Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Software memory is increasingly doing more and more for us. Yet it lacks one important element of human memory: emotion. This thought-provoking excerpt comes from Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How …
Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, has written a book: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Here are a few questions, which I loved, that are sure to spark your curiosity and imagination. What would happen …
“There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.” — Michael Friendly *** It’s tempting to consider information visualization a relatively new field that …
Confessions of wrongness are the exception not the rule. Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, pointing to the difference between being wrong in a prediction …
Albert Einstein and Max Wertheimer were close friends. Both found themselves in exile in the United States after fleeing the Nazis in the early 1930s, Einstein at Princeton and Wertheimer in New York. They communicated by exchanging letters …
For centuries we’ve wondered about the left hemisphere and right hemisphere divide. The “left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has …
“These three laws, simple as they are, form much of the basis of probability theory. Properly applied, they can give us much insight into the workings of nature and the everyday world.” *** In his book, The Drunkard’s …
A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the …
Jeff Stibel’s book Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain is an interesting read. The book is about “understanding what happens after …
The Unwritten Laws of Engineering is a book for those engineers who have more obstacles of a personal nature in organizations than technical. First published as a series of three articles in Mechanical Engineering, the “laws” …
This is from an interesting article in the New York Times on one man’s quest to find out the truth on genetically modified crops. “Greggor Ilagan initially thought a ban on genetically modified organisms was a good idea.” …
“The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.” — Galileo *** Most of us are unaware of the hidden world of mathematics. Actually, we’d rather avoid the subject entirely. It’s difficult and inaccessible. A lot …
Sleep is way more important than we realize. It’s also, according to David Randall in Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, “the largest overlooked part of your life and … it affects you even if you don’t …
Equations are the lifeblood of mathematics, science, and technology. Without them, our world would not exist in its present form. However, equations have a reputation for being scary: Stephen Hawking’s publishers told him that every …
Don’t have time to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time? Don’t worry. In two and a half minutes, The Guardian’s Made Simple series explains why black holes are doomed to shrink into nothingness then explode …
The first thing we do is try to figure out what went wrong. When people in organizations evaluate poor outcomes, determining what went wrong, and why is one of the first steps. Once we have a cause, whether accurate or (often) not, we …
“The whole thing was basically an experiment,” Richard Feynman said late in his career, looking back on the origins of his lectures. The experiment turned out to be hugely successful, spawning a book that has remained a …
“The ancient relationship between bees and flowers is a classic example of coevolution. In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties acton each other to advance their individual …
Eric Drexler is often described as “the founding father of nanotechnology.” His recent book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, includes a fascinating explanation of the difference …
“If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.” In this video from the 60s, Richard Feynman explains, very simply, the key to science with his timeless wisdom. It is the capacity to be wrong that moves us forward. In general, we look for a …
Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon? More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Terentius Varro, a roman citizen, proposed an answer, which ever since has been called “The Honeybee Conjecture.” He thought that if we better …
In this video Richard Feynman explains why trains don’t need differential gears
A simple explanation of how differential gears work and why they are necessary.
“I have never done anything like others,” Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) once said. That statement is proven time and time again in his autobiography: The Fractalist. Mandelbrot is independent almost to a fault, his book an …