Today, I learned that:

Once an hour per year, the World Wide Fund for Nature arranges the so-called “Earth Hour”, when they ask everyone on our planet to turn off the non-essential lighting for one hour, during the local time of 20:30 to 21:30, to make us aware of global warming. See reference #1 below for more information.

The photos above were taken during the Earth Hour on 2009-03-29 at 21:17 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. I was there to visit a trade show during the following week and had arrived in the city on the same afternoon. I managed to obtain a good ticket for the Cirque du Soleil’s performance at the theatre of New York, New York, and when I stumbled out of there, I was greeted by the unusual, almost pitch-black night of the Las Vegas Boulevard (a.k.a. the Strip), so I snapped those pictures in both directions from the overpass in front of New York, New York.

Solution to Problem # 5a, Pizzas, posted on 2016-03-13

So, should you bring one big pizza or two small ones? Do not get confused about the fact that the bigger one has twice the diameter of the smaller one. Since we are comparing two three-dimensional objects, and consider that both types of pizzas have the same thickness, then we must compare the two areas. And since the big pizza has a diagonal that is twice that of the smaller one, then of course the area has the same relation squared. So, the bigger pizza has 4 times the area of the smaller one, yet only costs twice as much. Take the big pizza and go home with twice as much pizza as if you had choosen two small ones. See also the following picture, and “buon appetito” !

The Margherita pizza was created in 1889 by pizzaiolo Rafaelle Esposito, as a tribute to Queen Margherita di Savoia during her visit to Naples. The ingredients were chosen to mimic the Italian flag: white represented by buffalo mozarela cheese, red by the tomato, and as the green “piece de resistance” fresh basil. In all its simplicity, still one of the best pizzas you can ever eat! See also reference #2 below.

Solution to Question # 5b, Pancakes, posted on 2016-03-13

I also asked why Bill Gates is so fond of pancakes. The answer is that his only scientific article deals exactly with pancakes. This is the story: You are working as an extra hired waiter for the morning rush at the International House of Pancakes. Everyone goes there for their breakfast pancake and today the chef has a bad day. Not all pancakes turn out the same, some are bigger, others are smaller. Your task is to serve the pancakes to the patrons from a neatly arranged pile, with the largest one at the bottom and the smallest one on top. The question is then, is there a maximum limit for the number of times you have to interchange the pancakes until you have reached your objective?

In his article from 1978, Bill Gates at Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and his co-writer Christos Papadimitriou developed an algorithm to try and almost answer that question. And their theory was undisputed until 2008, when a team in Dallas, Texas, USA improved it when they applied the pancake flipping theory to a minimization of connections between neighbouring network processors.

… That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: EARTH HOUR

2: Pizza Margherita

3: Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal

4: Flipping pancakes with mathematics

5: Team Bests Young Bill Gates With Improved Answer
to So-Called Pancake Problem in Mathematics

+: What did you learn in school today ?