Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you.  It just got me confused.  Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black [...]

Abstruse Goose

This needs no explaining.  I’m about to march on Wall Street myself.    

Abstruse Goose: Partners

Theorists really do think this, that maybe every fundamental particle has a so-far-invisible partner.  The partners’ names are just the names of the regular particles only with an “s” in front: squarks, selectrons.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  in Switzerland is kicking up a lot of dust looking for them (and for another putative particle [...]

Abstruse Goose: A Brief History of Us

AG’s sneaky caption this time is “. . . we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. — Delenn or Carl Sagan.”  It’s apparently a quote from Delenn who is apparently some scifi character who says portentous things.  Carl Sagan was real; also said portentous things; and undoubtedly said something like that, [...]

Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part 2

You remember Bees – Part 1, right?  The waggle dance they do to show other bees where the flowers are?  If not, go back there and click on those links, which explain everything. I’ve just looked through LWON’s archives and we apparently are preoccupied with bees.   Them and corvids. Meanwhile, AG poses another little mystery, [...]

Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part I

A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food.  An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out. To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or [...]

Abstruse Goose: Math Doesn’t Suck

AG’s little mouseover says, “. . .except algebraic geometry.  Algebraic geometry pretty much sucks.”  I’m going to have to take his word for it, I’m profoundly innumerate.  Moreover, if AG hadn’t added the caption, I would have said this cartoon was about physics.  Physics is the science, the knowledge; math is just the language — [...]

Abstruse Goose: Newton #2

I see two problems here.  Number 1 is that no squirrel ever slipped and fell off a tree.  Squirrels’ understanding of gravitational physics is hard-wired and mathematically immaculate. Number 2 is with AG’s mouse-overed comment, “Not even an insatiable thirst for knowledge can compete with our innate affinity for cute fuzzy little animals.”  I agree [...]