Front-Page Editorial in The New York Times

Today, The New York Times ran a front-page editorial for the first time since 1920. I'm very glad they've done this, and obviously it takes a lot for them to do this when the last one was almost 100 years ago. I hope it has an impact.

(Tip of the cap to Ernie Barreto and George Takei.)

A Shotgun Approach to Calculating π

Here is a literal(!) shotgun approach for calculating an approximate value for π. I approve! (I think...)

Now let me quote from the arXiv paper (which is called "A Ballistic Monte Carlo Approximation of π"): "We compute a Monte Carlo approximation of {\pi} using importance sampling with shots coming out of a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun as the proposal distribution."