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英美文化：教你如何科学地切蛋糕 You've had your share of birthdays so you know perfectly well how to cut a cake, right? 你已经过了好几次生日了，所以你觉得你很懂怎么切蛋糕，对吗? Don't count on it. 千万别这么想。 As British mathematician Alex Bellos explains in a fun new video from his Numberphile series, the traditional approach to divvying up a cake -- cutting a series of wedges -- just doesn't cut it from a scientific standpoint，or from the standpoint of flavor. 在“数字狂系列短片里，英国数学家亚历克斯·贝洛斯详细解释了把蛋糕切成多个楔形的方法，不是科学的切法，而且也不是一个保留口感的切法。 "You're not maximizing the amount of gastronomic pleasure that you can make from this cake," he says in the video, adding that once you cut out a wedge, you expose the inside of the cake to the air -- and it dries out. "你没有从蛋糕上极大限度地获得美食带来的愉悦，" 在短片里他这样说道，并补充说一旦你切下一块蛋糕，蛋糕的内部就暴露在空气中——然后它就会被风干。 A better way, Bellos says, has existed for more than a century. In 1906 the journal Nature ran a letter from Francis Galton in which the celebrated British polymath offered -- "for his own amusement and satisfaction" -- what he considered a superior method of cutting a cake. The goal, he wrote, was to cut it "so as to leave a minimum surface to become dry." | 
