Swans on Tea

The Science of a Really Bad Day
Interview with Peter J. Bentley, PhD, the author of The Science of Why Sh*t Happens

Unqualified Offerings: A lot of ignorance needn’t stop you from offering contradictory theories
I have no particular opinion on why there is a gender gap in certain fields of science. I have a lot of skepticism for various theories offered, but I have no theory of my own. And it isn’t just because [...]

Green Eggs and Toast
Changing standard storytelling as an exercise in challenging kids. Plus, it’s fun. I’ve done these and similar things with my nieces. The fill-in-the-last-word is something I learned from someone with a background in child development, and the replace-a-word I do just because I love kids’ sense of the absurd [...]

Wrong Tomorrow
When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate.
They want significant, empirically testable predictions made by public figures, that have no more than a five-year horizon. Topics (thus far) are [...]

Tiger Woods’ game after surgery may be pure physics
Woods’ swing has been the envy of golfers around the world ever since he burst onto the professional scene in 1996.
His action is pure efficiency, combining hip, shoulder and wrist motion to exert the greatest possible force on the ball.
Pure efficiency? Does that make him the [...]

Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems
“In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get everyday-use items like household cleaners,” says Lisa Katayama, author of “Urawaza,” a book named after the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. “So people looked for ways to do with what they had.”
Popular urawaza include picking [...]

Meet Entropy Jones. Four hours of a baby play, condensed into about two minutes of time-lapse video.
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Non Sequitur: The Invention of Ideology
Answers don’t come before the data are in. Couldn’t agree more.

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.
[…]
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically [...]

Who has the worst jargon?
I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate how my place of work was doing in terms of some business metrics. It was hell. Two groups that love their jargon and acronyms, the government and business. I thought that it could have been worse, because [...]

Thursday I stirred the pot and linked to some dredged-up Larry Summers controversy (It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time); I was dealing with a cold and didn’t include commentary while my head was foggy.
But I’m starting to feel better, and Cherish has raised some points and so here’s what my thinking behind [...]

It’s Thanksgiving, so why not stir the pot?
Larry Summers debacle, resurfaced over at incoherently scattered ponderings, (in response to a freakonomics blog post)
Do this simple experiment – go around and ask people to tell you in their words what was it that Summers said that got him in trouble. It’s an interesting Rorschach-test type question [...]