birthday paradox or pigeon-hole principle

The Pope celebrated his birthday today with an appropriately Bavarian entourage of well-wishers bringing some characteristically German traditions to Rome. He was treated to quite a few performances from this delegation. The Pope, the first German to hold the office in over a thousand years, shares his birth date with another, though perhaps less famous, German citizen, hailing from Erfurt, the city where Martin Luther was ordained and the Pope visited last September: Germany’s first test-tube baby (sogennante Retortenbabies, which sounds especially cruel, although test-tube is bad enough, as if they were sea-monkeys or kangaroo-joeys).

No details were disclosed on that young adult born in 1982 spent his birthday. I wonder what these two Aries would think of one another. The star or the conditions that one is born under of course is not everything, and the birthday problem refers to the very human propensity to make something out of a not so unlikely coincidence, whereas it would be more statistically remarkable if a randomly assembled and relatively small group did not have a few individuals that shared the same birthday. Still, I wonder what these two might have in common and what they might learn from one another.

776.012

tribute or bread and circuses

I think that the Olympic Games have officially become more commercialized than Christmas or guilt. Since the Australian games of 2000, as the Guardian reports, the International Olympic Committee has been making exponentially greater demands of its host cities for enforcing the market capitalization of official sponsors.
For the upcoming event, authorities have been given an onerous charge of making sure no opportunist, ambusher (I suspect that such draconian measures created ambush-marketing in the first place) or bystander have the potential for profit by association with a date, place or Zeitgeist of what is supposed to be a celebration of culture, sportsmanship and human achievement. Not only are pubs not permitted to invite customers to watch the broadcasts on their premises or even dare suggest that they are in fact physically located near a venue (or cohabitate in the same dimension), players and spectators are not allowed to share footage or photographs over social networks under threat of criminal punishment. Given also the marked increase in surveillance, security theatre and hassle (a rise for a place already one nation under CC-TV) and the mysterious prohibition against athletes shaking-hands, a prophylactic for some unnamed social disease, being picked as the setting for this and other large-scale, officially sanctioned happenings does not seem such a great trade-off.

inútil

Retronaut curated a series of funny comic book panels depicting rubbish superpowers (but does include this image of this Legion-hopeful being summarily rejected). What would your highly specific and apparently of limited utility superpower be? There are unfortunately more and more situations when Colour Kid's abilities could prove useful.

widget

Hungarian artist Martzi Hegedüs crafted an impossible character-set called Frustro, the font inspired by the Penrose tribar and MC Escher-esque architecture. I think this is brilliant and I wonder if advances in three-dimensional printing could manage to produce tubes for neon signs that appear to twist like this.

When I was little and first posed a question of hypothetical industrialists—i.e., someone running a widget factory, I always wondered (and still do envision it like this) what their product would be. I imagined a widget must have been this other impossible shape—a blivet or the devil's tuning fork, whose tines also produce a frustrating and dizzying optical illusion.  I thought that was as good a hypothetical product as any.