Dork Scratchings

Any orbit can be represented given enough epicycles. The Geocentric Model The geocentric model was wonderful for human self aggrandizement.  We belonged at the centre of the universe and everything revolved around us.  That early humans believed this isn't that surprising.  After all the Sun, moon, and stars do seem to move in circles around us (albeit different ones).  What's more interesting is how we attempted to cling on to this theory in the light of a) conflicting evidence, and b) a far better explanation. David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality puts forward the view that the point of a scientific theory is to explain .  The more a theory explains - whilst still remaining consistent with observable facts - the better it is.  This is a philosophical justification for Occam's Razor.  Why is an explanation with fewer postulates better than one with more postulates? because it leaves less unexplained! The earliest theory for why the plane...

I discovered the card game Dobble a few days ago whilst visiting relatives in Germany.  There are 57 cards with 8 symbols on each.  To play the most basic version of the game you deal the cards face down between the players such that one card remains (if there are an odd number of players you may need to hold back more than 1 card).  Then you turn face up the remaining card (or one of the remaining cards) and each person turns their top card face up. The first person to spot a symbol on their own card that matches one on the left over card shouts out the name of that symbol (e.g. "car!") and gets to move their card to the top of the shared stack; the others move their top card to the bottom of their own stack.  The winner is the person who gets rid of their cards first. At first sight this doesn't seem very mathematical.  However, after a while I noticed something odd about the cards: every card shares exactly one symbol with each other card in the pac...