But those cannot replace what is the real thing

At this moment we're almost certainly off at a local diner and enjoying the afterparty from the Lansing pinball league's Zen Tournament finals. When we put in the playoff system for determining league standings a strong contingent of folks were worried this would abolish the amusing, mostly-for-fun Zen Tournaments, in which pairs of people take one flipper each for a series of matches. Happily it's being kept as an epilogue to the season.

This was a decision made with some controversy yet, though, as folks suggested that people should pick their teams, rather than matching up highest-ranked to lowest-ranked, second-highest to second-lowest, et cetera. It looks like the league president/organizer is resisting that, though, and I'm glad. Attempts to strategize to win the Zen Tournament make the thing too serious, I think.

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And I've had a bunch of mathematics posts since the last time I did a roundup of them. I lost track of just how many, sorry. Among the posts:

• A Little More Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About How Interesting What We Talk About Is, where I left off last time, talking about information theory and basketball tournaments.
• Reading the Comics, April 27, 2015: Anthropomorphic Mathematics Edition, featuring a couple numbers with faces.
• Earth Day, a reblogged post, showing pictures of nature and functions that approximate stuff seen in the pictures.
• How April 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog; better than it treated my humor blog, although I think something's awry with the statistics overall.
• What Do I Need To Pass This Class? (December 2014 Edition), reposting last semester's answer just in time for finals. At least it was in time then.
• Reading the Comics, May 4, 2015: Hatless Aliens Edition, so dubbed because Herb and Jamaal Master Command finally got that Facebook meme going around.
• Reading the Comics, May 9, 2015: Trapezoid Edition, featuring a shapeshifter.
• Reversible and irreversible change, reblogging a bit of thermodynamics and entropy talk.
• Reading the Comics, May 14, 2015: At The Cash Register Edition, including a slightly interesting experience from working retail that I had.
• Calculating Pi Less Terribly than I did way, way back on Pi Day, thanks to the use of an infinite series.

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Trivia: The tape recorder on Mariner 10 was capable of holding 180 million bits of data. Source: On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212.

Currently Reading: Mathematics Without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, Michael Harris.