"There are four ranks of cards, instead of the usual 13. Instead of 2 through Ace, cards are ranked according to the topological classification of their symbol ... 2,3,5,7,J,K all have the same property that they can be deformed into a dot or line. These are the lowest ranked cards. In fact, by themselves they're worth dick--hence the name for these cards.

4,6,9,A are topologically the same as a 'o', and hence are called holes, ohs, or--if you can get away with it--hoes. These are the second ranked cards in ascending order.

10 is in a class by itself because it's a combination of a dick and a hoe, so it's called a Split, and is third ranked.

8,Q are topologically the same because of the way the Q is made on cards, with the slash going all the way across and creating two holes. This is the highest rank--the double hoe, or just double."

"Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza - and if not, who will get more?

Of course you could estimate the area of each slice, tot them all up and work out each person's total from that. But these guys are mathematicians, and so that wouldn't quite do. They wanted to be able to distil the problem down to a few general, provable rules that avoid exact calculations, and that work every time for any circular pizza."

• you compete against some other people
• each of you guess one number from [0, 100]
• compute 2/3rd's of the average of the guessed numbers
• the winner is whoever is closest

"In tests in Canada, women who were told that men and women do math equally well did much better than those who were told there is a genetic difference in math ability.

And women who heard there were differences caused by environment -- such as math teachers giving more attention to boys -- outperformed those who were simply reminded they were females.

The women who did better in the tests got nearly twice as many right answers as those in the other groups, explained Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver."