April 6 – 10 Have you ever had to endure the smug cocktail party contention that “biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, and physics is just math” (and so all of life is reducible to math)? Abstruse Goose demolishes that glib noise with a thought experiment that reverses the formula. Michael Balter’s brontosaurus story […]
Month: April 2015
The biggest science story this week was really, really big. Brontosaurus, weighing in at about 16 metric tons, is a taxonomic contender once again, thanks to a 300 page long cladistic analysis in the online journal PeerJ. (Spoiler alert: Yes, the rest of this piece will include puns, jokes and allusions to classic films just […]
I suppose somebody could actually think these things. I doubt that person would be in comp lit, though. I suppose reductionism comes in here somewhere but in spite of having it explained 100000 times, I don’t understand it. I don’t know, I’m just so depressed that Abstruse Goose seems to have fallen down. Oh Abstruse […]
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” — Some wise person who wasn’t Einstein. “I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” [Rolling Stone managing editor, Will] Dana, said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done […]
Since Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Carbon Capture” went live on the New Yorker’s website last week, environmentalists and the journalists who write about them haven’t been able to stop bickering about it. Whether Franzen was wrong-headed or visionary, dumb or prophetic, he clearly touched a nerve when he asked, “Has climate change made it harder for […]
March 30 – April 3, 2015 Cameron manages to build a story about the dove trapped in her house around a Karen Carpenter song, and that IS the first time in the history of humankind that anyone’s done that. Helen pursues her small obsession with museums, this one a bone museum at which she misses […]
For Easter, we thought we’d bring back this adorable post from 2014. My friends and I didn’t enter this year–we thought someone else deserved a chance to shine. Also, if anyone wants to buy a lightly used Peeps diorama, we might consider selling. It would make great yarn shop decor. On Monday, I asked: Do […]
In the weeks after I bought a Fitbit, I noticed I was acting bizarre. I started carrying bags with my left arm so my right arm – the one with the Fitbit – could swing freely to ensure the Fitbit’s accelerometer would count my every step. In the evening, I would pace around my apartment […]
