Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Wall Street Journal examines the origins and spread of basketball’s “three-point goggles” – this year’s biggest fad among the players: As you’ll see in the NCAA tournament this week, players on teams from Duke to Kentucky will celebrate three-point buckets by fitting themselves with pantomimed spectacles, the kind your kindergartener might make while pretending [...]

I’m giving Twitter a shot, so for whatever it’s worth, Dear Reader, I am now on Twitter at @arbesman. Short links and discussions can now be found there.

Remember calling a phone number to get the precise time? While our automatically synchronizing cell phones and laptops have rendered that service unnecessary, providing the exact time used to be a big business, and far earlier than might be expected. In the late Nineteenth Century, when railroads were beginning to criss-cross the United States, the [...]

Visualizing Economics has an epic graph that plots Egypt’s economic growth as compared to China, over two thousand years. Charted across events that include the Fall of Rome and Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, you can see the GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation) for each country change over a timescale that is wonderfully vast. And one [...]

I opened the Wall Street Journal this morning to see Jared Diamond’s byline in the sports section! While the article is about mismatched teams, I immediately began having visions of sprawling articles and books about how small differences have allowed certain regions to dominate sports throughout the history of civilization. Well, it wasn’t that Jared [...]

Ever hear of the University of Redwood? Don’t be concerned if you haven’t. Apparently, it’s a giant scam designed to take application fees from students in Asia. And what about what’s on the site? Redwood’s site content was simply swiped from Reed College. The Wall Street Journal has more: The website of a fictitious school [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a great map of the United States that presents the boundaries of each state in a streamlined format. Unfortunately, only a small version of this is available online: The design is elegant and distinctive.

I have an essay on the Harvard Business Review blog entitled Streaks, from Joltin’ Joe to Mutual Fund Managers. It grew out of a presentation I recently gave at a conference at University of Michigan on disentangling skill and luck in a variety of complex systems. I spoke about using performance streaks to help tease [...]

Here’s a fun game to play while you’re on a plane that is beginning its descent: see how early – that is, how many minutes and seconds before the plane lands – that you can see a human being on the ground. And evidence of a human doing something doesn’t count; moving cars are a [...]

Fans of Neal Stephenson’s writings will be pleased to discover a “relative” of his fictional geek dynasty the Waterhouses represented on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. Benjamin Waterhouse, known for his early adoption of the smallpox vaccine – he tested it on his family – was [...]