A minor nitpick: It was Andrew Wiles who proved Fermat's last theorem. Andre Weil was another incredible mathematician (responsible for, among many other things, the celebrated Weil conjectures), but did not prove Fermat's last theorem.
I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but your math doesn't seem quite right. Should it instead be
(1/100,000 chance of burning down each year) * ($200,000 cost if it does) = $2 per near expected damages?
This property of Piedmont is not even unique within the Bay Area! Fremont (the fourth-largest city in the Bay Area) has an enclave of its own, Newark, which is its own city yet completely surrounded by Fremont.
I use it for my weekly to-do list (since it then syncs across all computers and my phone), and it is a convenient way for me to keep track of my different projects. I type up a short summary for myself after meetings and I can also easily take a photo of a blackboard and include it with the notes. It's also a decent way to quickly record addresses or library call numbers, and to draft e-mails to send to my classes. (A proper e-mail client would work for this last purpose, but the only reliable way to e-mail all students in a course is through Blackboard, which is uniformly terrible.)
To belabor the point: Keeping one of the prices fixed, you should prefer that it be 20 percent more expensive on the weekend. Assume for example that the price on Saturday is $10 and the price on Tuesday is $8. It is then "20 percent cheaper to come during the week" but it is 25 percent more expensive to come on the weekend!
If you're handy with simple algebra (and can remember that the derivative of x^2 is 2x) then you can remember the picture. If f(x) = x^2 - N, then you're looking for the (positive) zero of f. You take a succession of tangent lines and look at the zeros of those. So, you start with a guess (call it x_0), take the tangent line at your guess (so it has slope 2x_0 and goes through (x_0, x_0^2 -N)), then find the x-intercept of this line and make it your new guess. This is all Newton's method is. With square roots, it takes the form of averaging your previous guess and N over it.
Just to nitpick a bit -- your final three numbers add to 110, not 100. Perhaps you meant 49/31/20? I point it out only because 49/31/30 seemed too good to be true.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but if the relevant part of the article is "I do not have insurance, so it is important that I maintain my health", then the contraposition would be "It is not important that I maintain my health, so it follows that I have insurance." What you are suggesting as the contraposition is "I have insurance, so it is not important that I maintain my health", which is the inverse of the statement (and equivalent to the converse "If it is important that I maintain my health, then I do not have insurance."
I haven't read Smolin's paper, so I'm not sure exactly what this article is getting at. Is he suggesting that there should be a different connection (i.e., not the Levi-Civita one) on the cotangent bundle of spacetime or is it something more pedestrian? Is he just doing microlocal analysis on spacetime? If the latter is the case, this article doesn't describe what is (mathematically) new about it.
On a second read of this article, it seems clear that my interpretation above is incorrect. It might still be that they are coming up with physical interpretations of microlocal analysis on curved spacetimes. (Though how you fix a quantization, I'm not sure.)
I'm not a physicist and have not read the original source, so please take anything I say with a large dose of salt.
I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, but here's the abstract:
We propose a deepening of the relativity principle according to which the invariant arena for non-quantum
physics is a phase space rather than spacetime. Descriptions of particles propagating and interacting in spacetimes are constructed by observers, but different observers, separated from each other by translations, construct
different spacetime projections from the invariant phase space. Nonetheless, all observers agree that interactions
are local in the spacetime coordinates constructed by observers local to them.
This framework, in which absolute locality is replaced by relative locality, results from deforming momentum
space, just as the passage from absolute to relative simultaneity results from deforming the linear addition of
velocities. Different aspects of momentum space geometry, such as its curvature, torsion and non-metricity, are
reflected in different kinds of deformations of the energy-momentum conservation laws. These are in principle
all measurable by appropriate experiments. We also discuss a natural set of physical hypotheses which singles
out the cases of momentum space with a metric compatible connection and constant curvature.
Andre Weil was very opinionated and lived a very interesting life. I encourage you to read about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Weil