Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bryant Gumbel, in January of 1994, is asked to read an email address out loud on the Today show and he is at a loss, especially when it comes to the “a, and then the ring around it”: This symbol, @, for us is second nature, and this video gives a sense of how technology [...]

The name of the in-flight magazine of Southwest Airlines is Spirit. While I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why this is so (no doubt due to Spirit’s youth in comparison to Southwest), it still strikes me as not so different to if Delta’s in-flight magazine had been named JetBlue.

William Marsh Rice, the man who founded Rice University, was murdered by his lawyer and valet. It took years for everything to be sorted out and the proper will to be used to found Rice University: An unscrupulous lawyer, in cahoots with Rice’s valet, Charles Jones, had concocted a plot to steal the fortune by [...]

Imagine you enter a building and get on an elevator bound for the tenth floor. And someone else gets in and presses the button for the second floor. You begin a process of silent rage, cursing them for adding an additional stop to your elevator trip, just one short flight of stairs above where they [...]

This year’s Edge question from John Brockman asks what concepts from science are useful as shorthand abstractions (“random sample”, “placebo”, etc.) and can improve our cognitive toolkit and help guide our thinking about the world. My answer is The Copernican Principle, the quantitative understanding of our mediocrity in space and time, and what this implies. [...]

Not that surprisingly, the Wikipedia page for the character Carmen Sandiego is extremely detailed: There are numerous discrepancies in the various media depicting Carmen Sandiego and there are no official rules establishing a correct canon. However, the following seems to have remained consistent throughout all Carmen Sandiego media created since around the mid-1990s: Carmen Sandiego [...]

I have an article in this Sunday’s Ideas section of the Boston Globe entitled 2011: The Year You Weren’t Expecting. It is essentially a calendar of the coming year that focuses on obscure but interesting events. A selection: January 9 The world will gain a new nation if voters in Southern Sudan choose independence in [...]

What did you during the blizzard? Well, with some time to kill, I decided to see if I could easily make a three-dimensional map of nearby stars. I was able to easily find coordinate data of nearby stars from the Digital Universe Atlas. After a bit of rescaling, the coordinates were ready for the Lego [...]

Partnering with Rachel Courtland at New Scientist, I made a number of quantitative predictions in the world of science and technology for this coming year, and wrote about them in the December 25 issue. Here they are: Will P vs. NP be solved? When will an extrasolar Earth-like twin be discovered? How will global internet [...]

The metonic cycle refers to a period of 19 years, which is the (approximate) least common multiple of days between a solar year (about 365.25 days) and a lunar month (about 29.5 days). Surprisingly, 19 solar years differs from 235 lunar months by only about 2 hours! So, why is this relevant? Its Wikipedia entry [...]