Monty Hall There is an interesting problem in statistics and probability known as the Monty Hall problem. You can choose one of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the other two are goats. You choose door number three, and then Monty Hall opens door number one, showing a goat, […]
Metaphysical Trigonometry
All In One Disaster A long time ago I bought an all in one printer. At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, even though I didn’t need a scanner or a fax machine. This was a long time ago, and it was one of the cheapest I could find. Heart […]
Sliding Into Amnesia
Collective Memory One of the interesting things about any given society at any given time is the idea of collective memory. The bigger a society gets, the bigger its collective memory gets which will allow any technology to be subsequently added to over the generations. However, like any complex systems, there are many […]
Collective Energy Use
Drafting Birds If you ever see a flock of birds flying, they’ll tend to draft off one another. This is an instinctive way to move much more efficiently as a group. It’s a technique that cyclists and truck drivers do. Predators and Parasites https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Mar10Loop.mp4 One way to think of a predator is […]
Imaginary Paradoxes
Gabriel’s Horn There is a paradox in calculus called the Horn of Gabriel. It’s a mathematical function, a three dimensional representation of the two dimensional equation y=1/x, but rotated around the x axis. The reason it is considered a paradox is this is a three dimensional shape with infinite surface area but finite […]
Hidden Disruptive Technologies
Excess Brain Power All modern problems can be resolved to what evolutionary psychologists call an instinct mismatch. That our mind body system was calibrated for a world much different than the one in which we live. A corollary to this idea is that we have a significant amount of excess brain capacity. […]
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 […]
Imaginary Party Games
Book Club People I have a friend who is a very die-hard, old school, book lover. She belongs to a book club and none of them like to use any technology. They only read hardback books, they don’t have smartphones, and they even refuse to read books written after world war II. […]
Poltergeist Origin Story
Drug Dealers There was this drug dealer, a friend of a friend, who started dealing just enough to support his habit. Then he started dealing enough to support his and his friends’ habit. Pretty soon he was making a lot of money, so much he quit his job and became a full time […]
Telepathic Triangulation
Where Am I? Triangulation is a pretty cool thing to be able to do, both from the inside and the outside. From the inside, like if you were hiking somewhere and you didn’t have a GPS locator, you could triangulate your location. You’d need a map and a compass, but it’s pretty easy. […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- …
- 40
- Next Page »