New Euro coin commemorates famous French defeat

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/world/europe/belgium-commemorates-waterloo-with-euro-and-france-is-not-pleased.html?_r=2

After it objected to a decision in March by Belgium to introduce a new 2 euro coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Belgians retreated, scrapping 180,000 coins they had already minted.

This week, Belgium decided to circumvent French resistance by invoking a little-known European Union rule that allows countries to issue euro coins of their choice, provided they are in an irregular denomination.

That led to the unveiling of a €2.50 coin — a first in Belgium — and 70,000 of them have now been minted. The coins, which can only be spent inside Belgium, display a monument of a lion atop a cone-shaped hill on the site of France’s humiliation, as well as lines indicating where troops were positioned when forces led by Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon in the countryside near Brussels.

Not again!

http://www.ryot.org/math-question-is-stumping-the-internet/934258

Either math is getting harder, or as a society we are just getting a lot worse at math.

Now, there is a new math problem sweeping the Internet. The question, according to Mashable, appeared on the GCSE exam in the UK, which is taken by students in secondary schools. An estimated 500,000 took the test. The question is so confusing that over 5,000 people have signed a petition to allow students to re-sit for the entire exam.

Think you can solve it? Here’s the question:

There are n sweets in a bag. Six of the sweets are orange. The rest of the sweets are yellow. Hannah takes a random sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. Hannah then takes at random another sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. The probability that Hannah eats two orange sweets is 1/3. Show that n²-n-90=0.


Solution here: