5- 9 November In the most heartwarming post of the week, Cassie considered post-election bitterness and wondered what would happen if we treated politics less as a competitive sport, and more as an expedition. Ginny wrote an amazing examination of the fundamental mismatch between stories and science. Cameron noted that owls are trending. Michelle pondered whether the $300,000 […]
Oct. 28 – Nov. 2 Could penises become obsolete? Sure. Christie has a few beers with friends and reviews a book. Ann & Richard each won a Windsor chair. Ann talks about Windsor chairs. Richard talks about naked ladies. What’s happening with old nuclear materials scattered around the Arctic? Nothing good, says Jessa. Two pieces […]
Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem. Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity. “We don’t know which […]
Continuing a preoccupation with movies about science, but this time about math. According to this very nice YouTube person, the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in all of math and whoever solves it wins a $7 million prize. I not only can’t solve it, I can’t even understand it. It has to do with prime […]
As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan. He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe. As such, he was involved in […]
October 1 – October 5 Virginia attends a Story Collider, listens to a scientist who picks up roadkill armadillos to study the erectile tissues in their penises, wonders why more scientists don’t tell stories, advises them how to go forth and do so. Christie was pissed off before about the Komen Foundation’s insistence that screening […]
Roughly — very roughly — the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that any given measurement of reality depends on the observer doing the measuring. And if no observer measures a reality, that reality just sort of disappears or collapses or something. The many-worlds interpretation says wait! maybe the unobserved measurement really just goes off […]
I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass. But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; […]
