Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Another indication that the original Drake Equation was worthless

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One of the oft-noted problems with the Drake Equation was the many ways it assumed that alien worlds would look, not just like Earth, but mi...
Tuesday, December 10, 2024

"The city would naturally form a line as it tried to get away from itself."

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YouTube is an SEO snake pit, a place where Gresham's Law of content prevails with an abundance of intelligent, informative, and entertai...
Monday, December 9, 2024

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

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  A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a ...
Friday, December 6, 2024

Double-talk from the other side

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Years ago we did a few posts on double-talk, the type of comic improvisation where a performer mimics the sound of a foreign language with g...
Thursday, December 5, 2024

Five years ago at the blog we were talking about an aborted twenty year old project that keeps getting more relevant

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Didn't do a great job with this the first time. The patches are in brackets. Wednesday, August 14, 2019 Agen...
Wednesday, December 4, 2024

What did John von Neumann mean by the "singularity"? -- a lemma post

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Sometimes, when I try to take on a really big topic here at the blog, smaller related topics start popping up. These tend to be right on the...
Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Having a Galactic Christmas

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To the delight of art directors everywhere, Galaxy, arguably the best science fiction magazine of the postwar era, is in the public domain (...
Monday, December 2, 2024

Trump did better with women against Harris than he did against Biden -- you'd think that would be the lede

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I've seen remarkably little coverage of this . [From the AP. Emphasis added.] Men were more likely than women to support President-elect...
Friday, November 29, 2024

For the math nerds in the audience (or, in our case, the audience)

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The following is a standard collection of word problems but they havea most distinguished pedigree. Any guesses? (Answer below the break) ...
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Thursday, November 28, 2024

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

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    If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hu...
Wednesday, November 27, 2024

"The trouble with revolutions is that they get in the hands of the wrong people."

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Phillip Marlowe's exchange with a private police officer guarding a gated community in 1942's The High Window raises some interesti...
Tuesday, November 26, 2024

I would have expected it to be higher.

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 It probably would have been OK to round this one off at 2%. Dana Fradon, originally published 1/31/1977    
Monday, November 25, 2024

Google and the Case of the Missing Search Term

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Picking up the ball from Andrew Gelman's recent post on the declining quality of Google searches (which itself built on this one from ...
Friday, November 22, 2024

"You're right. We need to strengthen the dose... One part in ten million." -- Mitchell and Webb on Health Care

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That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E That Mitchell and Webb Look: Lifestyle Nutritionists
Thursday, November 21, 2024

Nine years ago at the blog -- reposting this partially because RadioLab hasn't gotten any better but mainly because I really like the title.

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Thursday, October 8, 2015 "So long and thanks for all the fish" I've fallen into this trap b...
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