_________ by racheldandrea on Flickr.

Fort Worth Gas Well Revenue Balances as of 3/31/2012

Me and my friend Brendt made a venn diagram birthday cake to celebrate math and friendship and cake and our same birthday.

Here’s an informative graphic for the day. Click for source and discussion.

Other things you should know: Iran is suspected by many world powers of trying to develop nuclear weapons. One of many reasons for this is that they’ve been really cagey about allowing inspectors to come in and check out some of their facilities. (they’re also enriching uranium to levels higher than they need for nuclear energy, but speculation about Iran’s nuclear ambitions are actually beside my point)

The UN has this committee that’s in charge of handling diplomatic work with Iran over this issue called the P5+1 (also called the E3+3 in Europe), which stands for the permanent five members of the UN Security Council- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus one rotating member from the nonpermanent part of the council (right now that’s Germany). Which is to say the six countries negotiating with Iran about Iran’s nuclear future are all bearers of nuclear weapons themselves.

This is a really difficult topic for me to write about and I have to do it about once a month. It’s hard because often a successful summit means that the group has agreed to nothing more than meeting again to continue talks (they just wrapped up in Istanbul and will have more next month in Belgium). I was listening in on a call this afternoon with some experts on the subject who were sounding very optimistic- two weeks after the next summit Iran is going to face some pretty serious economic sanctions that could really hurt its citizens, unless they make something work, so the pressure is on. Next month is going to be very interesting, I think.