Hello, I'm a spacer

Book Review: The Signal and The Noise, by Nate Silver (February '21)

Why do so many predictions fail, but some don't? Nate Silver asks us that question on the front cover of his book. Fortunately for us, he ingeniously uses the content inside this book to answer his question, inasmuch as it can be answered. This is just a taste of the kinds of insightful analysis you can expect in my book review. Not to mention the liberal sprinking of honors-english vocabulary like 'inasmuch'.
Hello, I'm a spacer

Book Review: The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin (January '21)

Continuing my new hobby during quarantine of actually picking up and reading a book, I've read and reviewed Lee Smolin's history and psychiatric evaluation of String Theory, and what this wildy successful theory has done to the rest of the physics community. So what is the "Trouble With Physics"? Read my review to find out!
Hello, I'm a spacer

Book Review: The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch (December '20)

What better to do during covid quarantine than pick up the most intimidating book on your bookshelf and write a book review of it? Well, arguably I should also be doing some situps. Turns out, my at-home desk chair was better suited to holding laundry than supporting my doughy core muscles. Try to put that image out of your head, and enjoy my review of David Deutsch's Interdisciplinary Theory of Everything!
Hello, I'm a spacer

The Weirdest Scientific Papers Ever Published (Updated Feb '20)

Well, it's only been a couple years since my last post -- I was taking a really really long nap. As part of my tour of the weirdest areas of science to write articles for TimeBlimp, I come across some really strange research papers. While 99% of scientific publications have extremely dry, unappealing titles, the weird 1% make it all worthwhile. Here I’ll collect the best of the best (and incidentally, recycle some material that I had to read anyway into a brand new article. Efficiency!)
Hello, I'm a spacer

TimeBlimp: Get Your Geek On

Welcome to Timeblimp! 

 

“Oh hey, I didn’t see you there!  Welcome!”  

Ugh, that kind of intro is so hackneyed, that making fun of it is now also hackneyed.

You’ve found one of the foremost sites on the web for information you really don’t need.  This is where people go to arm themselves with facts to annoy others at parties.  No, we don’t mean political discussions, or how to make a better faux-hawk — the harmless facts, the interesting trivia that make life interesting.  The facts that sound better described using a nasal voice.  The dorky facts.

Math          Yeah, that’s right.  Math.
Science     She blinded me with bursts of coherent photons to the face!
Nature      That’s why we call them animals!
History     And leather elbow patches.
People      Feeling good about yourself lately?  Cut that crap out.
Culture     We drain the fun out of the art you love.
Opinion     Opinions are like mitochondria, everyone’s got about 10 billion.
Original Research    Why yes, that is a Macarthur Genius Grant that I’m picking my teeth with.
    We’ve hunted around for the interesting stories that we think are really cool.  Not just what techno-geeks and supreme academics will think of as cool  — I for one have heard how the transistor works one too many times — but the really cool stories about the world that even the algebra-disadvantaged could appreciate.And we’ve tried to find relatively obscure topics, stuff not covered by yer typical PBS show or Popular Mechanics article.  You’re not going to see much here on the causes of the Civil War, or on Relativity Theory.  The History Channel has pretty much wrote the book on World War II, and I think everyone on earth now knows that to a topologist, a doughnut is identical to a coffee cup.  But did you hear about the insects that understand prime numbers?  Or the day that America had no government at all?

  

 

© 2011 TimeBlimp Thith ith a pithy statement. Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha