MATH

Throughout last year's election, Nate Silver ran a fascinating website called FiveThirtyEight, named after the number of electors in the United States electoral college. Silver is a statistician, and he spent every day applying his considerable math chop

Call me a nerd (hey, I do write for Mental_floss), but I kind of miss my math homework. Back in the days before algebra and trig, math homework meant math problems embedded in intricate stories, arithmetic trickery and the occasional logic puzzle. In shor

Let's say you're a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you format it, since you don't have any conc