Dr. Piatetski-Shapiro’s outstanding mathematical contributions came despite hardships in the Soviet Union and later the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease....

Our favorite music critic Andy Whitman reviews U2’s new album NO LINE ON THE HORIZON http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/februaryweb-only/108-41.0.html “Time is irrelevant, it’s not linear,” Bono proclaims near the beginning of No Line on the Horizon (4 stars), U2’...

This is an interesting series of books, available from www.edumanga.me: The Manga Guide to Statistics The Manga Guide to Calculus The Manga Guide to Physics - Dynamics The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology The Manga Guide to Databases Each chapter in the books has the following format: Cartoon Text e...

You're not coming here for economic analysis, but I found this Wired article on quants, risk, and the financial crisis useful: Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number. They also should have noticed...

from Proust Was a Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer But Whitman also knew that his poems were not simply odes to the material body. This was the mistake that his Victorian critics made; by taking his references to orgasms and organs literally, they missed his true poetic epiphany. The moral of Whitman's v...

> What could be a more appropriate thing to do on Friday the 13th than have lunch with Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan author Nassim Taleb? I am looking forward to an interesting meal . . . (apologies for the shameless name dropping) > UPDATE: February (Friday the) 13th, 2009 Fascinati...

If you like what we’re doing in documenting all these local musicians at free shows and want to help out, do us a huge favor and help spread the word about the show. The biggest help would be putting up posters or flyers around town. To get a large version, click on the above image and grab it...

How to Hallucinate With Ping-Pong Balls and a Radio Makes you wonder how much of the rest of our reality is only a conventional illusion.Tags: hallucination mind illusion purkinje perception Preston L. Bannister { random memes } Precisely (in an as-precisely-as-you-can-map-reality sort of way).Tags:...

Throughout last year’s election, Nate Silver ran a fascinating website called FiveThirtyEight, named after the number of electors in the United States electoral college. Silver is a statistician, and he spent every day applying his considerable math chops to the various problems of the electio...

One-Sided Magnets, Ballsy Mice, Algae Genes, Blowing Hard, Cosmic Extremes, Froggy Discoveries, and the Minion Mailbag....