TGIPF: Abstruse Goose on Not Envying the Penis

AG is citing a riposte to intelligent design’s argument that a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker. And yes, I know it’s not a Penis Friday.  As Cassie says, you can’t have penises every Friday; and a codicil would be, some penises come on Thursdays.  AG is also offering his own, more tasteful, riposte to Cassie’s [...]

Abstruse Goose: Computer Programming 101

In spite of AG’s title, this is really Science Writing 101.  The first time science writers run across these infinitely receding questions is when they start researching a story and the story is all parts and no whole.  The next time is when they start asking scientists questions and every answer just means another question. [...]

Abstruse Goose: Electromagnetic Leak

You understand this, right?  that the radio-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum travels, like all light, at one fixed speed.  And since those same radio waves carry television programs, the programs broadcast earliest have traveled farthest.  It’s not complicated but it is appalling:  poor Arcturus, stuck with Happy Days. ________ Abstruse Goose took a little break and [...]

Abstruse Goose: Party!

AG’s hypermeta mouseover thing says something about being in company but forever alone, and really, no disrespect to anyone having this feeling because it’s surely occasionally universal, but it’s also self-pitying nonsense and just not the case.  Think about it for a minute:  let’s say AG got tired of party chitchat and happened to notice [...]

Abstruse Goose: Disproportionate Reaction

I should never argue about anything whatever with someone who understands math, especially someone who understands it as well as our boy, AG, here.  But I wonder whether “disproportionate” isn’t confusing statistics with neuroscience. Let’s say AG is 30 years old, meaning he’s lived for 10,800 days, so finding the spider one day out of [...]

The Last Word

Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem. Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity.  ”We don’t know which [...]

Abstruse Goose: Riemann Hypothesis, the Movie

Continuing a preoccupation with movies about science, but this time  about math.  According to this very nice YouTube person, the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in all of math and whoever solves it wins a $7 million prize.  I not only can’t solve it, I can’t even understand it.  It has to do with prime [...]

Abstruse Goose: Many Damn Worlds

Roughly — very roughly — the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that any given measurement of reality depends on the observer doing the measuring.  And if no observer measures a reality, that reality just sort of disappears or collapses or something. The many-worlds interpretation says wait! maybe the unobserved measurement really just goes off [...]