flickering pictures

Check out this simple and fascinating primer on how to visualize ten dimensions by Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Every so often — and it doesn’t happen often — I’m just really glad we have physicists.
(Apologies if this video loads slowly — Bryanton’s site got Boing-Boinged and doesn’t seem to be […]

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From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault […]

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When I was a kid, comic books always had those little ads for mail-order venus flytraps, with promises that they’d keep your home bug-free by crushing the life out of unsuspecting houseflies with their razor-sharp fangs and super-corrosive digestive juices. When my mom finally got me one, I was a little disappointed — no […]

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The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

People with two children are more likely to be actively […]

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I spent a bit of time in South Korea last year, and if you could sum the place up in one word — which you can’t — it would be “busy.” South Koreans work an average of 2,390 hours a year, compared to 1,777 in the U.S.A., 1,717 in Canada and 1,652 in the […]

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How brilliant is this interactive little site?
Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length […]

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