In idle moments of ennui, one can always don safety glasses and indulge with a bit of entertaining enlightenment. There’s lots of it to be found in the University of Nottingham’s Periodic Table of Videos. All of them are, as you might guess, more than a bit scientifical:
Tag: science
Old amusements book for new men
If you are a young man inclined to read old books about amusement for men who were, at the time the books were written, young, this book may provide some amusement. Called The Young Man’s Book of Amusement, it was published in 1856, and is now online thanks to Google Books:
Vampirical science (Freese!)
The word “vampirical” used as an un-admiring description of a scientific claim, has been credited to Jeremy Freese [pictured here], who wrote: “Part of what makes the Trivers-Willard hypothesis perhaps more ‘vampirical’ than ’empirical’—unable to be killed by mere evidence—is that the hypothesis seems so logically compelling that it becomes easy to presume that it must […]
The hardness of Nintendo, calculated
Computer scientists will, perhaps more deeply than others, appreciate the hardness of several computer games produced by the entity called Nintendo: “Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard,” Greg Aloupis, Erik D. Demaine [of whose recent work, more here], Alan Guo, arXiv:1203.1895v1, March 9, 2012. “We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, […]