A curiosity stopper is an answer to a question that gets you to stop asking questions, but doesn’t resolve the mystery.

There are some curiosity stoppers that I’ve heard many times:

• Why doesn’t cell phone radiation cause cancer? Because it’s non-ionizing radiation.
• Why are antioxidants good for you? Because they eliminate free radicals.
• Why do bicycles stay upright? Because of gyroscopic forces.
• Why do solids hold together? Because of intermolecular forces of attraction.

For the first three, those answers confused me because I didn’t know what those words meant. I guess I know what an ion is (it’s an atom with an electrical charge) but why do I care whether radiation is ionizing? And what makes radiation ionizing or non-ionizing?

What’s a free radical? Why is it bad?

What’s a gyroscopic force? (What even is a gyroscope? It’s some sort of top, right?) How on earth does a bicycle generate a gyroscopic force?

The fourth curiosity stopper—”intermolecular forces of attraction”—is even more of a non-answer. Of course solids hold together because a force holds them together. That’s what a force is. But what is the force, and where does it come from?

Another genre of curiosity stopper is the out-of-context number:

• “The Dow is down 600 points today.” (How much is that?)
• “My proposed policy will create two million jobs.” (What percentage is that? What are the odds that I, personally, get a new job?)
• “This product has 7 grams of protein per serving!” (How big is a serving? How much would I need to eat to meet my daily protein requirement?)

Answers (sort of)

Continue reading

Vizzini: Inconceivable!

Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

What did Inigo mean by this?

(Don’t laugh, this is serious.)

Continue reading

Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man.

According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion.

But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender.

When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:

Continue reading

An investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”

A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”

Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”

A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.

Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.

“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.

Continue reading

One day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.

Continue reading

If we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?

Continue reading

(Here is the same clip in HD, but that 2010 YouTube vibe is part of the fun)

This clip is in the running for most-mocked scene of all time, but I think it’s good, actually.

First, let’s get some things out of the way:

1. The writers of NCIS know how keyboards work. (They probably used keyboards to write this scene, even.)
2. The director of this episode knows how keyboards work.
3. I’m going to go out on a limb and say >90% of this show’s audience knows how keyboards work.

This scene was not written this way because the writers think their audience is dumb and doesn’t know how a keyboard works. It was written this way because of the Rule of Cool.

The Rule of Cool states: an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief is proportional to how cool a scene is.

Continue reading

Nearly nine years after part 1, I bring three new short ideas.

1. Keep in mind that scientific fraud happens sometimes
2. Clichés are good, actually
3. You must put unnecessary decoration on your useful items, or else you’re a weirdo

Continue reading

This post contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy.

Continue reading

Investors often say that standard deviation is a bad way to measure investment risk because it penalizes upside volatility as well as downside. I agree that standard deviation isn’t a great measure of risk, but that’s not the reason. A good risk measure should penalize upside volatility, because upside volatility is bad.

Continue reading