"Attack on the pentagon" ...aaaand the guardian has lowered themselves to buzzfeed's standards.
I think it's more that they have raised themselves to The Economist standards.
Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
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Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#72Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math? It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
Not to answer your question, but here's a simple, unsolved problem:
Dissect the circle into congruent pieces
such that the center point is in the
interior of one of the pieces.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#73Many of these types are basically combining two pentagons into an octagon (or even hexagon) then tiling it across the plane. For some reason, intuitively those seem more easy to me (2 * 3, 2 * 4), so that you could just generate a bunch of them, and split them in two to create tessellating pentagons? Even the example in the article can be viewed as a regularly tessellating nonagon. I don't see what's "irregular" abou…
irregular - with sides of different sizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polygon
Sides and/or angles. It's possible to have all the sides the same length, and yet still not be regular. Similarly, it's possible to have all the angles the same, and yet still not be regular. It is instructive to construct examples of both types of failure.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pun, not clickbait. This is not the death of "journalistic integrity".
No, the original title is clearly clickbait – meant to be misinterpreted as something other than what the article is about. Here is what a real pun in a newspaper headline looks like: http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/03/22/on-astronomy-minors/
The title, being a pun, is only meant to be misinterpreted for the first half of the sentence. It can hardly be clickbait if the reveal is made by the end of the anchor text.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you NOT link to mobile version? Mobile phones switch to mobile automatically, desktop version does not.
The mobile version is very readable on a desktop browser, and it's probably easier for you to edit the URL on your PC than for the poster to edit it using their phone.
...all effort being equal. And assuming, of course, that comments are read (on average) once.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#76Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
irregular - with sides of different sizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polygon
Sides and/or angles. It's possible to have all the sides the same length, and yet still not be regular. Similarly, it's possible to have all the angles the same, and yet still not be regular. It is instructive to construct examples of both types of failure.
Ah true. A lozenge has all sides with the same size but not the same angles
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#78Take that, Penrose! LOL
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#79"That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James’ discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice
that's awesome. Outsider math and outsider art deserve as much respect as "outsider" programming ( startups / garage hackers ) garner. Creating semi-closed communities of insiders, united by what are essentially arcane handshakes, and dismissive of value emerging outside of themselves, is really just both a narrow-mindedness that doesn't behoove innovation and also an admission of an unnecessary insecurity about the…
But mathematics is about the only field where merit is clear-cut enough that there's no outsider mathematics, even if crank mathematics is clearly recognizable by professionals and even by college calculus-educated adults. If, as often is the case, someone draws a sketchy proof for an ambitious conjecture that seems promising enough, entire communities of professionals spend thousands of man-hours fixing the holes.
What's more, mathematics has consistently avoided the "Lakatos trap" of chasing "narrow-minded" research programs that it might be argued that plague science in general. Even physics: Alan Sokal's mock article accidentally zooms in on how we have failed to understand (and persist on failing to working on, at least since the Kolmogorov formalism) the everyday phenomenon of turbulent fluid dynamics even as we've grown to astounding heights in esoteric reductionist physics that are spuriously compared to a new metaphysics. And don't get me started on economics or even econometrics -- just the vast swaths of subjects we've given up on.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something can be accurate and still be misleading.
It would only have been misleading with a capitalised "Pentagon".
Well now we're arguing semantics. But okay.
I think that in the context of a newspaper when you read, "Attack on the pentagon" the first thought that most people have is that there has been an attack on The Pentagon. That's the whole reason it's a pun, right? Because you're lead to believe it refers to The Pentagon when it really refers to a 5 sided polygon?
That's an inappropriate thing for a newspaper to do. Go ahead and make puns, just not about attacks on government buildings.
The SPJ ethics code clearly states,
> "make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context."
At the very least you must admit that it's pushing the envelope, no? The fact that the HN mods changed the title from what OP submitted is evidence enough that I'm not alone in thinking it's a misleading headline.