Showing results by narrator "Matt Parker" in All Categories

Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

Trigonometry is perhaps the most essential concept humans have ever devised. The simple yet versatile triangle allows us to record music, map the world, launch rockets into space, and be slightly less bad at pool. Triangles underpin our day-to-day lives and civilization as we know it. In Love Triangle, Matt Parker argues we should all show a lot more love for triangles, along with all the useful trigonometry and geometry they enable.

From some of the biggest names in horror comes an Advent calendar of short holiday horror stories perfect for the darkest nights of the year.

In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working-class East Coast, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation's capital, the heroes of White Man's Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older.

If you've ever pondered where the mint in your toothpaste really comes from or wondered what The Hot Chocolate Effect is, then come explore and play along at home. The team also investigate everything from radioactive bananas and musical bicycle tyres to assisting you with mathematically efficient sock storage and how to host your very own static electricity party.

I never planned on getting married. After my dad deserted my family the day before my 10th birthday and I watched my mother fall to pieces over him, I decided it wasn’t worth the heartache. Then Shepard Rhys-Jones, who ghosted me two years ago, declares he needs to marry someone to claim his inheritance, and I drunkenly offer myself up as his wife.

I haven’t seen Finley Lawson in five years. The day I walked away from him - or ran, rather - was the hardest day of my life. My only regret is losing touch with him. I loved him and he loved me. And then I threw it all away. I thought the past was in the past until I walked into a bar in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve and smack-dab into the boy I used to love, who is now a man. Like, a really hot man. And I realize, every feeling I ever felt for him is still alive and well.

The need for love - obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable - takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.

A famous 18-year-old fiddle player, Beau, is abducted from her parents’ huge Sierra home at a birthday folk jam in her honor one summer in the early part of the 21st century. As a fire burns up the mountain while she is buried on the land under a pile of brush, she is found just in time. A month later, much to her horror, she is abducted again, this time from a Berkeley music jam.

Visible Gods is an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and four fictitious modern-day characters. Socrates' worldview is of a living cosmos with man only half-way up the hierarchy of all beings; above him reign suprahuman beings of great majesty and power - the visible gods. The moderns with whom Socrates converses disdain his ancient Greek cosmos as primitive and false.

In the aptly titled Offbeat, Richard Matheson, a modern master of strange fiction, offers 13 excursions into the unsettling and bizarre. In these stories you will encounter a major league pitcher with a horrific secret for his astonishing success; an ordinary man who wakes to find himself in a silent, empty world; a death row prisoner with an extraordinary explanation for his innocence; and a novelist whose fictional creations transcend the printed page.