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Archive for the ‘general science’ Category

I’ll keep this short, because Freakonomics is a pretty simple book. It takes a look at various topic—the effect of names on success, drug dealer salaries, cheating in sumo wrestling, etc.—through the eyes of an economist.
This book is a few years old (and has a sequel out now), and it took me a while to [...]

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It’s Halloween time, so as one would expect, many ghostly happenings have been … happening.
A few nights ago I had a lovely date night with myself. I got some snacks and some wine, turned off all the lights except for a single candle, and sat down to watch a scary movie. I’d never seen The [...]

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There’s a commercial for bottled water on TV right now that shows kids frolicking in a swimming pool, and a voiceover goes something like: “your children don’t swim in high fructose corn syrup.”
The conclusion you’re supposed to draw, I guess, is that your kids shouldn’t eat foods with high fructose corn syrup, and should instead [...]

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Richard Wiseman’s Twitter remote viewing experiment, part 2.

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A look at Richard Wiseman’s experiment using Twitter to test remote viewing.

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Everyone is an alien to someone.
I’m in my late 20s. To anyone under the age of 18 today, I’m from a world they have never been to, and never will. A world we call the 1980s. It was inhabited by creatures with big curly hair that listened to cheesy pop music and grazed [...]

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A review of Daniel Levitin’s book This is Your Brain on Music.

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Statistics

(from xkcd)

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LHC

I love Google’s title image for today:

It’s a nice mix of recognizing an extremely important scientific accomplishment with just a pinch of end-of-the-world paranoia.
The truth is that the world has about the same chance of ending today as it did yesterday. But I think the dimwitted people protesting the large hadron collider [...]

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I’ve been thinking about music a lot lately. Yesterday, I had a conversation about why certain chords tend to “sound good” together. It seems like a lot of it has to do with the physical layout of an instrument; certain chords are easier to play together on a guitar. Since most rock [...]

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