February 6, 2024 – 6:34 pm
Here’s some good news, for a change: clever application of advanced technology is now making it possible to read ancient Roman scrolls that were carbonized in the devastating first-century eruption of Vesuvius, making them too fragile to unroll. Learn more here.
I wonder where this story is headed. (Commenter “JK”, call your office…)
March 18, 2023 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been slow again here — I’ve been a bit under the weather. I do have something interesting for you tonight, though: a substantial essay, by a writer I’ve never encountered before, on the stubborn consistency of our perception of physical beauty — in particular, female beauty — across ages and cultures. The essay […]
We on the reactionary Right like to study history, and theorize about the cycles and mechanisms of power — and of course we denizens of “FrogTwitter” joke around about helicopter rides — but real power is that which, if you get on the wrong side of it, you die. With that in mind, here are […]
March 20, 2022 – 11:49 pm
Currently underway in Iceland:
January 12, 2022 – 6:38 pm
I saw this online today. I think it’s brilliant.
Here’s something beautiful, from a visual artist by the name of Tobias Gremmler. Watch in full-screen.
January 31, 2020 – 9:36 pm
Here’s a research paper, from a team of scientists in India, about the now-pandemic coronavirus. They are puzzled by an “uncanny similarity” of portions of its molecular structure to other dangerous viruses, including HIV, and say that the insertion of these novel sequences is “unlikely to be fortuitous in nature”. Perhaps we will be hearing […]
November 29, 2019 – 1:52 pm
The other day I was out for a walk in Prospect Park and ran across this: I was reminded of this, which is 39,000 years old: Some things never change, I guess.
November 20, 2019 – 10:38 pm
Staying on message from our Bowie post of a few days ago, here’s a story about Life On Mars — and not just lichens or something, but bugs.
Here is a fantastic visual illusion.
January 23, 2019 – 11:10 pm
I don’t often link to The Atlantic, but this is worth your time: everything you need to know about the hagfish.
November 6, 2018 – 6:23 pm
You may recall the curious object Oumuamua, a visitor from beyond the solar system that passed by the Sun on a hyperbolic orbit late last year. It was no ordinary asteroid: it had a strange pattern of reflection that suggested it was a long, skinny cylinder, and as it left our solar system it appeared […]
October 16, 2018 – 5:14 pm
A fascinating aerial-photography collection. Here.
September 11, 2018 – 1:49 pm
Here is a remarkable video clip of the center of Hurricane Florence.
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology. It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
It’s a dreary day here, and I find myself at a loss for anything interesting to say. Instead, then, I give you Russian politician Valentina Petrenko. And her hair.
January 22, 2018 – 1:22 pm
This is nice: a 3D simulated fly-through of the Orion Nebula, in visible and infrared light. What times we live in! The nature of astronomical nebulae was almost completely unknown as recently as the beginning of the last century; it wasn’t even a hundred years ago that astronomers debated whether the spiral nebulae* might in […]
January 18, 2018 – 8:53 pm
A little birdie just whispered into my ear the words “Project Pelican”. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about…
Here’s an interesting angle: using Benford’s Law to spot falsified data in academic papers.
A while back a reader pointed out to me in an email that my e-pal David Duff and I often seemed to be oddly “in sync” with our blog-posts. Yesterday I visited David’s excellent blog Duff and Nonsense after a few days’ absence, and saw that like me, he’d also put up a post about […]
April 11, 2017 – 10:47 am
Sorry for the lack of original content here lately – I’m weary of the news, and temporarily abandoned by the Muse. Here’s something out of the ordinary for you, then: a huge clown in whiteface channeling Johnny Cash to sing “Pinball Wizard”. (That would be extraordinary enough all by itself, but this man has a […]
December 20, 2016 – 6:42 pm
I always have to admire those who present quantitative data in visually compelling ways. With a hat-tip to David Duff, here is a wonderful example: Trumpland and the Clinton Archipelago, from the site Vivid Maps.
September 21, 2016 – 12:03 pm
We’ve mentioned the mysterious “Antikythera Mechanism” before (see here and here). Now divers have found a human skeleton, probably containing intact DNA, at the shipwreck site. Story here. (See also this story, suggesting that the device was already old when it was lost at sea.)
September 5, 2016 – 3:20 pm
Here’s something interesting: Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English. Given that almost everything else in the English language is slapdash, happy-go-lucky, care-may-the-Devil, word order is surprisingly strict. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green […]
In his book Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Douglas R. Hofstadter discussed the idea of “recursive acronyms”. He gave as an example the acronym TATO, which stands for “TATO And TATO Only”. The expansion goes like this: 1. TATO 2. TATO And TATO Only 3. (TATO And TATO Only) And […]
February 25, 2016 – 12:26 am
I had occasion today to pay a visit to one of the websites on our sidebar: The Fallacy Files. It’s one-stop shopping for examples of logical fallacies; I hadn’t visited for a while, and I’m glad to see it’s still in business. Even more comprehensive than our political comment-threads, I think.
December 22, 2015 – 11:59 am
Here is “The Khaleesi“, a proposed skyscraper for West 57th Street in Manhattan. A tower for our times, I think.
December 15, 2015 – 6:56 pm
Here’s an interesting item: a novel gait identified in Russian officials. Learn more here.
November 15, 2015 – 11:26 pm
In an essay about the Paris attacks, Richard Fernandez writes: The dilemma the West now faces is that it cannot survive on the basis of the platform which its elites have carefully constructed since WW2. They are being beaten to death with their own lofty statements. They must either continue to uphold the vision of […]
October 28, 2015 – 3:56 pm
Under development: the pinniped space-program. Here.
Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know about: “anting”. From Gilbert Waldbauer’s What Good are Bugs?: The amazing behaviors by which many birds, including some quail and a multitude of perching birds, use or solicit ants to free their bodies of lice and parasitic mites are known as anting, Birds ant in two quite different […]
OK, this is interesting: ‘Impossible’ rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours Some details here.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present the most numerous vertebrate on Earth: the bristlemouth.
From a corporate presentation I’m watching just now, in order to earn my daily crust: “We need to create an ideation methodology across various stakeholder groups and provide full-circle communication.”
I had no idea such a thing was even possible, but here it is: Gird your cheeks. You’ve been warned.
Here’s a strange item that’s been making the rounds. (Charles Fort, call your office.)
Rather an odd coincidence today: an old friend called, with whom I hadn’t spoken in quite a while. He asked how I was; I said that while I was well, generally, I had had a bit of a rough time the past few weeks with my knee-replacement surgery, and now with the prospect that it […]
I’m not happy about this. Not at all.
January 10, 2015 – 11:21 pm
Well, some days, anyway. Today I heard for the first time about something called “Blaschko’s lines”. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them: Blaschko’s lines, also called the Lines of Blaschko, named after Alfred Blaschko, are lines of normal cell development in the skin. These lines are invisible under normal conditions. They become apparent […]
October 9, 2014 – 8:30 pm
Most of you have likely heard of the ‘Fermi Paradox’: the puzzling fact that, despite the uncountable multitudes of stars in the sky, and the overwhelming likelihood that myriads of them have habitable planets, we have never seen any conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life. Why is this? Given the immense age of the Universe, and […]
Here’s something really beautiful: photographs of subtropical fungi by Australian photographer Steve Axford.
December 27, 2013 – 12:15 am
From our reader Henry, here’s an interesting item: geneticists studying the rate at which biological complexity has increased over time have arrived at a provocative extrapolation.
December 22, 2013 – 12:24 am
We’re having a busy weekend — among other things, our daughter just flew in from China to stay with us for the Christmas week — and so I haven’t had the time to sit at the computer brooding and writing. For tonight, then, a logical curiosity you may not be familiar with: Newcomb’s paradox. Here’s […]
October 24, 2013 – 2:18 pm
In this article from Science Daily, we learn that eucalyptus trees are pumping gold out of the ground.
October 19, 2013 – 8:23 pm
It’s the flesh-eating beetle, genus Dermestes. See these hungry little guys in action, here.
September 23, 2013 – 10:33 pm
Here’s a Cold War scheme I’d never heard about, until our own JK sent me this link: a Saturn-like ring around the Earth, made of little copper wires.
September 10, 2013 – 10:23 pm
OK, enough about Syria. Here’s the video we’ve all been watching, a frame a day, in the mirror. Fantastic.