If you read my last post you’ll recognize this face. It’s the average face from a set of 200k images of famous people caught in their natural habitat – in front of a camera lens. Since I already had the […]

In 2016, The Chinese University of Hong Kong published a very large set of images of celebrities, along with an exhausting set of annotations, including commonplace and objective measures like “what color is the person’s hair?” and “is the person […]

It’s time to solve another Riddler. This one’s not a war, but a geometry puzzle instead. The problem statement this time is pretty succinct, so I’ll reproduce it in full here: What whole number dimensions can rectangular prisms have so […]

Storming the Castles The FiveThirtyEight blog runs a weekly column, called “The Riddler” which poses a problem each week for readers to solve. They’re mathy, or nerdy, or both, and they usually have one, correct answer. Furthermore, the author only […]

A New Medium Shortly after discovering, sometime in the late eighties, that magically, mysteriously, I could use a joystick and button to control a spaceship or a keyboard to command a boy to explore a castle, I found myself wishing […]

Each Contestant Meets All Other Contestants In Turn A few years ago, a co-worker participated in a local cricket league. Each team played all of the others in the league twice, and the top few qualified for a playoff. He […]

What Disorder Looks Like Which image below looks more disorderly? Which seems more chaotic?           Perhaps these seem like trick questions—they’re not. They may seem like leading questions—they most certainly are. Feel free to answer with […]

Geez, This Is Taking Forever! A short time ago, I watched my hometown college football team come back to tie a game in the fourth quarter, triggering overtime. Because overtime is so much fun to watch, I immediately wondered how […]

Men Without Hats Here is a very fun and surprising result which is not really new, but if you haven’t seen it, you really should. The problem looks like this: One-hundred men throw their hats into a closet. Each one […]

A co-worker of mine recently emailed me a link to a rage face comic with the following: “Is this always true??? I mean the math part… Stephen???” Knowing that I have an irrational love of rage faces as well as math, […]