Collected

-- Good ol' Lewis Carroll took a break from imagining the strange journeys of a young girl named Alice and wrote a book of mathematical puzzles called Pillow-Problems. One of them suggests that a person imagine any three points on an infinite plane. What, Carroll asks, is the probability that the triangle they form is obtuse? For reference, an obtuse triangle has one angle greater than 90º -- the obtuse one -- and two angles smaller -- the acute ones. Some mathematicians played around with a new way to solve the problem and came up with an answer: 83.8 percent of those triangles will be obtuse. A related question: Given any three members of any legislature, what is the probability that all three will be obtuse in the other sense of that word? The answer is left as an exercise for the student.

-- Many people get tattoos with what they are told are Chinese or Japanese characters that are either translations of desired phrases or symbols of some sought-after characteristic. Many of those people are fooled.

-- Sometimes the Iditarod sled dog race is thought of as an individual sport, because there's just one person involved. Although the dogs are called a team, the degree to which they are indeed a team with their human can be overlooked. Until it can't.

-- As always, it's entirely possible for a politician to support a good idea at several steps along the process, even up to putting his or her name on paper enacting laws to make that idea happen, and then torpedo the good idea by not giving it any actual money.