Watch your language about promiscuity, suggest Elgar, Jones and McNamara — and watch out for other people’s language. Their study explains: “Promiscuous Words,” Mark A Elgar [pictured here , above left], Therésa M Jones [pictured here below, right] and Kathryn B McNamara, Frontiers in Zoology, 2013, 10:66. (Thanks to Ed Yong for bringing this to our […]
A washing machine filled with Legos and applied mathematics
Colin Lecher writes in Popular Science: “Random Structures from Lego Bricks and Analog Monte Carlo Procedures” is… about throwing Legos in a washing machine. And it is wonderful. Ingo Althöfer of Friedrich-Schiller University in Germany is the author of the minor masterpiece. From the introduction to the paper, allow Dr. Althöfer to explain: Within a larger experimental series we […]
They seek a language for cheese
The 21st century, at its birth, saw cheese researchers in something of a frenzy trying to solve the industry’s great language problem. The problem is this: say what you will, the taste of a cheese is hard to describe. This cheese – this one! – is better than the others, you insist. But how can you say why? Which […]
Simple answers to technology questions (XKCD)
XKCD offers some simple answers: