Articles
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What really has a 1 in a million chance?
A Berkeley statistician's playful classroom topic: sort out which everyday events genuinely have one-in-a-million odds,…
What Sort of Thing a Brain Is
A short note by Nate Soares on what kind of thing a brain is, a specialty device shaped by evolution, written as backgro…
What the Romans Found Funny
An essay on the comedies of Plautus and Terence, explaining the jokes, farce and wordplay that made Roman audiences laug…
What the White House Could Have Looked Like
A visual look at rejected designs for the White House, showing the grand, odd, and forgotten alternatives architects pro…
What To Do If A Nuclear Disaster Is Imminent
A long, plain-text survival guide with practical steps for a nuclear emergency, from shelter and fallout to food and wat…
What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
A personal look at why the Windows 2000 interface felt so good, from its crisp beveled controls and consistent behavior…
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Science
What's a fire, and why does it burn?
A mathematician stares at a beach bonfire, realizes he does not understand fire, and works out what flames really are, w…
What's Best Forum
A high-end audio discussion forum where hobbyists and industry professionals debate speakers, amplifiers, and playback g…
What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
A curious, well-sourced look at whether ants outweigh humans and which living group really tops Earth's biomass, with te…
What's Noka Worth?
A legendary piece of food investigation that dissects a luxury chocolate brand selling at hundreds of dollars a pound an…
What's That Bug?
A long-running community blog where entomology enthusiasts help identify mystery insects submitted by readers from aroun…
What's the Difference Between -ectomy, -ostomy and -otomy?
A classic Straight Dope answer explaining the medical suffixes for cutting out, making an opening, and cutting into, wit…
What's Trending in Type - Typewolf
A typography resource that showcases real-world font pairings on well-designed websites and recommends typefaces for des…
What's Up With All Those Equals Signs?
Explains why old emails quoted online are littered with equals signs, tracing the mystery to quoted-printable encoding a…
superradnow.wordpress.com
Art & Design
When Alice Cooper met Salvador Dali
The odd story of how shock-rocker Alice Cooper and surrealist Salvador Dali spent two weeks in 1973 making the first rot…
When Buddhism Goes Bad
A personal account of how an intense mindfulness and meditation practice tipped into a breakdown, and what the author le…
When Do We Stop Finding New Music?
A statistical analysis of listening data asking at what age our taste in music stops evolving, and why we drift toward t…
When Future Historian Comes To 1910
David Friedman discovers a 1910 New York Times column featuring a time-traveling Future Historian who shares his name, a…
When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver
Bruce Tognazzini's classic case study of how confusing cockpit controls contributed to the crash that killed John Denver…
When Kylie Minogue Was a Font
Whitney Mallett digs into German Bold Italic, a 1997 Towa Tei song featuring Kylie Minogue and named after a typeface, a…
When Looking Became Seeing
An essay on John Berger's Ways of Seeing, the 1972 BBC series that changed how a generation looked at art, advertising a…
When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story
A personal story of a research project on website-fingerprinting side channels, where a machine learning result turned o…
When Random Isn't
A decade-old story of how a supposedly random number generator turned out to be predictable, told as a security detectiv…
When Wrong is Right: Classic Wrong Speed Records
A feature on records that sound better played at the wrong speed, from 45s slowed to 33 to LPs pitched up, explaining wh…
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