Do you know the name of the new forward?

A Greek team signs a new player.

It's a secret between the club owner and the director of a sports newspaper. But it begins to run by SMS.

All will lead us to the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio.

By the way, we'll find spirals, sunflowers, pine cones, shells, roots and leaves, methods to win on sport bettings, violins, the Vitruvian man... ah! and a bit of Maths, of course.

I hope you will enjoy the new story of  Matifutbol: Fibonacci also plays football

Calculated friday

December is time for making calculations. We must add up the monthly incomes, and subtract the usual costs, and other expenses not so common: the Christmas dinner, the gifts for family...

To do this, we use calculating machines. This way our mind doesn't get tired, and we can devote our thoughts to higher things.

All of us may think that calculators were invented by Mr. Casio, Mr. IBM or Mr. Hewlett-Packard. Nevertheless, it was a Galician man, Ramon Verea, who invented and patented it, in 1878.

Do you think he received any help from the Spanish government? Any prize or distinction? Did he do the patent in Barcelona, La Coruña or Sevilla? Did he become a millionaire? Is his calculator of iron and steel, weighting 26 kg, and named Verea Direct Multiplier, exposed in the science museum at San Sebastian, or Valladolid?

It was two centuries ago, but things have not changed since then. Ramon, with a brilliant academic record, was denied the scholarship that allowed him to study in Santiago de Compostela. So in 1855 he emigrated to Cuba, and from there he moved later to New York, Guatemala and Buenos Aires. He never returned to his homeland, and he died destitute in Argentina.

During this journey around the world, he had time to work as an engineer, a journalist, a translator, and an inventor. He directed for more than 10 years a newspaper in New York. 

His invention was patented in the U.S.A. He got the recognition of a medal at the World Exhibition of Inventions in Cuba. And his calculator (we couldn’t say it's a 'pocket ' calculator), is displayed at the headquarters of IBM in White Plains, New York.

So when you use a calculator machine this month, don’t forget about its magnificent inventor. It will be the best private tribute that we can do for him, because he hasn’t got any public one.

The amazing case of the extra car.

The amazing case of the extra car

The sponsor of the Football World Championship 2015 in Canada i going to give away some gifts to the best scorers. But a last minute change in the number of gifts creates a curious change in their apportionment. 

Try to find out what happens!

Football and happiness

Mathematical refreshment for summer Football and happiness. An easy and refreshing problem for this summer, that helps us not to forget exponentiation.

You can see the new story on Matifutbol: Football and happiness

Hope you'll enjoy it!

@matifutbolcom #mathematics

Angelical friday

Photo taken at the underground station of Kings Cross-St. Pancras in London on July 11, 2013 at 12:21 hours.

Germany is saving Europe.

It has spent €100 billion bankrolling bailouts in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus.

It can afford these rescues only because Germans work so hard: per head, Germany has grown at more than twice the rate of the rest of the euro zone since the euro was created.

Slow-growing countries are reforming their sclerotic economies largely because of pressure from Germany.

Press, stats and football charts.

It's difficult to agree on what we know, when each one uses different data. 

But when we all start from the same data, should not always reach the same conclusions? 

A story which mixes paradoxes statistics, charts, news media, index numbers, sports trophies, data tables, economic results, football clubs and contrary opinions. 

And where everyone seeks to be right... 

Press, stats and football charts

A black (and red) hole

Thanks to the prize of the proceeds of a footbal match, we can learn about some nombers that attract the others so that they can escape from them.

Mathematical sequences which lead to mathematical black holes.

You can see this new story on A black (and white) hole

Cow abduction

I wonder why aliens lift our cows and not most of our politicians...

http://www.cowabduction.com/

Is it because they are more productive?



Is it because they are less harmful (despite the methane)?


Is it to keep them from catching any harmful behavior?

Ron Swanson

Ron Swanson has been told that a politician has confessed incompetent and corrupt, has resigned and returned all the money he has stolen.


Thanks to that, next year Ron will pay less taxes (including taxes on alcohol).


You can see Ron's reaction after hearing the news on the following link:

Reacción de Ron Swanson

Santa friday

Santa is not Nordic, but Turkish.

Although he is traditionally dressed in a heavy coat and surrounded by snow and reindeer, the fact is that Saint Nicholas, the saint who refers the legend of Santa Claus has nothing to do with this land.

In fact, he also has nothing to do with Bari (Italy), a city where he never set foot, and that only has the privilege of being the sanctuary of his relics.

The truth is that he was a Christian bishop of Greek origin, born in Lycia, in modern Turkey, back in the fourth century.

And his reputation for delivery of gifts is based on a story about a poor man with three daughters, who could not marry them for not having the necessary dowry. Aware of this, Nicholas handed, when they get the age of marriage, a bag full of gold coins each. It is said that all this was done in secret by the priest who entered through a window and put the bag of gold into socks for the girls, hanging over the fireplace to dry.

So this year you should not be scared if you see him appear riding a magic carpet, and not in his traditional reindeer float.

Lucky friday

Have you ever stopped to consider that Bugs Bunny, the famous 'lucky rabbit' is actually a hare?

Yes, it is a specimen of the genus Lepus, which differs from rabbits that his ears and eyes are more developed.

In fact, his first short film was called 'The Wild Hare'. But its creator had to start saying it was a rabbit so not to be accused of plagiarism for copying the character of an earlier short titled "The Tortoise and the Hare" of another artist.

Even in this thing we are cheated like children ...

Chinese friday

Chinese colonization continues: restaurants, shops, clothes, tools, compass, mandarin oranges, rice, gunpowder, whiskey ...

You said whiskey?

Yes, we all think it's a Scottish drink, but it was an Irish monk named John Cor who, in the fifteenth century, applied to the malt beverage distillation the process of Chinese liquor.

So this weekend please get drunk with the local wine of the country, please (grape juice for nondrinkers).

Good weekend.

Cloudy friday

Week of clouds over Palestine clouds, clouds around the rescue, clouds over the eurozone recession. And now somebody also manufactures real clouds indoors ...

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a way to create clouds indoors by carefully regulating the space’s humidity, temperature and light. The fluffy white clouds are summoned up temporarily using ...

a fog machine, creating a surreal experience in the middle of a room. Smilde has created his clouds inside different types of locations, ranging from corridors and hallways, to bedrooms and common spaces.

You can see the whole article: Clouds indoors

And yet it doesn't move

Eppur si muove.

This is the phrase that Galileo Galilei pronounced after being forced to recant his belief on heliocentric theory by the Inquisition Tribunal (and most probably after leaving the courtroom...).

In this case, we must say just the opposite.

Staring at the image, we get the impression that all the squares are moving side to side.

But, it's a fixed image!

7vium

The title of this blog pays tribute to the medieval Trivium+Quadrivium.

In the early Middle Ages, monastic and cathedral schools, only depositaries of knowledge of the epoch, turned to compile and organize all the known human knowledge in a comprehensive encyclopedic corps.

This compendium derived, in the late eighth century, in the Trivium et Quadrivium, which were adopted as the educational curriculum by Alcuin of York for the Palace School at Aachen, and soon spread throughout western Europe.

In it, the liberal arts, classified into seven branches, were divided into two groups:

- Trivium (Latin: three-ways), which grouped together the disciplines of eloquence: Grammar (lingua, "tongue"), Dialectic/Logic (ratio,  the "why") and Rhetoric (tropus, "figures").

- Quadrivium ("four roads"), including related disciplines of Mathematics: Arithmetic (numerus, "the numbers"), Geometry (angulus, "Angles"), Astronomy (astra, "the stars") and Music (tonus, "edges").

Out of this classification of the liberal arts, understood as 'art' or academic disciplines, which were trades or professions held by free men, we could find those arts classified as 'servile', vile and mechanical tasks played by servants or slaves.

Thus, the privileged classes were devoted to intellectual work, applied to the study of the Trivium and Quadrivium, while the popular classes developed crafts.

The scope and extent of this classification certainly evolved over time, but this design did not suffer significant innovations till the next era of intellectual transformations, called Renaissance, and especially till the age of Enlightenment.

Despite this, we still talk of  'liberal professions' in reference to those related to law, economics, medicine or journalism, for example.

Once this exposure, and given my interest to focus on the spreading of news and resources related to the so-called 'Science', without neglecting the other fields of knowledge and human creation that merit divulgation, I thought it was appropriate to pay tribute to that set of subjects that constitute the functional backbone of our existence, titling this blog as 7vium (3vium+4vium).

Hope this mutual journey will be interesting both for me and for you, and that we'll have fun together with the proposed themes.

Color illusion

Some people think everything's dark. Some people think everything's clear. Some believe that everything is black or white, and some think that there are infinite shades of gray.

In any case, one thing is what we see and other one is that what we think we seer.

Let's look at this example, and try to figure out which box is clearer, A or B.

To see the solution, let's have a look at:

Color illusion