Abstruse Goose is a nameless, faceless entity, obviously a mathematician of some sort, who posts extremely funny but occasionally abstruse cartoons at http://abstrusegoose.com. http://abstrusegoose.com/275
Month: June 2010
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made […]
A cow fell out of the sky and crushed me flat. I pushed it aside with all my might, but then – boom! another cow came barreling out of the blue. Again, I shoved it aside, to no avail, because, hey, yet another cow was falling in its wake. After a while, I thought it […]
Take one brilliant middle-school science teacher with a love of hang-gliding. Add a classroom of typical teenagers, a phone book, a stack of printer paper, and a pair of scissors. Watch something truly magical take place, as a fleet of miniature planes takes to the air on gossamer wings. Who wants to work […]
The last time I wrote about the evolution of language, scientists’ theories sounded like contradictory Just-So stories. Some said language began with gestures, like pointing at the food you want. Others said language began with talking, like “look out!” or “hey you, get over here.” Nobody had much solid evidence: language evolved, after all, without […]
Has anyone ever taken a better photo of Stonehenge than the one Harold Edgerton snapped on a dark night near the end of the Second World War, 1944 to be exact? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. When has Stonehenge ever looked so mysterious, so alien, so theatrical, so totteringly old, so alive, so […]
On a hot summer day, I like to watch a rat or two foraging on the tracks of the New York City subway system. No-one is entirely sure how many of the whiskered beasties live in the city, although, thanks to New York’s electronic rat map, a catalog of rat hot spots such as lived-in […]
Exactly one century ago this year, a swashbuckling American archaeologist named Ernest Thompson was wrapping up his investigation of the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, one of the most famous of all Maya sites. Thompson had been long been fascinated by the natural 130-foot-deep sinkhole that was filled in part with water. According to one […]
