Changing minds often isn’t like changing light bulbs. Many bright ideas don’t fit your sockets. Wonks particularly need to grasp that incorporating new data or arguments can be closer to […]
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In theory, a genetics research firm could enable parents to choose ‘smart embryos.’
The noise in our nation is deafening as the Affordable Care Act, takes hold. This loud back-and-forth may ultimately require us to wear ear-plugs, but I’m fine with the debate, […]
Using less math and more logic, we can model the muddling masses. Reality’s richer patterns require better metaphors and methods.
Feeling is a form of thinking. Both are ways we process information, but feeling is faster. That’s the crux of Daniel Kahneman’s mind-clarifying work. It won a psychologist an economics […]
How you can safely trick your mind into triggering a visual hallucination, using only math and neuroscience! “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of […]
The physics of accurately knowing just how much time has passed. “While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any […]
If you’re running a little short on potable water, you might want to take some empty jugs up to Portland Oregon, where for the next few days they will be […]
Lee Smolin: I used to think that my job as a physicist was this kind of mystical transcendent undertaking to transcend the daily reality and experience of the world and discover this timeless representation of the world where the truth really was.
Guest post by Kevin Flora(Cross post from kevinflora.com) Think as if there isn’t a box, not just “outside the box”. Embrace change and accept your responsibility as a professional within […]
In 2010, Duke researchers scored infants according to their innate number sense. Three years later, further tests show a correlation between those scores and mathematical aptitude: The higher the score, the better the skill.
These international borders follow mathematically impartial pathways, laid out by so-called Voronoi diagrams named after the Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy.
Can our political beliefs actually make us bad at math?
Manil Suri gives a full-throated defense of math as a field that is “about ideas above anything else.”
Niall Ferguson: I’m constantly struck by the levels of historical ignorance that I encounter. In rooms full of very well-paid financial professionals, nobody appears to have read any of the major works of financial history of the last 30 or 40 years.
Whether you’ve ever run across this famous “how many triangles” puzzle or not, you’re in for a treat looking at the magnificence of the solution. “Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! […]
Put a pair of newborn rabbits, a buck and a doe, together in a pen. Assume it takes them a month to start reproducing, and another month for the female […]
What about Earth Science? What about Math? What about all of the social sciences? And indeed, what about technology?
You’ll be investing 5-to-7 years of your life. What will you get back? “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” –Benjamin Franklin Recently, a number of people — of widely different ages […]
Bill Nye: I don’t think U.S. students are lazy.
Several studies note that people working in a particular environment — the classroom, the office — can be affected by the sounds and smells around them. Now researchers and others are investigating ways to use this information for the public good.
Sadly, the only thing that you can consistently say about someone who holds a high school diploma, especially one issued in the last few years, is that they come from a family stable enough to get them to school most days for 12 years.
As teachers begin using new and questionable methods, will students suffer and get left behind? “Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.”–Dan Quayle As the first full […]
If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it’s happening? “There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point […]
Dozens of papers have been published to create the perfect commuting algorithm. But how do you account for factors like the weather? Or even local politics?
According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, three fears account for “the most expensive, ambitious projects humans have ever undertaken.”
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was not a giant comet, but if you did the math – which astronomers did at the time – you would know just what a catastrophic impact it would have.
If we knew all we do about math and physics, but had never seen the heavens, what would we conclude? “Both the solutions must be rejected, and as these are […]
Tech-savvy, hard-working people, says Tyler Cowen in his book Average is Over, have a lot to gain in the new economy. The rest of us? Not so much.
Answer: Hormones. That’s true, but not the whole predicament. Middle school has issues. The problem is often folded into a larger, if illusory, “problem” of the U.S. public school system […]