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Peanut Butter Cookies and Cultural Diffusion
Recipes for peanut butter cookies always say to do something peculiar to them, prior to baking: use a fork to create grid-like cross-hatches. Where did this come from? We all do this, but we’re not...
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John McCarthy’s Thoughts on the Wonders of Progress
Every now and then, you stumble across something simply wonderful on the Internet. You find a gem that requires bringing it to others’ attention. That’s what happened with me recently when I was...
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The Universality of (Sephardic) Ethnicity, as Explained by Mathematical...
Last year, Spain announced that it would provide a fast track to citizenship for Sephardic Jews—Jews of Spanish descent (the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492). While there hasn't been movement...
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Computational Crystals and City Maps
City structures are by no means perfectly regular. From imperfect grids to hub and spoke models to complete chaos, the street maps of cities are a delightful blend of order and disorder. It turns out...
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Pareidolia and Fractals
Many of us have seen faces or shapes in clouds. Some have seen a face on Mars. Imputing patterns onto the face of randomness more generally is known as pareidolia. And it turns out, we do the same...
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‘Touch Generations’ and 1,000 Years
I was recently listening to a lecture by Kevin Kelly where he introduces the concept of touch generations, the idea of a list of people based on when one person died and when the next was born: one...
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Wikipedia’s Famous Academics Versus Successful Academics
Wikipedia’s coverage of the topics of the world doesn’t always adhere to the importance of these topics. It’s uneven and often privileges fiction over reality. But what about in academia? Does the...
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Predicting Highly Cited Scientific Papers
Lots of people make predictions. But very few—especially in the pundit world—are held accountable, or even reexamine their predictions. Recently, Mark Newman, a physicist and network scientist at the...
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The Scientific Revolution Killed the Polymath. It’s Time to Bring the...
It’s as if the Scientific Revolution -- and the knowledge it spawned -- killed the ability to Know Everything. Before then, it was not only possible to be a generalist or polymath (someone with a wide...
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Members of the Geek Pantheon
When you read a lot of science and math books, there are certain names that reappear over and over. Richard Feynman is everywhere and Alan Turing too. While Feynman is known to the greater culture and...
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We Can’t Understand Our Technology Any More
What if technology is becoming too complicated for humanity to understand? I explore this idea in a recent article in Aeon Magazine: For centuries, humans have been creating ever-more complicated...
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Vanity Science: Eponyms, Knowledge, and Twitter
You know you've always wanted your science equation, theory, or principle -- like Newton, Heisenberg, or Einstein. WIRED Science blogger Sam Arbesman has created a twitterbot that will bestow...
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Science Does Not Equal Big Science
The most recent Edge question is What scientific idea is ready for retirement? My answer is “science = Big Science“: Centuries ago, when science was young, it was possible to make contributions to...
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The Return of History at Long Timescales
Talk to many scientists involved in computational social science, complex systems, and related fields, and at a certain point, someone will mention psychohistory. The post The Return of History at Long...
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The Night Sky, Mythology, and Timescales
Many of you have likely seen the image that shows what the night sky would look like if the Andromeda galaxy were far brighter, making it clear that in its entirety it appears as several times bigger...
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The Barber Paradox and Kosher Certification
There is a classic logic problem known as the Barber paradox (itself a variant of Russell’s paradox): in a town where the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself, who shaves the barber? If he...
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Artistic Depictions Via Playing the Game ‘Telephone’
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the children’s game Telephone, where a whispered sentence or phrase gets passed on—and garbled—from one person to the next, often with hilarious results...
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How Ancient Alexandria Became an Intellectual Center
Today is π Day! And one of the many interesting people involved in the many uses of this constant was Eratosthenes, the ancient Greek geographer who calculated the circumference of Earth. Eratosthenes...
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Technology As Helpmate
Robert McGinley Myers has written a beautiful post about technology and its increasing use an outboard brain. Myers examines the brouhaha over Romantimatic, an app that provides reminders to send notes...
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The Diffusion of Tangrams
Every now and then a puzzle or game sweeps a population. We had Rubik’s Cube in the early Eighties, Sudoku in the 2000′s, and now Flappy Bird. But too often, due to technology, these spread incredibly...
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