How to draw an impossible triangle
If you’re like me, you like to doodle fun patterns. One of my favorite things to doodle is an “impossible triangle” that looks like three straight bars meeting in right angles, which can’t exist in real life: But I had trouble drawing an impossible triangle from memory, until through trial and error I came up with this […]
Your Advertisement Here!
On billboards, during movie theater previews, among those ads for lawyers and ESL teachers on public transit—I love coming across instances of the “Your advertisement could be here!” filler that advertising companies use when their advertising space goes unfilled. For one thing, I’m tickled by the meta-ness of advertising for advertising. For another, some of the more creative […]
The Sleeping Beauty Paradox
This is my take on a classic probability paradox, the case of Sleeping Beauty. Along the way I’ll explain what I think is wrong with a classic rule of inference, Bayes’ Rule, and what needs to be done to fix it, but I hope you enjoy the paradox even if you don’t have a background in […]
Which self am I?
I have lots of questions about the world every day. Where did I put my keys? Is my phone battery dead? Is there enough food in the fridge that I don’t need to go grocery shopping yet? (Maybe you can tell what kind of life I lead right now.) But one of the most common […]
The class size paradox
Today’s post is a short paradox about averages, and how they don’t always match expectations. Imagine you’re a freshman college student, happily confident of a personalized education—after all, your college boasts an average class size of a mere 10 students per course. But when you arrive, most of your classes have far more students than […]
There are a lot of people.
There are over 7,000,000,000 people in the world, over 320,000,000 of whom live in the United States alone. When I try to picture populations this big, I go “okay, a thousand people would be how many fit in a really big room, and then a million is… a lot more than that, and a billion […]
Worry less, care more
I remember growing up reading a cross-stitch poem on my parents’ wall: Who hath a friend with whom to share hath double cheer and one-half care. The sense of “care” used here, and in similar sayings like “not a care in the world”, really seems more like what I’d call “worry”, and not so much that […]
Substitute Desires
Sometimes, to get something you want, it’s helpful to want something else. For example: If you want to be fit, it’s better to find a kind of exercise you enjoy (e.g. swimming, aerial acrobatics, ultimate frisbee—it’s up to you!) than to fight yourself over doing something you hate every time. In other words, find a way to […]
Contracts with myself
This semester, I’m upping my exercise regimen to include strength training at the University of Minnesota gym. I’m really enjoying feeling satisfyingly exhausted, but I do always wonder why, if I go to the gym to get stronger and have more energy, it makes me feel so weak and drained afterward? By now (I’ve been […]
The problem with real-life experiments: followup
Previously, I talked about a problem I perceive with doing experiments in real life: what’s good for you to do might be bad when everyone does it. In order to tell, you have to tally up the benefit to you minus to the total detriment to everyone else, which is hard since those negative consequences are may […]