When I saw an October 2019 book by Natalie Olah entitled Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in the Age of Austerity I assumed that it encouraged privileged people to get ahead by… | Continue reading
I like to explore nonsensical territory, so if you like silly yet surprising pop-culture associative reasoning, read on. If you would like to hear this post read aloud, try this video. In Napoleon … | Continue reading
This is a risky thing for me to write, but I feel like I have an outside perspective on the divides cracking the US apart, so I may as well share it. Sometimes it is hard to think when you are righ… | Continue reading
What is the essence of a jellyfish or a hydra? They are both slimy, they both live in water, and they have stinging tentacles. They are both classified as animals, just like a horse. But what is a … | Continue reading
I don’t smoke, but my husband does, so I’m quite interested in the stories about how four times fewer people who smoke end up in the hospital with coronavirus, but if they are admitted,… | Continue reading
[unlike most of my other posts, this one is written to be accessible for children who want to know about the pitfalls of the scientific method.] If you would like to hear this read aloud, try this … | Continue reading
Everybody knows that police officers have been known to set the guilty free if their skin is white enough. They have also been known to disproportionally arrest and assault innocent black people, u… | Continue reading
There is something cathartic about creating an effigy to contain all of the things we don’t like about ourselves. Whenever a group becomes irritated by a person and feels the need to create a… | Continue reading
Today, I watched a woman train her dog by restricting his access to his favorite toy. She threw the toy into the water and let him jump in to get it. When he came back, she took the toy away and se… | Continue reading
An exploration of some unexpected connections between Ricky Gervais’ After Life and the Coronavirus. | Continue reading
If Germany switched to making everything in-house rather than importing the products from China, they would have to pay 2-3 times more for everything from pantyhose to teddybears to headphones. To … | Continue reading
Imagine the life of a conscious entity that cannot die. Your heaven and hell is a solipsistic hall of mirrors from which there is no escape. You have a godlike power over everything in this prison,… | Continue reading
I must admit that spin 2 gravitons make no concrete sense to me as fundamental particles because they seem to be composed of more fundamental sub-components. I can imagine fundamental concepts for … | Continue reading
In this article I am going to explain everything I’ve learned about artemesia plants and coronavirus. A few months ago, there were speculations about the efficacy of a certain plant called ar… | Continue reading
By the standards of the physics community, Paul Dirac is the tops because he hated poetry and only the manliest of men hate poetry as much as Dirac did. Physics is only really good when it is mascu… | Continue reading
Before the coronacrisis started, I was at a party with some neighbors and we discussed some things… Outsourcing of component manufacture… Moving to an island to avoid a collapse of civi… | Continue reading
Science popularizers are guilty of providing a bad education when they promote the idea that there are new, special people who are coming up with new ideas rather than redi… | Continue reading
If I predict that a ghost will appear in the castle tower every midnight, I might put a camera with a timer in the tower and attempt to capture an image of the ghost. I could repeat this process ev… | Continue reading
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and did you ever wonder what 60 hours corresponded to? It corresponds to the number of hours that the moon spends in each sign of the zodiac… | Continue reading
I’ve been reading a novel that was written around the time of the fall of communism in Russia and it gives a portrait of how fragile people’s mental health can become within a system th… | Continue reading
I remember being given Sea Monkeys as a Christmas present when I was a child. The package showed an amazing aquatic world inhabited by otherworldly creatures that looked like little mermaids. There… | Continue reading
Gell Mann worked on fundamental particle physics and Anderson worked on quantum materials science. They supposedly hated one another. They are both | Continue reading
Where does the air come from when water boils? If you like to listen rather than read, try this video. The simplest answer is: energy creates space and pressure contains space. | Continue reading
International collaboration has become a contentious issue in the world of academia. From a recent Bloomberg article by Tyler Cowen, I learned that ivy league universities have been accepting huge … | Continue reading
Warning: this is lewd and offensive. I’m sorry that you are having so many technical problems. I’m trying to clear out my queue so that I can move forward to something new. I tend to ru… | Continue reading
When I saw an October 2019 book by Natalie Olah entitled Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in the Age of Austerity I assumed that it brazenly encouraged privileged people to get… | Continue reading
Whenever a paradox arises in a physics problem, it does not indicate that there is a complicated mystery you need to rationalize away with mathematics. It means that you need to think outside of th… | Continue reading
I like to explore nonsensical territory, so if you like silly yet surprising pop cuture associations, read on. In Napoleon Dynamite, we see a picture of a world that may have never existed. Set in … | Continue reading
If you looked at a single color or subset of the data plotted below, you would conclude that eating more pasta every day will make you thinner, but if you look at all people grouped together, you&#… | Continue reading
I found kinetic sandscape toys rather hypnotic when I was a child. I loved watching a new world materialize right in front of me with nothing but gravity to power it. What would happen next? What n… | Continue reading
This is a risky thing for me to write, but I feel like I have an outside perspective on the divides cracking the US apart, so I may as well share it. Sometimes it is hard to think when you are righ… | Continue reading
In my city, thousands of data scientists and machine learning experts are building a layer of automation onto our economic and military systems. Of course, each individual data scientist has no acc… | Continue reading
Never before have our memories been so easy to recall at the push of a button and with the coronavirus on the loose, grief over recorded memories is a form of suffering for which everyone needs to … | Continue reading
A simple pendulum modeled as a harmonic oscillator with error bars illustrates how the uncertainty principle can be connected to gravity and if you use this as a modular puzzle piece in an algorith… | Continue reading
I remember being given Sea Monkeys as a Christmas present when I was a child. The package showed an amazing aquatic world inhabited by otherworldly creatures that looked like little mermaids. There… | Continue reading
If you want to make sure that a person or a quantum computer is telling you the truth, you either have to convince them that you already know the truth and that you have information that could hurt… | Continue reading
Imagine the life of a conscious entity that cannot die. Your heaven and hell is a solipsistic hall of mirrors from which there is no escape. You have a godlike power over everything in this prison,… | Continue reading
Where does the air come from when water boils? The simplest answer is: energy creates space and pressure contains space. This yin yang symbol is a nice, recursive, technical representation of boili… | Continue reading
Since loss of language and memory are central themes in both the novel I’m writing and in the pop-science writing I’ve done on this blog, I should look back at how authors from the past… | Continue reading
I recently read a story about how the fastest girl in America was broken down by a training regimen designed by idiots and it reminded me a lot of my university experience. When I was in university… | Continue reading
I could write about how, because of the pandemic, I made a really nice ratatouille yesterday and about how I plan to make a mayonnaise chocolate cake with sticky, condensed milk icing today,…… | Continue reading
I now have two out of three kids on-board with my lesson plan. We spent the morning drawing a Poincare disc and the trick to motivate my son was to effusively praise the work that he did yesterday.… | Continue reading
I am in Germany and we are about ten days ahead of the US and ten days behind Italy in this pandemic, so I can daisy chain the information about my experience to let those ahead of me know what is … | Continue reading
Guest Post by Richard Benish He proposes a serious experiment by playfully contrasting the perspective of physicists today with the perspective of a mythical race of rotonians who live on the insid… | Continue reading
When you close a feedback loop in a system designed to measure something, you might converge on the setpoint of the feedback loop and accidentally measure the setpoint instead of the thing you want… | Continue reading
International collaboration has become a contentious issue in the world of academia. From a recent Bloomberg article by Tyler Cowen, I learned that ivy league universities have been accepting huge … | Continue reading
Warning: this is lewd and offensive. I’m sorry that you are having so many technical problems. I’m trying to clear out my queue so that I can move forward to something new. I tend to ru… | Continue reading