Some blame mathematicians to sit in their ivory tower.
Others blame mathematicians talking about their topic to present only some sensational aspects: ‘baby’ math, or widely known simple arithmetic, or generalities, or ‘embellished’ mathematics.
Anyway, here are some of my excursions out of that ivory tower (most recent first).
The inclined plane of Ronquières, Belgium, has a construction error. I published a paper about engineer Dewaele's discovery in (the Dutch version of) EOS magazine. The music in the video is an allusion to a politician known because of this inclined plane (guess who):
It reached number 2 on the top of most viewed items of the site of the (French) National Television:
On Sept 16, the Brussels’ Diamond League ‘Memorial Van Damme’ organized the first 400 meter clockwise in history. During the whole meeting, 45000 joyful people made clockwise and counter clockwise Mexican waves. The BBC called me a ‘mad professor’ (no offense taken, on the contrary, thank you!): The younger Borlée spoke about it on the Belgian French Speaking National Television: Here is the version of the Belgian Flemish Speaking National Television. My own explanations are found here, in French: or in Dutch:
The painting ‘The Mystic Lamb’ is like Flanders’ Holy Grail, yet few people noticed Eva is not holding an apple in Paradise.
It is a kind of citrus, called “Adam’s apple”, as shown in a joint research with Hungarian art historian B. Mecsi. The forbidden fruit was rediscovered; time to make up for the Fall of Man.
What Leonardo labelled as a stellar rhombic cuboctahedron (note the label above the drawing) is in fact a stellar pseudo rhombic cuboctahedron (the correct image is given above right). I published Rinus Roelofs’ discovery of this mistake all the way up to Scientific American.
Short movie (in Dutch):
At the Brussels' Airport of Zaventem, one of the runways has a wrong number. Airport runways are numbered along their orientation to the magnetic North Pole, but the latter changes and so airports adapt their runway numbers - except in Belgium.
Based on a report about a crashed Boeing I could figure out the correct actual orientation of Runway 02 is now 014°. This is rounded off to 010° and thus Runway 02 should be Runway 01.
Despite some media attention the runway still has its wrong number and so using a compass Belgium can be recognized from the air.
Like Pisa with its skew tower, Belgium has a flawed landmark after its restoration: the Atomium. Not only does it mirror now like a car after a crash, also, one of the sphere was hastily covered by totally irregular stainless steel panels. See (in Dutch):
or (in French):