Slate has a series called The Wrong Stuff, about mistakes. Two recent interviews in the series have been very interesting, one from Josh Stieber and one from Chuck Colson.

Almost two years ago on this blog we heard a prediction from mathematician Keith Devlin:

Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own [a mobile phone].

Now The Economist reports that we're halfway there:

Sometime in the next few months, the number of mobile phones in use will exceed 3.3 billion, or half the world's population.

"Halfway there" is also the theme of a recent funny post from another mathematician.

Neal Wu is one of the best competitive programmers in the world:

He has competed in six coding contests run by Kolstad’s organization, the USA Computing Olympiad; he won three of them with perfect scores. Wu has the relaxed disposition of a star athlete; he’s confident without ever letting on that he is America’s Great Nerd Hope. “I hate to say he’s the Tiger Woods of computer programming,” Kolstad says, “but he shares the properties of cool, calm under pressure, and consistent, consistent performance.”

Probably went to some fancy-schmancy private school in the Northeast...

He just graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana.

...or maybe a public high school in a below-average district in the state ranked 46th in the country for math education.

I had almost given up on blogging, but these two sentences inspired me to write at least one more post:

It is possible today to grow up in an American home with a 40-inch flat-screen television and a daily caloric intake so high that it actually becomes detrimental to health, but to lack access to basic medical and dental care, to run a material daily risk of rape or other profound physical violence, and to leave school functionally illiterate. Poverty today means something very different than it did in Dickens’ day, but it has not been abolished.