Everything

Ah, the famous Chickenpox Plane. If you’re on any social media and are interested in aeroplanes (and this clearly applies to you), then you know this story. Some typically dumb military officers approach Abraham Wald, a mathematician working with airplane … Read more

Taking BS to mean behavioral science, the answer to that question is, not quite. But most things are. Most things involve a heavy dose of behavioral science. I would argue, however, the contrary does not apply. I don’t want us … Read more

The fast inverse square root algorithm, made famous (though not invented) by programming legend John Carmack in the Quake 3 source code, computes an inverse square root $frac{1}{sqrt{x}}$ with a bewildering handful of lines that interpret and manipulate the raw … Read more

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is … Read more

“It’s a slow melodic line that climbs up with a swell in dynamics and then it comes back down again with a diminuendo.” Stephen McAdams had been leaning back in his chair in a casual end-of-workday position, but he sat … Read more

18 March 2022 Let’s imagine you’re incredibly lazy and you want to learn R, but you only want to learn one function to do statistics. What function do you learn? I’d recommend to learn to use the lm() function. Why? … Read more

Orchids were Darwin’s “abominable mystery.” They continue to elude science—and efforts to save them. By Sofia Quaglia Sign up for our monthly newsletter! After investigating the origin of the species, Charles Darwin lunged into an exploration of something that seemed, … Read more

This post is not going to be about what’s wrong with individual databases. There are so many databases and so many individual API issues, operational problems, and arbitrary limitations that it would be take forever to cover all of them. … Read more