Mona Chalabi at FiveThirtyEight on queueing theory as applied to grocery stores.
Heuristics for estimating life expectancy, from Decision Science News.
Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine, At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law, on the Tracy-Widom distribution from random matrix theory.
How to tell the temperature using crickets from Priceonomics. (Supposedly this eventually goes back to the Arrhenius equation but a quick Google only finds me unsupported claims of this fact. Google Scholar is a little better.)
Better Explained has an interactive guide to the Fourier transform and the law of sines. (I bet at least one of these is old, but I came across them this week.)
Colm Mulcahy has rounded up a bunch of Martin Gardner’s puzzles for the BBC, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Gardner’s birth, and also his top ten Scientific American columns The CBC program The Nature of Things did a show on Martin Gardner in 1996.
I’m still working out what to think of this app that solves math problems by pointing your phone at them.
Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman applies Bayesian computation to doing the laundry.
A book on the foundations of data science (high-dimensional geometry, Markov chains, etc.) by John Hopcroft and Ravindran Kannan of Microsoft Research is available online.
Users of MathOverflow have compiled a list of obscure names in mathematics, i. e. theorems whose names don’t tell you what the theorem is about or who discovered it.
Michael Jordan is interviewed by IEEE Spectrum and comments on how that process was disillusioning.
God plays dice 