Marrying Mathematics and Media for Humor and Relevance Session S053 Tennessee B

The Question of the Ages… Why do we have to know this? Answer: It makes the jokes funnier

Modern Family, ABC Television

“Dave Barry: A Journey into My Colon and Yours”

You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) “Dave Barry: A Journey into My Colon – and Yours,” Miami Herald, Feb. 22, 2008 Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes -- and here I am being kind -- like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The Big Bang Theory: CBC Television

The Next Millennium Bug… Y2K problem was 2-digit code for year: 2000 and 1900 indistinguishable. Now many systems store dates in a signed 32-bit integer representing the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, bit used for the sign = 2,147,483,648 Today: 1,415,836,800

The Next Millennium Bug… 2 31 = 2,147,483,648 seconds  yr On January 19, 2038 at precisely 3:13:07 universal time, the clock will reach the largest possible representation of a signed 32-bit integer. Upgrade to a 64-bit system and the number of seconds represented will take us to Sunday, December 4, the year 292,277,026,596.

ABC Television “When Not Knowing Math Costs You $15,000”

You Tube Name: “Millionaire Math is Hard” ABC Television

$50,000 Question for Charity… ABC Television

File:US Navy N-9593M-031 Sumatra, December 2004

File:US Navy N-5244H-150 Haiti, January 2010

File:US Navy M-0145H-063 Japan, April, 2011

Napa Valley, California, August 2014 Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Source: USGS

Two cars leave a rest area at the same time and travel north on I-95. One car averages 56 mph and the other averages 64 mph. The faster car reaches the next rest area ½ hr before the other. What is the distance between rest areas?

Seismographs record two types of wave energy (P waves and S waves) that travel through the Earth after an earthquake. Traveling through granite, P waves travel approximately 5 km/sec and S waves travel approximately 3 km/sec. If a geologist working at a seismic station measures a time difference of 40 sec between the arrival of the earthquake’s P waves and S waves, how far from the station is the epicenter?

Traveling through granite, P waves travel approximately 5 km/sec and S waves travel approximately 3 km/sec. If a geologist working at a seismic station measures a time difference of 40 sec between the arrival of the earthquake’s P waves and S waves, how far from the epicenter is the station?

P waves reach the station 60 sec after the quake. S waves reach the station 100 sec after the quake. The distance between station and epicenter is 300 km. (5 km/sec)(60 sec) = 300 km

Speaking of Disasters…

r  0.979

x-axis Increase to the right y-axis Increase upwards Longitudes increase to the left Latitudes Increase upwards

Find distance between two consecutive points (spherical trigonometry) Divide by 6 hr to find speed of forward progress. Problem reduces to finding the central angle where the points are not oriented due north-south of each other. r  3960 mi  s = r 

Find Distance, Given Latitude and Longitude s = r 

Faster

Photo: Michael Duff, AP

Photo: Dominique Faget, AFP/Getty Images

Photo: Tony Nwosu, European Pressphoto Agency

Photo: Pius Utomi Ekpei, AFP/Getty Images

Source: “Ebola Virus Diease in West Africa – The First 9 Months of the Epidemic and Forward Projections, “WHO Ebola Response Team, “The New England Journal of Medicine,” September 23,

Source: WHO:

Naïve estimates of the CFR (case fatality rate) derived from the ratio of recorded deaths to recorded cases significantly under-estimate the true CFR since the final clinical outcome of over half of the reported cases is not known. 95% confidence interval

Basic reproduction number, R 0, of an infection is the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period in an otherwise uninfected population. Measure of Contagion…

One simple model suggests that the proportion of the population that needs to be vaccinated to prevent sustained spread of the infection is given by: Vaccinations?...

Google Flu Trends

From Wolfram Alpha…

Among the Writers… J. Stewart Burns: BS Mathematics, Harvard University MS Mathematics, UC Berkley David S. Cohen: BS Physics, Harvard University MS Computer Science, UC Berkley Al Jean: BS Mathematics, Harvard University Ken Keeler: BS Applied Mathematics, Harvard PhD Applied Mathematics, Harvard University Jeff Westbrook: BS Physics, Harvard University PhD Computer Science, Princeton University

The Big Bang Theory: CBC Television

Julie Miller Who are Sine and Cosine?