titled “Universe of Words”, made by Emmanuelle Moureaux.

To celebrate 100 years of the japanese soft drink calpis, emmanuelle moureaux presents [this] new installation… Forming part of the ‘Calpis 100th year anniversary, let’s meet at Tanabata’ exhibition, the work immerses visitors in colored pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling. As the latest in moureaux’s ‘100 colors’ series, the work uses the full spectrum to compose intimate and thoughtful spaces.

The installation was unveiled in July 4, 2019, coinciding with the Japanese star festival, Tanabata.

Tanabata Day marks a tradition when people write their hopes and dreams on colored pieces of paper and hang them from a bamboo branch in the hope that their wishes will come true. moureaux‘s installation reinterprets this event by floating words throughout the gallery space, in an effort to evoke visitors’ curiosity and emotion.

More photos over at DesignBoom.


(Image Credit: DesignBoom)

By Franzified

Identical But Different: The Surprising Individuality of Bacterial Clones

A crowd of runners, all of which looked identical, gathered near the starting line. But this wasn’t your usual 5k. The facilitators of the contest would test both speed and navigational ability as the runners find their way through a maze, as they choose the right direction at every intersection.

At the end of the course, the postdocs Mehdi Salek and Francesco Carrara would be waiting to identify each of the finishers.

The winners, however, won’t receive any medals or trophies. After all, they’re not human: they’re Escherichia coli bacteria.

In recent years, the notion that there could be individual winners in the race have shaken the foundations of microbiology. To test this notion, a team of microbiologists and engineers created a unique endurance event for these bacteria.

The cells at the starting line of Stocker’s microbial marathon were genetically identical, which implied, according to decades of biological dogma, that their resulting physiology and behavior should also be more or less the same, as long as all the cells experienced identical environmental conditions. At the DNA level, every E. coli cell had a roughly equal encoded ability to swim and steer through the course. A pack of cells that started the race at the same time would in theory all finish around the same time. 

But that’s not what Salek and Carrara found. Instead, some bacteria raced through the maze substantially more quickly than others, largely because of varying aptitude for moving toward higher concentrations of food, a process called chemotaxis. What appeared to Salek and Carrara as a mass of indistinguishable cells at the beginning was actually a conglomerate of unique individuals.

Find out more about this study over at Quanta Magazine.

Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay

By Franzified