What Birds Know About Fractal Geometry - ScienceNOW

ScienceShot: What Birds Know About Fractal Geometry - ScienceNOW: "Birds, do your math: The pattern of feathers on the chest of your potential mate might provide a good sense of his or her overall health and well-being. In a new study, researchers find that a single number that describes the complexity of those configurations, a parameter called the fractal dimension, is linked to whether a bird has a strong immune system or is malnourished. (Fractals, possibly most well-known from pop art posters of the 1970s, are incredibly complex patterns that have the same amount of detail at all levels of scale, from the huge to the microscopic.) When scientists restricted the food of red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa, inset), the feather patterns (details in main image) on their chests had a lower fractal dimension than those sported by their well-fed colleagues, they report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The food-restricted birds, on average, weighed 13% less than their well-fed colleagues and had weaker immune systems, which makes fractal dimension an easily recognizable sign of a potential mate's health and vitality, the researchers contend. "

Scrabble needs new scoring system, researcher says - World - CBC News

Scrabble needs new scoring system, researcher says - World - CBC News: "An American researcher is calling for an overhaul of Scrabble's scoring system, arguing that the classic board game has become outdated.

Joshua Lewis says that certain letters are now overvalued in the context of the modern English language.

'The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed,' he told British media.

'Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.'

Lewis created a program called Valett that recalculates the values of each letter to better reflect modern usage."

Cheating in Chess

The Crown Game Affair « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: "Faye Dunaway is an Academy Award-winning actress who co-starred with the late Steve McQueen in the 1968 movie ‘The Thomas Crown Affair.’ She plays a freelance insurance fraud investigator, Vicki Anderson, who believes that millionaire playboy Thomas Crown is guilty of instigating a $2.6 million bank heist, but falls in love with him anyway. The most famous scene in the movie shows her both defeating and seducing Crown in a game of chess.

Today I write about the difficulty of detecting fraud at chess, and the role of statistical evidence."

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions | MIT Technology Review

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions | MIT Technology Review: "A toppling domino can push over a larger domino but how much bigger can the next one be? One mathematician thinks he’s worked out the secret behind domino chain reactions"