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Writing Frankenstein
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2–3 minutes·
1 comment on Writing FrankensteinWhen Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, Europe experienced a ‘Year Without a Summer’. At the time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aged 18), and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. With outdoor activities being unappealing due to the poor weather, they spent a lot of time indoors. It was during…
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Can a Game Save the World?
On December 9th 2007, a curious event took place at the University of South Carolina football stadium. As 29,000 people filed inside, each was given a piece of paper bearing four names and phone numbers. During the event, each person called those names and asked them to vote for Obama in the coming primary election.…
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Can the Science Museum be up-to-date?
I visit the Science Museum in London at least twice a year, so I was interested to read an interview with their new Director, talking about how he’s going to change the place: A month into his job, Professor Rapley is sitting in his South Kensington office, telling me that broadly the museum’s collection celebrates…
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Great Success = Some Talent + A Lot of Luck
Spotted this wonderful, and very accurate, ‘equation’ by Daniel Kahneman: The Secret of Regression to Mediocrity Success = Some Talent + Luck Great Success = Some Talent + A Lot of Luck The term ‘regression to mediocrity’ (also known as ‘regression to the mean’) was first coined by Francis Galton in 1886. Galton showed that,…
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Antimatter
After six weeks of silence, I’ve finally updated my After Our Time weblog with a post about Antimatter. It’s the sort of thing that would otherwise have gone here, so if you’re missing my posts about science, check it out.
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The Strength of Weak Ties
Anyone who’s read about social networks and the ‘tipping point’ will know how important the connections between people are. It’s not enough to look at just the number and the individuals in the connections though – you have to look at their strength. While reading an article (I forget which) about social networks, I spotted…
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Food Miles
Sometimes, when I come across a particularly interesting article, I try to find the research paper that it’s based on. I don’t always read the entire paper (in fact, I normally skip over huge chunks) but it’s always instructive to see the results and analysis as the original author wrote them; it’s not rare for…
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Bits and Pieces: Left Turns
The research at U.P.S. is paying off. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes — saving roughly three million gallons of fuel — in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. Incredible – something that seems obvious in retrospect, but in practice hard to implement. Interestingly, it wouldn’t work in…
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Beating the Hive Mind
“What’s this?” I asked, toying with a white cylinder with letters printed across it. “It’s a cryptex,” explained Eric Harshbarger, one of Mind Candy’s in-house puzzle designers. “Like the one from the Da Vinci Code.” In The Da Vinci Code, a cryptex is a cylinder with five wheels that can be rotated independently; each wheel…
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Cars off the road
M&S unveils carbon-neutral target (BBC News): M&S said the carbon savings it aimed to achieve under its plan would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road each year. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of environmental plans being measured in the number of cars taken off the road. I did a search on Google…
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