Abstruse Goose: the Mad Scientist, IRL

I never watched mad scientist movies, except maybe Dr. Strangelove, and I don’t have a clue what biologists do.  But Abstruse Goose here just seems to be describing real life.  Sad.  Not very. Much sadder:  our AG hasn’t  been seen or heard from in a month of Sundays. Has he retreated from this world? ______ […]

Abstruse Goose: Game of Thrones = Dragons + War of the Roses

When I can’t sleep, my brain thinks it’s fun to enumerate all the things I’m afraid might happen.  I’ve taken to thinking about the derivations from the same Latin root — application, complication, explication, implication, replication — but sometimes get hung up on not knowing what “plicare” means.  I do think the Yorks and the […]

Abstruse Goose: TV on the Stars

You get this, right? that light travels at a certain fixed rate so TV programs (yup, light) leaving Earth in, say, 2010 would have gotten 4 light-years away and any star 4 light-years away would just be getting the program now.  I’ve understood this idea for decades and I still get confused by it. __________ […]

Abstruse Goose: Being and Nothingness

Yup.  Absolutely.  No doubt.  AG speaks for us all, or at least for many or us, or at least for me.  I have a friend who loves to sit and do nothing, and I’m still studying her to see how she does it.  No clue yet. http://abstrusegoose.com/554

Abstruse Goose: Electronic Man

AG’s mouseover says, “When I forget to charge my phone at night, my existence feels incomplete in the morning,” meaning I guess that he’s become as one with his electronic devices.  But as I know because I’ve been writing an interminable story about insomnia, AG’s identity as an electronic device is just the God’s truth. […]

Abstruse Goose: NUM63R5

As a literate but functionally innumerate person, I hate AG’s title.  I think it’s dumb and silly.  But I thoroughly get why he feels the way he does about that equation.  Really.  What an odd pattern.  Why would it happen?  Would figuring out why it happened  help you understand anything else?  No?  You couldn’t even […]

Abstruse Goose: NSA Surveillance, Solved

I just don’t have anything to add to this.  Though I’m pretty sure if the NSA put their massive minds to it, they could figure out how to hear us thinking, let alone typity-typing on our computers without an internet in sight.  Did you know that NSA is the country’s largest employer of mathematicians?  It […]

Abstruse Goose: Piss ‘Em Off

AG here, based on his examples, seems to mean that the best science undercuts peoples’ faith in their beliefs, thereby annoying them deeply.  I’m sure that’s true but I haven’t noticed it myself.  What I notice is when, for example, some observer tells some theorist that no, in fact the universe isn’t coasting along slowly, […]