What do you do when you come across a bit of science and engineering that seems totally counter-intuitive? Do you try to construct arguments for why it can’t work and must be a hoax of some kind? Or do you accept that maybe you just don’t (yet) understand the underlying concepts and need to work [...]
Well, it’s once again the time of year when I review the state of my life, and resolve to do something about all the shortcomings that inevitably present themselves. Unfortunately, although I have no trouble coming up with worthwhile resolutions, I’ve never had much success in keeping them, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld. Therefore [...]
A couple of months ago I wrote about Edge Foundation’s What is your formula? question. Well, the results of the Edge annual question for 2008 are now online. The question posed to Edge’s contributing scientists and thinkers this time around was, What have you changed your mind about? Why? (You’ll need [...]
2007 has been a depressing year, and I don’t think that it’s just me. I’ve pretty much given up on watching TV news or reading newspapers. Doing so just adds to the malaise. And because of the writers’ strike, the one remaining palatable news source has been unavailable. (Now if I [...]
Physicists in the lab have produced hard data for string theory! Well, for a theory about strings. Actually, knot theory might be technically a more accurate label. Okay, the truth is that the only reason I’m writing this post at all is so I could make a pun about string theory in [...]
[Note: I goofed up in describing What is your formula? as an Edge annual question. It's not, and I've updated the post below to correct this.]
Edge Foundation does a yearly thing where they pose a question to an array of scientists and other intellectuals, and collect together all their answers. They have also [...]
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about SocialRank, which seems to be a new blog search engine that identifies which blogs entries are currently generating a lot of interest. These entries are categorized by subject matter and daily ‘top 15′ lists are created for the top blogs and top blog entries. [...]
[Update: I thought, since I mentioned Snap Shots in this entry, that I should just turn this feature on in this blog instead of sending you elsewhere. Done. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a magic bullet, as you'll see if you scroll over the mathbloggers.com link. However, the cached [...]
I was trying to do a little background reading on a problem in complexity theory (this problem, to be precise), and I was dismayed to find myself thwarted by the unavailability of papers. Not being an academic type, I don’t have ready access to a research library. (I can, in theory, get papers [...]
Late last year the IT consulting firm Gartner issued its ‘top ten predictions’ for 2007, and among them was the claim that blogging would level off as the number of people quitting their blogs equaled the number of new bloggers.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now 3 different ‘mathy’ blogs have [...]