Allen Downey on when we will see a two-hour marathon. (Basically, extrapolate the current world record progression linearly, but there are good theoretical reasons to expect this to make sense.
Robert Smallshire (of the Norway-based Sixty North) on Predictive Models of Development Teams and the Systems They Build
Todd Schneider on How Many Paths are Possible in an 18 Hole Round of Match Play Golf?. (Match play golf is played on a hole-by-hole basis, with the winner being the one who wins the most holes.) Schneider is kicking ass lately; he put together a traveling salesman app in Shiny.
Adam Piore at Nautilus on why we keep playing the lottery.
Evelyn Lamb at Scientific American on Leslie Lamport’s ideas on how to write proofs. (From the abstract to Lamport’s paper: “A method of writing proofs is described that makes it harder to prove things that are not true.” This is in response to a lecture Lamport gave at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum; see also talks by Martin Hairer (“Taming infinities”, i. e. renomalization) and Wendelin Werner (“Randomness, continuum, and complex analysis” there.
Jeremy Kun on making hybrid images (which look like one thing from close up and another thing from far away) using Fourier transforms.
Vi Hart at EleVR on camera balls for mono spherical video: how do you put a bunch of cameras that sense rectangular images together to make a “camera ball” which sees in all directions?
Jim Albert at Chance explores streakiness in home run hitting. (Summary: there’s evidence that streakiness exists, because there are more streaks than you’d expect if it didn’t, but that evidence is too weak to pick out individual streaky players.)
Susan Marshall and Donald Smith wrote an article for Mathematics Magazine, Feedback, control, and distribution of prime numbers; it won an expository award from the MAA.
God plays dice 