"One in four adults has the maths skills of a nine-year-old or worse and struggles with the most basic everyday sums. According to a shock report, more than eight million adults in England are considered to lack even basic numeracy." Hahahaha, England! 1 in 4 adults! That's like 50% or something!

.@joenbc: If you think it's a toss-up, let's bet. If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 1, 2012

The Nate Silver Wars are still going—but it's embarrassing to even refer to it as a proper battle, since the weirdo pundits who think he's a LIBERAL MOUTHPIECE are too busy breathing through their own mouths to be understood. If you were busy "being without power" or "helping out your neighbors" or otherwise having a life and/or suffering in the hurricane, perhaps you missed the most hilarious intellectual breakdown of the election yet. [...]

Bad news, ladies: Now you have no excuse for being bad at math.

Big night out last week for Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan! The three men were spotted ordering the $700 worth of wine at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill by an associate professor of business at Rutgers University named Susan Feinberg. After dining in the same restaurant with her husband, Feinberg confronted Ryan and his pals about the high-end wine. The exchange became contentious. Ryan professed not to know the price of the wine, and one of his buddies responded to Feinberg's chastisement by loudly saying, "Fuck her."

He has fun friends! The mouthy one is Cliff Asness, who runs a hedge fun and used to work at Goldman Sachs [...]

Do you know why investment banks and hedge funds and insurance companies actually work? If you just said "LAWYERS" or "THE FED WINDOW," you are technically correct. But on a more fundamental level, it's because there are thousands of Ivy League children assiduously doing math all day. These firms are the nation's number one consumer of nerds, and that is why, in the end, great amounts of money are made. (Though it's never the nerds that get the big bonuses, which is a shame.) So when businesses try to rip off a model—for instance, the fine people who mixed viatical settlements with derivative instruments, that is to say, [...]

"The blue ghost is nicknamed Inky, and remains inside the ghost house for a short time on the first level, not joining the chase until Pac-Man has managed to consume at least 30 of the dots. His English personality description is bashful, while in Japanese he is referred to as 気紛れ, kimagure, or 'whimsical.' Inky is difficult to predict, because he is the only one of the ghosts that uses a factor other than Pac-Man’s position/orientation when determining his target tile." —Games is maths!

A statistical analysis of 100 people in order this afternoon on the High Line.

In order to become a wizard, you must first apprentice to a wizard, and the acolytes who followed Nate Silver's lead did very well in The Awl's first quadrennial electoral college pool. Out of 160 entries received, 9 of you predicted the map exactly. (That's right: we're calling Florida for Obama. I mean, it's Friday.) This means that 5.6% of this website's readers have documented psychic powers. You can't argue with that. It's math.

Of the people who predicted the map exactly, 78% overestimated Obama's popular vote total by several million votes, reflecting a wildly inflated expectation for voter turnout. The remaining 22% didn't guess Obama's popular vote at [...]

As has been widely advertised, the jackpot for tonight's Powerball drawing is $250 million. Later today, I'll head out to a store in my Chicago neighborhood to buy a $2 ticket, then spend the rest of the day as I always do before a drawing, daydreaming about what I would do with all that money: A house across the street from Lambeau Field (perhaps attainable without winning the lottery), villas on the beach, bottles of Pappy van Winkle 23-year. The works. Top shelf everything. Living easy.



While I know that my odds of actually winning the jackpot—1 in 175,223,510 to be exact—are essentially zero, I never bothered to [...]

"If an average-sized human body were rolled into a sphere, how big would that sphere be?"

Not just two white men are without jobs, though they're the nice anecdotal evidence for the cover of Newsweek, which announced "The Beached White Male." Oh, you do not say: "Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed." Oh but wait, do not make fun: "It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children." (There are about 52 million married white men in the U.S., by the way.) But it's still safe to say this thesis doesn't have anything to do with [...]

With today's forthcoming signature by the President, the nation enters a frenzy of wealth transfer over both the next few weeks and the next two years. What does the tax bill do? Here is a fairly simple breakdown.

"Chefs, among them Hes ton Blumenthal of Bray, England, New York City’s Wylie Dufresne, and Chicago’s Grant Achatz, have taken to foaming all manner of savory foods. These dishes have an aura of mystique about them and not just for their novel texture. Although foams may look like random jumbles, the bubbles within all foams seem to self-organize to obey three universal rules first observed by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau in 1873. These rules are simple to describe but have been remarkably hard to explain. The first rule is that whenever bubbles join, three film surfaces intersect at every edge. Not two; never four—always three. Second, each pair of [...]