Wall Street Journal Site Has More Fun With New Book by Weinstein and Adam

For the second time in two weeks, The Numbers Guy column on The Wall Street Journal Web site is featuring the new book, "Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin," by Old Dominion University professors Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam. This time, the professors get more of a chance to share in the fun that bloggers are having with the think-on-your-feet numbers problems the book poses.

The posting at http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/ includes a color photo of the two authors (Weinstein left, Adam right) with spiked hair (because each has a hand on the Physics Department's van de Graaf generator). Adam said family and friends from as far away as his native country of England have been amused by the photo. Not only is his hair standing on end, he noted, but because of the way the picture is cropped he looks to be holding hands with Weinstein.

Weinstein and Adam are interviewed by The Numbers Guy author, Carl Bialik, about the book's usefulness to job applicants who are often asked to "guesstimate" answers to numbers-related problems. The authors praise the innovative ways bloggers are quickly calculating answers to questions such as, "What is the external surface area of a typical human."