Tertiary Source

Here's a million-to-one photo I took yesterday:

When I was a freshman I took Philosophy 110. It was a big lecture, and the professor had a habit of rambling (which I mostly found entertaining); there was the customary falloff in attendance as the term went on. During one lecture the professor was working up to making three points and put some bullets on the whiteboard:

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He then promptly distracted himself with a tangent about how boring people drive Fords, and whenever you see a Ford it's being driven by a boring person. After a couple minutes of this he turned back to the board and said, "I have no idea why I made these three circles. They must mean that boring people drive Fords." This got a chuckle out of the class, and he added, "Remember that! It'll be on the final."

This weekend's This American Life included interviews with some of the participants in this summer's measles outbreak. I learned about the outbreak from a somewhat overblown reaction from Phil Plait. From memories of Plait's older material, I expected a little lesson in conditional probability. Not finding one, I did an analysis of my own. I reached the surprising-to-me conclusion that, even with this summer's outbreak, the risk tradeoff between measles exposure and vaccine side effects is not totally unbalanced. My writeup at the time got lost in comment noise, so I'll condense it again here.

Here's a nice duck from the Economist. It's interesting that coups d'etat have become less common in recent years. It's also interesting that these commandos are reaching through the grid lines to pat the data.

Dylan Foley pointed out to me that my question about CSX's advertised fuel efficiency has previously gotten attention from FactCheck.org.

If you stand reasonably close to a road, the sounds of passing traffic get Doppler shifted: they start off high and end up low, "wheeeee-oooooom." Professional and amateur musicians have sophisticated training in recognizing frequency ratios. (Though, explicitly mentioning the relationship between frequency/wavelength ratios and intervals is more common when players of string instruments experiment with making harmonics.) How accurately could you estimate the speed of a passing vehicle by the sound it makes?

Antimatter is strange, exotic stuff, right? Only produced in dangerous physics experiments? Leads to complete annihilation with ordinary matter?

Sort of. It's a question of quantity.