Researchers from Brazil's Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation to confirm paleontologist Stephen J. Gould's prediction that it is evolutionarily advantageous for cicadas to emerge at intervals lasting a prime number of years.

862 = 2 x 431.862 is a number whose sum of divisors is a fourth power: 1 + 2 + 431 + 862 = 1296 = 64.862 is the maximum number of regions into which 41 lines divide the plane.862 has the representation 862 = 25 x 33 - 2.862 is a divisor of 955 - 1.Source: What's Special About This Number?

Pound Foolish by Helaine Olen is an excellent exposé of the personal finance industry. After reading it, you’ll never look at a talking head on TV the same way. It seems many personal finance advisors have an attitude of “Do what I say, not what I do.” Here are a few examples from the book. [...]

Bad decisions 1. JC Penny uses fake regular prices so sales look better 2. If you’re not a pure-math person or an expert programmer, that’s all right, because you can be on a team with people who are” 3. Thinking everything at Subway is healthy 4. Replacing expensive habits with slightly less expensive ones 5. [...]

Karsten Fyhn just let me know of their recent article and attendant code repository.  Compressive Parameter Estimation for Sparse Translation-Invariant Signals Using Polar Interpolation by Karsten Fyhn, Marco F. Duarte and Søren H. Jensen We propose new compressive parameter estimation algorithms that make use of polar interpolation to improve the estimator precision. Moreover, we evaluate six algorithms for estimation of parameters in sparse translation-invariant […]