In two recent conversations with David Hemenway, I learned about how to get more bang for our buck in keeping people safer, and about a cool statistical insight that helps explain things ranging from why your classes are larger than “average” to why its hard to reduce the number of cars on the road.

Listen to the audio:

Public Health Success Stories

Why Your Classes are Larger than Average

Here are some funny math inspired cartoons. 

If you’ve ever dated a math major you may also find this and this and this funny.  If you’re in grad school you might like this.  Remember the right hand rule?  Also, you can’t have a sciency website without a little dark global-warming-humor.

Today is my sister Lily’s birthday.  Given Lily’s interest in astronomy, black holes, and the like, this post is for her:

While many movies have been made about life on other planets, alien invasions and parallel universes, check out Science Magazine’s latest on a solar system much like our own.

Lily, you will especially like the clever technique they use to figure this stuff out.