The AbacusEdition #2

Our amazing winner!

Sapere Aude: We Have a

Winner!

√-1 8 ∑ Delicious π

A mysterious group of students call‐ing themselves 'Team Pi' have launched the Pi Newsletter, a mail‐ing list which sends recipients a number of facts about each digit of Pi between gaps of the number of days represented by that digit. For example, the newsletter starts with 3 facts about the number 3, followed by 1 fact about 1 aer one day, fol‐lowed by 4 facts about 4 aer four days. e facts range from the in‐

sightful to the surreal, but all of them will broaden your mind!

Students are being encouraged to sign up for this integer-themed, fun-$lled factoid collection. It promises to give subscribers a deeper under‐standing of, and closer emotional bond with, each integer. To sign up, email KCLMSnews@yahoo.co.uk

One enterprising student has de$ed the all the odds to defeat the menac‐ing trials that consist of Sapere Aude, the super-tough omnipuzzle that we set readers of the Abacus last months. Alice Collier has displayed a dazzling range of crticial and later‐al thinking skills (and intense pa‐tience) and is therefore the $rst ever winner of Sapere Aude.

So, three cheers for Alice, the super-spectacular solver of last edition's problem!

2 e Abacus

Revelation: Teacher

Holds Lesson

Mr Robson's Games-mastery

Mr Abramson's Barnstorming

Speech

Celebrity News

Our very own Highly Esteemed Headteacher gave a (televised) speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham in which he explained to attendees "what is special about our school". Mr Abramson spoke passionately and wittily about the importance of Mathematics in an increasingly data-driven world, and of the im‐portance of extending the best teaching in the $eld to students who may otherwise miss out on opportu‐nities to study it. e word 'barn‐storming' is banded about a lot in conference season, but it really does apply here,

"I am delighted to be part of an in‐stitution which is not following the pattern in A Level education, where, in 2013, only 20% of those students entered for Physics were girls, a third of those entered for Further Mathematics were girls, and in Computing its as low as 7%." We wholeheartedly agree. Let's throw off the patriarchy in Mathematics, sisters!

Mr Abramson added "Our job and our reason for being, is to provide opportunity for... interested students to be able to effectively develop and express the talent and interest they have for this subject." And what a fantastic opportunity it is.

ITV's Tonight programme came into KCLMS last Monday to $lm the rarest of events: a Maths teacher giv‐ing a Maths lesson. Students in Mr

Robson's Core Maths class were joined by Jo Boaler, a renowned ex‐pert on mathematics education, as well has our highly esteemed head‐teacher and a camera crew of three for a lesson spent tackling past BMO questions.

Tonight producers say that the les‐son, $lmed as part of a feature on the work of Jo Boaler that is sched‐uled to air later this month, is main‐ly to provide a useful background. Students, however, are convinced that they are the real stars of the cur‐rent affairs programme. And why wouldn't you be? It doesn't matter that the v iewing publ ic (or 'muggles'- Abacii passim) will not understand the few seconds of num‐berspeak a student may say on TV, what matters is that it sounds im‐pressive. Has Tonight discovered the next Marcus du Sautoy? Only time will tell.

It could be that the teaching of a Maths lesson is such a rarity that it deserves reporting on national tele‐vision. However, the Abacus esti‐mates that at least $ve Maths lessons have taken place in England in the past year.

Of course, the recording will mark Mr Robson's second appearance on national television in the space of a month, suggesting his elevation to 'A list' status is complete. is would explain his recent appearance at George Clooney's wedding in Venice, where reporters saw him in earnest conversation with U2's Bono. On Twitter, rumours are cir‐culating that Bono will leave U2 to form a rap duo, Complex Conjugates, with Mr Robson. Surely this super‐

act would take the charts by storm.

ose of you who are up to date to with what’s happening around school should have been aware of Mr Robson’s cameo on the TV show Only Connect, aired on the 29th September on BBC Two (if you were unaware of this, or haven’t seen it, I’m highly suspicious that you are ei‐ther a hermit or living under a rock). Only Connect required quick thinking and ability to connect ran‐dom words, pictures or objects un‐der pressure. ose who did watch will know that it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Playing as one of the 'Gamesmasters team', Mr Robson’s team managed to win by a landslide score of 30 points to 13. (Aided by the rival team lacking the most basic knowledge of Radiohead and Dou‐glas Adams' classics! Ed.) To that we congratulate him on his awesome‐ness and we, KCLMS, take pride in having such an amazing teacher. HJ out.

3e Abacus

The Controversialist:

Tattoos

From Our Editor...

10 ings We Want to Know

ree weeks ago, I was feeling rather anxious. My team and I had put hours of work into the $rst edition of the Abacus, with no idea how the school would react to it. With noth‐ing more than intense enthusiasm and a few laptops, we had patched together an eclectic mix of news and satire, the real and the surreal, the topical and the irrelevant into a newspaper that we would publicise with just three sheets of A4 paper. How would people react? Would our work simply be ignored? Would people be offended by our gentle mockery? I even wrote and tore up four different stories for our front page.

Fortunately, our fears were un‐founded. We've had more readers than there are people at KCLMS, and you've been great at telling us what we've got right and what you'd like us to improve. It's early days yet, but we are determined to make ev‐ery edition of the Abacus better than the last. With that in mind, I'd like to respond to some of the sugges‐tions and queries you've made here.

You've told us that you've found the Issuu Reader a little tricky to use. We do realise it can be a little, ahem, stubborn. You said that you'd prefer to read the Abacus on paper, or on PDF. We did consider going to print, but that the only we we could afford that is to charge for published copies, which would probably lead to nobody reading us! Are we wrong? Do let us know. However, we might be able to put a PDF edi‐tion of the newspaper on Sharepoint in the future. But for some reason, all the images are inverted when we convert our $les to PDF. In the

meantime, we suggest you try to get used to Issuu Reader!

You also said that you'd like more mathematics in the Abacus. is is a tricky one, as there is probably enough technical Maths talk going on as it is without us adding to it. However, we are always to happy to publish any Maths questions, ideas and essays you'd like to see pub‐lished. We hope you'll agree we've found the right balance in this edi‐tion, particularly aer reading our Exam Questions sheet.

By Kafayat

Some people like tattoos some peo‐ple don’t. But most people know that tattoos are a form of body art; an ex‐pression of themselves. Recently tat‐toos have become an issue in the workplace, aer the recent story of Jo Perkins who was $red for a 4cm tattoo on her foot. According to the tattoos cover up policy and the “No Visible Ink” policy, employees must hide their tattoos or remove them. Moreover, reachers have to cover up there tattoos for the fear of “in&u‐encing” children.

To me this seems like an unfair rule. e point of tattoos is to express who you are: to be told to cover them up is essentially formalised bullying and discrimination in the workplace. People have even started to get tattoos in places which are easy to hide like the back and foot. Some people would consider the need to do this as a contravention of human rights, speci$cally the right to express yourself. With 20% of UK residents having some form of tattoo, the issue is affecting many people and not just the minority.

It’s hard to make a claim for cover‐ing up tattoos because society is blasting them in our face.

David Beckham, Cheryl Cole and the Prime Ministers’ wife are some examples of people who visibly wear tattoos in the workplace. It’s hard not to be in&uenced by the media and society when tattoos are en‐couraged. So why do employers still view tattoos as unacceptable?

1. Why on earth has the vending machine stopped selling Diet Pepsi, the only cola worth drinking?

2. Why does green marker not rub off?

3. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

4. Why have students been banned from the cool spiral stair‐case?

5. How many KCLMS students are now on Nuime?

6. What does the fox say?7. Why hasn't that Jeremy Kyle

album reached Number 1?8. What is the life expectancy, in

minutes, of a whiteboard pen at KCLMS?

9. Did someone install a gate be‐tween the Annex and the main building for a practical joke?

10. Oink?

4 e Abacus

Practice makes perfect: revision questions

Did you know that 102% of students who regularly complete past exam questions in Mathematics get better grades? at’s why we at the Abacus have scoured the exam board li‐braries to bring you this question paper, designed to test all of your newly-acquired skills and knowl‐edge. Email us your answers and we’ll tell you if you’re failing miser‐ably or if you might just survive your A Levels.

Mechanics

A suitcase is standing on a man, who is jumping in the air from a li,

which is travelling up inside another li, within a skyscraper that is hang‐ing on a pulley. On the other end of that pulley is a black hole. is en‐tire system is balanced on a train that moves at light speed. e suit‐case drops another pulley (holding masses of 200 kg and 65j kg) onto the man's head.

1. Draw a force diagram for the above information.

2. If the man drops a penny out of the li doors, how soon will it fall to the &oor of the li the li is con‐tained in? at is, not the li the

man is contained in, but the li that contains the li that contains the man.

3. Your Mechanics teacher is balanc‐ing on a pen, which is balanced on a house, which is balanced on a ball, which is held up by a small springer spaniel, which stands on the roof of the skyscraper. What is the skyscraper's new acceleration?

4. Do you give up yet?

5. No? Are you sure?

6. ere's no shame in taking a resit, you know.

7. We WILL crush your spirit. You just don't know it yet.

Statistics and Decision

1. I am at a party. I am eating some peeled garlic, picking brightly coloured balls out of a bag and breathing $re from my nostrils. e probability that a given person at the party owns a dog, has purple hair and likes e Truman Show is 1/288. ere are 68.4 people at the party. As it is a particularly good party, the ratio of girls to boys is 19:1 and everybody likes Green Day.

a) What is the probability that no‐body is talking to me and that I like the Truman Show?

b) Using Boolean algebra, write an expression for the probability that a randomly selected person from the party has two daughters, one of

5e Abacus

Make Your Voice Heard

KCLMS has entered the qualifying round of the national Debating Mat‐ters competition, run by the loy-sounding Institute of Ideas. KCLMS will enter a ten-strong team of speakers and researchers to compete

with schools around the borough of Lambeth for a place in the London regional $nals next Spring. From there, $nalists will proceed to the national round next Summer, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves.

e debate, which takes place on the 5th November at University College London (incidentally, the college which has a long-running rivalry with our parent university, KCL) will centre on the use of sportspeo‐ple as role models and Britain's membership of the European Union. e latter is more interesting than it sounds, if only because young people's voices are rarely heard in the EU debate, as they are oen crowded out by slipper-waving Tunbridge Wells residents. A panel of three judges will direct the dis‐cussion and declare the winner of each debate at the end of the evening.

Students from the competing schools will stay to watch the de‐bates and in&uence the outcome by a s k i ng r iv a l t e ams d iffi c u l t questions. As KCLMS is such a small school and will no doubt be outnumbered in the audience by our competitors, it is all the more im‐portant that we support our people!

e formation of a debating team, which was only possible due to huge interest from students, shows that the range of extracurricular interests and activities pursued by students grows broader by the week. Which other school of fewer than 70 stu‐dents can boast football and debat‐ing teams; robotics, $lm, origami, Bridge, board games and meditation clubs; its own newspaper and (if ru‐mours are to be believed) its own band? Stay tuned for full coverage of the debate... and of any musical ven‐tures.

whom has an odd age.

c) Is it possible for a girl to attend the party and own a dog without be‐ing injured by my $re-breathing an‐tics? Explain your answer, using Venn Diagrams and the applicable laws of Physics.

2. Draw a seaside community equiv‐alent to a MAR gate using only bro‐ken dreams, deprivation, and NOT gates.

Pure Core 1

1. Use the result of the multiplica‐tion of matrix M, by a vector con‐

sisting of any two complex numbers, to prove that:

Further Pure Core 1

1. Furthermore, use further results of the multiplication of matrix M by

further complex vectors to prove, to a further extent, that

Computing

1. Use Python to write a program that will set users random program‐ming tasks to perform mathematical operations, such that it takes longer to write the program than to just do the maths.

2. Who is two paying a compliment to? To be honest to you about two, isn’t two paying too many comple‐ments?

3. Convert 200 to binary. Convert 33.82 to binary. Multiply the results. Convert to denary. Wouldn’t it have been faster to just calculate in denary? Oh well.

Physics

1. Stress can be calculated by divid‐ing the amount of schoolwork you have by the time you have to do it. A person’s Young’s modulus is equiva‐lent to the modulus of (100- their age in years) divided by stress.

Dave has a greater Young’s Modulus than Nick, but both of them have the same task: to win a beauty com‐petition with Nigel and Ed in the next 7 months. Which has the greater strain?

2. An emergency is going on. e X Factor appears on your TV set, which is situated on the opposite side of a 5 metre-thick glass prism from the remote control.

a. Calculate the speed that the in‐frared signal from the remote con‐trol travels through the glass prism.

b. Assuming that you press the ‘change channel’ button instanta‐neously, calculate the exact length of time that Simon Cowell’s smug face will appear on your TV for.

6 e Abacus

Hip rocker Neil Diamond. He's so zeitgeisty it's not true.

Kudos mints complex

banknotes

Hip Music Makes School Capital of Cool

KCLMS’s credentials as London’s capital of cool were cemented this month, as trendy students have started treating the school to YouTube videos of the most cutting-edge music. e music, played at ear-splitting volumes in the cafeteria during study periods, has proved controversial, but we at the Abacus think it’s worth it.

Recent delights have included American country rocker Neil Dia‐mond and U2, the band which has been going strong for 38 years and is not at all past it.

Many readers may not be familiar with Mr Diamond, whose populari‐ty was at its height in the early 1970s. All they need to know is that Diamond’s folksy melodies have brought joy to all the hip celebrity trendsetters, such as Ed Miliband and Terry Wogan. It is thus unsur‐prising that Diamond’s burgeoning fan base, Diamondistas, mainly con‐

sisting of sixtysomethings with a predilection for tartan-patterned rugs, have developed a $erce rivalry with One Directioners and the Be‐liebers. is is despite Harry Styles’ attempts to woo Diamondistas by visiting them at bingo halls up and down the country.

U2 have recently proved their stellar popularity by collaborating with Ap‐ple to push their new album, for free, onto millions of iPods. So de‐lighted were U2’s new fans that they pleaded with Apple to tell them how to delete the songs.

Since the 1990s, U2 has progressive‐ly drained all the creativity and &air from their work, but it seems that the world has only just noticed.

So the Abacus awaits with interest the next highlights from the musical zeitgeist. We anticipate stylish power balladeers, Meatloaf and, if we’re lucky, Busted. Perhaps the students

responsible for this music might ex‐tend their coolness into other areas of their lives. We hear that &ared trousers, clogs and gramphones are all the range amongst today’s teenagers.

Kudossers were le scratching their heads by the introduction of new denominations of banknotes, the latest of the Kudos government’s economic reforms. Ministers have dismissed complaints that the intro‐duction of banknotes in non-integer denominations has made basic transactions difficult to conduct.

As of yesterday, the Bank of Kudos has withdrawn traditional ban‐knotes, such as €5 and €20, in favour of €√3 and €2j. Moreover, the Bank has set interest rates at com‐plex numbers, paying savers in both real and imaginary money. Savers are unsure if this is bene$cial to them or not (Hint: compound inter‐est in j% is probably bad. Ed) and shopkeepers have taken to paying customers, in complex money, to take their goods.

e Kudos government has correctly pointed out that, as it has no real money, it has nothing to lose by pay‐

7e Abacus

What's in a name?

Kudos Clamps Down on Pro-Democracy Groups

ing teachers, nurses, social workers and street cleaners in imaginary money instead. e International Monetary Fund, which bailed out Kudos two years ago, has endorsed the move. e Chief Executive of the government told MPs:

“If we can persuade people to use imaginary money, the possibilities are endless. Soon, we will be able to replace bene$ts with imaginary gru‐el; hospitals with imaginary doctors’ clinics, and schools with imaginary colleges in which imaginary teachers teach imaginary pupils imaginary syllabuses. And yes, that demands tough decisions about existing ser‐vices. For example, we will have to close all $re stations and replace them with buckets of imaginary wa‐ter.”

“Aer all, the best way to stop peo‐ple spending money is to make sure that they don’t understand it.”

It seems that the Kudos treasury it‐self has failed to understand it: the paymaster general provoked a strike aer she attempted to pay the entire Civil Service (14 staff and a cleaner) in Monopoly money, evidently mis‐understanding the distinction be‐tween money in imaginary denomi‐nations and money that is imagined. at said, Kudos is probably the one country in the world where property prices actually resemble those on the Monopoly board: last week, Kudos' entire second city was sold for €80.

Many of us (or maybe just me) have been wondering what on earth our school/sixth form/college is actually called. So on a coffee high at 3am on a Monday morning, I decided to in‐vestigate this little thought (even though it seemed like a good idea at the time I realised that in retrospect that it probably wasn’t wise to do this at 3am in the morning).

Taking to the interwebs, I googled it. “166,000 results in 0.45 seconds” I

Ahead of the inauguration of the new Emperor and Empress of Kudos by KCLMS this week, authorities in Kudos have stopped peaceful protests organised by pro-democra‐cy groups, including the opposition Kudos Revolutionary League. In w hat has b e en te r me d ‘S ad Saturday’, secret police have dis‐solved occupations of the Imperial Palace, using Real Hydrochloric Acid™. At the same time, opposition leaders have been imprisoned, in‐cluding Heros Herosinos.

Authorities are looking to make an example of Heros, and are treating him very cruelly. He has been incar‐cerated in the notorious labour camp, Butlins, where his duties in‐clude taking part in ‘fun’ activities. Two days into his stay at Butlins, Heros is said to be close to breaking point. He has nevertheless managed to smuggle out a list of demands to the underground Kudos Free Press.

Kudosser society is heavily segregat‐ed according to mathematical ability. All Kudossers take a Maths test at age 16, which determines whether they are classed as ‘Muggle’, ‘Goat’, ‘Shepherd’, or, if they are more talented, ‘Counsel’, or ‘Mathe‐megician’. Anybody in the lower classes is condemned to a harsh life employed in the ‘key’ pea-shelling industry.

It is this issue to which Heros has turned his focus. He wrote:

‘We Kudossers are worth so much more than our mathematical ability. We have valuable skills and talent in t h e $ e l d s o f a s t r o l o g y ,

baconography, biscuitology and cat-stealing. Of the latter, we are the best in the world! And yet we are still re‐duced to a single class by a dictator‐ship which is more interested in cal‐culators than goats. ese are not true Kudossers.’

Heros has voiced a concern that is held by thousands of his fellow countrymen, but the government has an unsympathetic view. With a new Emperor and Empress to im‐press, civil servants will be eager to retain their vice-like grip on this di‐vided nation.

8 e Abacus

Advert

marvelled brie&y at how amazing technology had become before I re‐alised that I was going off topic and went back onto my quest on $nding the true name of this place. I clicked on the $rst link, mainly due to con‐venience but also because it looked like the most trustworthy link, this redirected me to the school website. “KING’S COLLEGE LONDON MATHS SCHOOL” appeared at the near top of the page in bold, white, capitals in Arial font. So that con‐cludes it, right? Wrong. If we go and $nd other resources such as the school building, we will $nd that it is actual ly “KING’S MATHS SCHOOL” in bright, bold, yellow writing.

Despite the fact that the school web‐site’s colours did not match the school building’s colours at all, this was not what bothered me most. Was “King’s Maths School” the actu‐al name of the school seeing as it ap‐peared on the school building or was it just an abbreviation of “King’s College London Maths School”? You could argue that “King's Maths School” was an abbreviation of “King’s College London Maths School” by stating the fact that it was mathematically impossible to $t the full name of the school onto the front and the side of the building and the words would still be legible from a very far distance. is is also a valid argument because many peo‐

ple also use the acronym of KCLMS more oen that KMS (which not only sounds weird but looks weird). However, others may argue that it is “King’s Maths School” because it is on the school building which makes it official and nothing will change it.

Aer my impromptu research, I concluded that the name of the school is “King’s College London Mathematics School” and all the other names are just shortenings of the actual name of the school and people are too lazy to say/write it fully. To be fair, KCLMS also does the job perfectly $ne. HJ

9e Abacus

Cookie craze: Where are all of my cookies?? !

KCLMS Students Pull A Hat Trick

Viva la Cookies

E4 Offers Students

Free Cinema Tickets

A new craze has suddenly developed amongst the students at KCLMS. In

the hallways, during break, lunch and study periods, many of us are on our tablets clicking away. Baking millions of cookies per second, buy‐ing grandmas and other upgrades to help them bake more cookies. Is this a fad or will it be something that will last the whole year? At the moment the highest amount of cookies being baked per second has reached half a billion in a couple of days. So what do you get if you have the highest cookie count? Nothing really, just the ability to brag about how many cookies you can earn per second. Personally I wish for the downfall of the cookie clicker craze, it’s a waste of time, quickly becoming an addic‐tion for a lot of people and the con‐stant clicking sound is irritating for everyone. On the brightside, at least it’s not Flappy Bird. HJ out.

E4 and Picturehouse Cinemas have teamed up to arrange monthly cine‐ma screenings that are absolutely free to students. e little-known scheme, called Slackers’ Club, is per‐haps one of the best student dis‐counts out there.

Students register for Slackers Club at their local Picturehouse cinema, and can then book free tickets if a partic‐ular screening takes their fancy. ese usually take place on urs‐day evenings. An eclectic range of $lms are shown to Slackers’ Club members, from classics like Back to the Future to previews of brand new blockbusters. is June, members

By Varun

Dress-up Fridays didn’t work for you? No worries! Our community is – as it seems – fairly quick in replac‐ing one ridiculous trend with an even more ridiculous one. While the occasional student may still follow formal Fridays, the majority have helped to build up a wonderful hat‐mosphere (Yikes. Ed). If you casual‐ly stroll into school at 9:20am and $nd that you’re the odd one out without a hat, fear not. For the latest l o ok , h ave a g l an c e at ou r institution’s hatalogue (I don't even.... Ed.). Hatastrophe averted! e more popular choices include:

e dual-horn hat! Instructions: for effective use, $rmly place two hands and two legs on the ground, growl like a beast, and charge at an unsus‐pecting victim wearing red. Results may vary.

e top hat: for those who think their tricks are dated, and feel like a failure. Recent studies show that 90% of users feel less like failures af‐ter purchase, but failures with hats. Yay!!!

e mainstream cap. What’s Hat-Day without these on people’s head at a right angle (sometimes 180°) to where it’s meant to be worn?

Note: prices range from 99p to the value of your collapsing reputation.

10 e Abacus

DofE: Students

Scramble to Sign Up

Inspirational Quote #2

You'd Have To See It To Believe It...

By Varun

It’s been a month in this institution and – my fellow acquaintances must agree – it has made an impression on us. Indeed, KCLMS is the in‐triguing light bulb in the future of mathematical education – it has to be seen to be believed. We’ve seen it; our Marvel Super-Teachers have seen it; even Nicky Morgan MP un‐

derstands the beauty of what she has helped found. I feel that a promot‐ing YouTube video is in order…and voila! Lo, the video to surpass the likes of Gangnam Style and e Fox (whom no mathematician gives a log about what it says).

e video begins with:

“King’s College London Mathemat‐ics School is all about mathematics”

For all the Einsteins that couldn’t $gure it out. e short $lm features a selection of teachers and the small array of students that had the audac‐ity to agree to face a video camera. ey speak about maths, the har‐monic atmosphere, maths, high quality teaching…oh, and maths! While they have done a remarkable job of representing our community’s views and patriotism, you would hope that enough people could wit‐ness what we witness.

Like, subscribe, and share your in‐sane passion for mathematics and silly faces at the end of promotion videos!

Efforts by students to arrange entry into the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme were rewarded last week when a crowd of volunteers rushed to sign up. e tiered award requires participants to set their own person‐al goals to develop skills and experi‐ence both personally and in the community. Volunteering is a prominent part of the scheme.

High levels of interest have been ex‐pressed even in the Gold award, which requires at least a year's work to attain and includes a 'residential' trip in conditions that can be best described as basic. e Abacus wish‐es all volunteers good luck with their targets.

were able to see e Fault in Our Stars weeks before it was released to the general public.

Due to the varying genres of the $lms, the popularity of the screen‐ings, and the fact that some $lms are 18-rated, few Slacker’s Club mem‐bers attend every $lm showing on offer.

e screenings are held at all branches of Picturehouse Cinemas, which are found in Clapham, Not‐ting Hill Gate, Greenwich, Hackney, Brixton, Brighton and Stratford East. e cinemas tend to be more luxurious and characterful than the large multiplex chains, which is an added bonus.

Of course, free $lm seekers could to worse than look to KCLMS’ very own Film Club, which runs aer school on Wednesdays. e club has been a runaway success, (despite running 22 Jump Street last week? Ed.) with large numbers of students enjoying a cinema-style experience in Classroom One. It seems that if you offer people free $lms, with food, in the company of friends, they jump at the opportunity. For that, we thank the hardworking or‐ganisers of the Film Club. Even that person, who knows who he is, who seems determined to break the pro‐jector. Of course, the club would be even better if responsibility for se‐lecting the $lms to be shown were delegated to an esteemed member of the school community, like the es‐teemed editor of a certain newspa‐per, perhaps?

For more details on Slacker’s Club and to sign up, visit channel4.com/e4/slackers-club

11e Abacus

e Ebola Crisis Explainedby Sam Bird

On the 28th of December last year, 3 days aer Christmas, an innocent toddler is trying desperately to cry. Except she can’t. She has not enough strength to even make a sound as she slowly fades away. Will this be known as the beginning of the end? Will there even be anyone to know it?

In March 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported a major outbreak of the Ebola Disease in Guinea. Since then it has escalat‐ed on a massive scale and is now considered an epidemic, killing at least 3,865 people. It has been traced to that small girl. e disease has been focused in Western Africa and is the largest Ebola outbreak to date, affecting a suspected 8,033 people.

Why should we in the west be scared? ere are plenty of reasons be assured. In the last 48 hours alone, a US citizen, passed away af‐ter contracting the disease on a trip to Liberia. It has also been found that a number of health care workers who have been working alongside patients with the disease have also contracted the deadly virus. If these people were to enter our borders un‐noticed then this epidemic could easily spread to our population, and with a population as dense as that in London, there could be no end to the problem. Not only that, but in the last few hours the UK has an‐nounced health checks for the virus in all Airports and the Eurostar to help imminently curb any risk of spread of disease.

What if the disease is already in our

population? Well, then we can sim‐ply vaccinate everybody surely? Hmmmm…. actually… kinda… no! e Ebola Virus currently has no working vaccine and while the au‐thorities claim they are working des‐perately to $nd one (love it when they do that), that means that re‐stricting the spread of disease could be very difficult indeed. Unfortu‐nately, at the moment treatment for Ebola in the west usually involves expensive kidney treatments, due to the organ failure disease that kills around 50% of the people who con‐tract the disease, which let’s just say won’t work on a large scale. How will this treatment then be assigned? At least if we give priority to young people we can help reduce our aging population! …but still? Nope, it seems that we may be in a bit of a muddle – and if you need even more convincing about how doomed we would be then why not take a look at this jolly graph. Can you spot the trends boys and girls?

And in case some of you couldn’t work it out, that looks pretty damn exponential to me.

Of course, human life isn’t all that matters and we must also worry about what would happen to our precious economy. In the countries

currently affected such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, we have seen massive cost issues where they haven’t been able to provide enough beds for their ill! And just imagine what would happen to those all-im‐portant stock prices!

Now, it may be true that this is very hypothetical and Britain always seems to bounce off of these things, just look at all of those other ‘out‐breaks’ (looking at you miss piggy). We didn’t all end up $ghting each other of for the last scrap of food did we? erefore, while I think it is im‐portant to be aware of the situation and do what we can to help $ght it, not like when DC say’s it, I am aware that this issue may not be im‐mediately pressing. However, nei‐ther is ISIS! Ebola poses a much greater threat to our greater popula‐tion than any terrorist attack could, yet our government insist on cosy‐ing up to the US and just sent an‐other two Tornado $ghters to Iraq when that money could be far better spent working to develop a vaccine and actually saving lives. I think it is this that needs to be called into at‐tention far more than any other ‘cri‐sis’ at the moment.

And to end this, I leave you with a quotation of seeming relevance

"It is said that despite its many glar‐ing (and occasionally fatal) inaccu‐racies, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Ency‐clopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover."

12 e Abacus

by Amy Sellers

Notus Incompertus

Print your own copy: &nd Notus

Incompertus on

Sharepoint!

NEED TO KNOW:

is is a crossword/word search hy‐brid. You need to answer the ques‐tions below and then $nd them in the word search. e questions are riddles so may not be straightfor‐ward. Write the answers next to the questions so I know you haven’t just found random words in the puzzle.

If you are really stuck you can come a n d $ n d m e o r e m a i l KCLMSNews@yahoo.co.uk. Every‐one who completes it will be put in a prize draw and the name randomly picked will win a bar of chocolate. Good luck!

1. What has a bank but no mon‐ey?

2. is royal is also big in the re‐tail/fashion business

3. If I am facing North and I turn 28,080 degrees on the spot, what di‐rection would I be facing?

4. What colour does red and blue make?

5. What sport starts with a T, has four letters, and is played around the world?

6. What goes up and never comes down?

7. What building has the most stories?

8. Two men went into a restau‐rant. ey sat at a table and the wait‐er came by and asked, "What do you want to drink?" e $rst man said, "I'll have H20." e second man said, "I'll have H20 too." What hap‐pened to the second man?

9. I'm dry when you put me in. e longer you leave me, the stronger I get. What am I?

10. What comes $rst, the chick‐en or the egg?