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An old NY Times article on the surprising ubiquity of Zipf’s law : Math and the City One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week’s column is about one such pattern. It’s a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme.

One tight slap on Times of India. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Eb-waHx-00?rel=0]

The preface to this book gives a reason behind the title for this book, This year we learnt that there are many thousands of children across Britain who cannot read competently, that there are thousands who leave primary school unable to put together basic sentences. One in three teenagers reads only two books a year, or fewer, and one in six children rarely reads books outside of the classroom. Many parents do not read stories to their children, and many homes do not have books in them.

“Life is too short for a bad book or the right book at the wrong time.” -– Tim Parks