Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Geometry puts some real design constraints on Darth Vader's desire for a spherical Death Star. (credit: Ben Orlin)

Opting to build the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been classic Star Wars villain Darth Vader's wisest move, according to math teacher Ben Orlin. He investigates this burning question, and so much more, in his fabulous new book, Math With Bad Drawings, after Orlin's blog of the same name.

Orlin started using his crude drawings as a teaching tool. He drew a figure of a dog one day on his chalkboard to illustrate a math problem, and it was so bad the class broke out in laughter. "To see the alleged expert reveal himself as the worst in the room at something—anything—can humanize him and, perhaps, by extension, the subject," he writes. When he started his blog, he knew that pictures would be crucial to helping readers visualize the mathematical abstractions. Since he had no particular artistic talent, he opted to just cop to it upfront. And thus, the Math With Bad Drawings blog was born.

The book is a more polished, extensive discussion of the concepts that pepper Orlin's blog, featuring his trademark caustic wit, a refreshingly breezy conversational tone, and of course, lots and lots of very bad drawings. It's a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Monday, (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On a Monday night filled with emotion as much as engineering, one of the most poignant moments came toward the end the program at SpaceX's rocket factory in California. The company's founder, Elon Musk, choked up as he described the financial contribution from a Japanese businessman, Yusaku Maezawa, to his Big Falcon Rocket project.

"I’ll tell you, it’s done a lot to restore my faith in humanity," Musk said, seated in front of the end of a Falcon 9 rocket and its nine engines. "That somebody is willing to do this, take their money and help fund this new project that’s risky, might not succeed, it’s dangerous. He’s like donating seats. These are great things."

The headline news out of Monday's event was that Maezawa has bought all of the seats on the first human flight of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) and upper stage spaceship (BFS)—a sortie around the Moon as early as 2023. Although neither Musk nor Maezawa would specify how much it had cost, Musk said "This is a non-trivial amount that will have a material impact on the BFR program."

Enlarge / An electronic voting machine sits in a privacy booth at a polling location during the Georgia primary runoff elections in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., on Tuesday, July 24, 2018. (credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Georgia’s upcoming November 6, 2018 election will remain purely electronic, and will not switch to paper to ward off potential hackers, a federal judge in Atlanta ruled on Monday evening.

But as US District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote, she is not at all happy with the inadequate efforts by state officials to shore up their digital security measures.

"The Court advises the Defendants that further delay is not tolerable in their confronting and tackling the challenges before the State’s election balloting system," she wrote in her order.