The Wedge There’s a beach in Newport Beach called The Wedge. It’s a perfect example of wave interference patterns, how when waves cross orthogonally, the peaks combine, as do the troughs. This means the waves rise quick and high, but they also suck up all the water to do so, so when they […]
MLM Universe
Survivorship Bias Survivorship bias is very dangerous, as it doesn’t happen inside our brains. The filtering, which is normally done inside our brain, is being done by the world, is the result of unpredictable chaos theory. But since it seems an easy task to study the winners, that’s what people do. Network […]
Immortal Monkey Apocalypse
Shakespeare Experiment There’s a theory that if you put enough monkeys on an island, each banging away on a typewriter, they’ll eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. This is true in theory, so long as they bang on a typewriter long enough, a certain percentage of the random stuff they type will make […]
Blood and Semen
How Do I Do This? I read and interesting research paper recently about the rapidly diminishing skill set of most normal humans. They reported that up to 40% of people were dependent on the Internet to understand how complete basic house hold tasks. They couldn’t do simple tasks like fixing a leaky faucet, […]
Evil Cat Lady
Japanese Genius I have this friend in Japan who, after a long and circuitous route, has finally managed to open his own shop. He did so after getting a PhD in electrical engineering, and then realizing what a huge mistake that might have been. But then he found a way out and now […]
Impending Cannibal Apocalypse
Science Fiction Story There is this really cool story by I think Ray Bradbury. It’s about this planet that has a bunch of people. The first use fire, then they discover agriculture, then they have an Industrial Revolution and then they invent nuclear weapons. Then they use the weapons on themselves, bombing […]
Thought Cancellation Pattern
Middle Age Genius One of the more interesting ideas that happened between the early and high middle ages was the idea of scholasticism. Before, they only had monasticism. Which meant focusing only on one set of ideas. Back then, these were ideas about God and society and the teachings of the Catholic […]
Subconscious Time Control
Trampoline Train I saw a pretty cool video the other day. A bunch of guys doing tricks on a trampoline, but the trampoline was on an open train car that was moving pretty quickly along the train tracks. From the trampoline perspective, they were only moving up and down. But from the […]
Malthusian Death Traps
Black Death Back during the black death, nobody knew why everybody was dying. Of course, today we know it’s because of the fleas that were on the rats. But back then, it was way before they could understand science. Way before we humans learned how to use science to increase health and […]
The Missing Gorilla Paradox
Perception Limits There’s a famous video that allegedly points out the discrepancies and inadequacies in human perception. The point is to show that even if you pay attention to something, you will miss most of what is going on here. You’ve no doubt seen this video, as this one is really popular. […]
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