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Richard Kiel is best known for his role as Jaws in the James Bond movies. But did you know he was an accomplished salesman, house developer, and tremendous family man despite the many difficulties he faced trying to make it as an actor? He was a very hard working guy that worked on countless projects and created the comedic nature of the character Jaws. On top of that, he was a pretty inspirational guy later in life.

Learn how he got that lump on his forehead and how a man with many things against him made it in one of the most image-based industries. Definitely worth a listen.

The last chapter of his book is particularly touching where he discusses his faith and asks if the reader is interested in Christianity. He provides a prayer for you to say outloud and even puts his email address and mailing address down if you said it and want to talk to him about it. He then says, “Thank you for letting me share my life with you.”

What a guy.

A fantastic strategic analysis of the game Monopoly by Walter Hickey.  Any investigation of a game that ends up talking about Markov chains is pretty sweet in my book.

http://www.businessinsider.com/math-monopoly-statistics-2013-6?op=1

I remember the first time I saw one of these and learned how to open them.  Super-cool – too bad ones that get over about 20 steps to open are unbelievably expensive…

Browsing the goofs and trivia for movies on IMDB is one of my favorite pastimes while watching a show (especially bad/low-budget movies).  Did you know the same such collection exists for video games?  Learn all kinds of interesting tidbits about your favorite game here:

http://www.vgfacts.com/

What if you sat down and added up:
1+2+3+4+5…
all the way to infinity. What would you get? Most people would say – well – infinity.
What if I told you it wasn’t infinity – but -1/12. Hogwash you’d say!
But here he is proving it, and he claims the result is used all over in string theory and astronomical physics.

How? Well, it has to do with how you think about and sum infinite series.

Spoilers:
I remember a prof telling me that depending on how you interpret infinity – you can get systems in which parallel lines converge or diverge or stay parallel at infinity.  It didn’t make a lot of sense at the time, but now you see a real case.

You start to enter the rabbit hole when he proves the Grandi’s Series = 1/2:
1-1+1-1+1…=1/2.

Here’s a link to all those explanations
http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/thanks.html
But how does it really work?  TerryTao goes into tremendous detail of how the summation works and why the Grandi series can sum 1-1+1-1+1… even though it does NOT converge in the classic sense. But that’s the difference between applied mathematics/physics and theoretical.  In applied fields – you really DON’T have infinite things summing – you have real things – and it makes modeled results…unexpected.  Amazingly enough – we had models for these systesms before we even knew of real things that displayed the properties.

Ever have a parent tell you that you’re getting “A big old car – one made of steel. That way you will be safe in an accident”.

Well – tell them to stop trying to kill you.

Crash Test 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air VS. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu