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Mathematics of soccer: Shot angles
Consider a situation in which a soccer player runs straight, with tha ball, towards the bottom line of the field. Intuitively, it is clear that there is an optimal point maximizing the shot angle,...
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When it comes to religions, governmental regulation and social norms affect...
If you read the last post you'll know that the relationship between religion and happiness is complicated. When you look around the world, religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people....
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Welcome to Curious Bends
A few years ago, I formed a group of science enthusiasts. Our goal was to fix the problem of poor science communication in India. There only existed a handful of science publications and fewer among...
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Cats need more food in the winter?
Here's a report on research that found that cats eat more in the winter, so it recommends we feed them more. Who wrote this? A cat? TPP's basic skepticism suspects that our kitty-girls, the ones that...
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Good problems to have
GamesWithWords.org will be experiencing periodic outages as we upgrade* the server. The incredible response we've had for WhichEnglish has completely overwhelmed the server. After bringing it back from...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Oyama magnolia
Wow! Just wow! A new magnolia in flower is just so exciting! Our Magnolia sieboldii, the Oyama magnolia, is several years old, a somewhat skinny shrub about six and a half to seven feet tall. It's...
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Hot dog nostalgia
Upstate New York is where TPP grew up, basically in sight of Lake Ontario, and very few people outside of the "natives" know that Rochester is renown for its hot dogs and its lake side stands. On a...
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End of May
May thirty-oneth - the end of May, the beginning of summer, and very appropriately today was a hot, dry summer day. All of the gardens, all of the new plants, need water. The last two "rain events"...
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15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes
Visualization and "audibilization" of 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes.Sorts random shuffles of integers, with both speed and the number of items adapted to each algorithm's complexity. The...
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June 2014 Desktop Calendar
Some mosses with a friendly fungi : ) June Desktop Calendar 1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of...
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Which English: The Science, Part 1
I've gotten a number of questions about the science behind our WhichEnglish quiz. Actually, I had intended to post a more detailed discussion days ago, but I got distracted by other matters.In this...
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Fox News expert with mail-order degree blames “homosexual impulses” for Santa...
Robi Ludwig, media commentatorIn the wake of the mass shootings by a disturbed man in Santa Barbara, California last week, Fox News featured comments from Robi Ludwig, a self-described psychotherapist,...
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Handling viral traffic
Around 4am EST on May 28, we started getting *a lot* of traffic to the website. This very quickly overloaded the server, resulting in the website running very slowly. We did some optimization. Things...
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The simulations behind the fitness landscape visualizations
We now have two videos out featuring evolving populations in two-dimensional fitness landscapes.Using fitness landscapes to visualize evolution in actionYoutubeVimeoVisualizing coevolution in dynamic...
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Palaeontology Online: Fossil Focus: Placodonts
This link is to a new article at Palaeontology Online providing an overview of Triassic marine placodonts. Palaeontology Online is a website sponsored by the Palaeontological Association (who publish...
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A bit of water relief
Recent rain "events" have simply missed us, so after a pretty good soaking rain almost two weeks ago, we've had virtually none, although people only a few miles away got soaked. In general it takes a...
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The Araeolaimida: We Barely Know Ye
Axonolaimus sera, from here.Overall, the nematodes cannot be considered one of the best-known groups of animals. This is not because they are at all uncommon: there is the oft-cited factoid that...
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Making sense of a messy natural world
It's a mess out there! Or perhaps more accurately, it's complicated out there. Nature involves interactions, and they are so diverse that as a biologist you begin to wonder if you can make any sense...
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Forums find GamesWithWords
A number of forums have picked up the WhichEnglish quiz, and have produced some really intelligent and insightful conversation. I recommend in particular this conversation on metafilter. There is also...
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