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Who’ll win, Al Gore or George W. Bush? Let me explain why my statistical model proves Al Gore is gonna be Mr. 43. Oh, wait– the election was a decade ago, argh. So much for my 10,000 word essay! When it comes to politics, the longer you hold off, the better the return you get [...]

René-Louis Baire His “Baire space” and “Baire Category Theorem” help us understand topological spaces whose complements are very bare. George Cantor Taught us how to count infinite sets. Carl Friedrich Gauss Made a pretty good guess at how many primes there are below x. Also, some stuff about statistics. Kurt Gödel Played God by applying [...]

Isaac Newton famously attributed his success to standing on the shoulders of giants. Here are some tips how you can do that too. Before you know it, you’ll be wearing a huge British wig and inventing new branches of math and science. Work your way up. Before you stand on the shoulders of giants, you’ll [...]

The BP Oil Spill. It was an okay premise (yeah yeah, yet another sinister corporation draining the planet’s life energy), but it just dragged on and on, it’s obviously become a zombie franchise. I keep expecting to see Tony Hayward happy meal toys. It’s hard to pin down the exact “Jumping The Shark” moment, because [...]

We see them all the time. On television, newscasters nod deferentially while Very Serious People tell us what to believe. On the street, we see them wearing their suits, scowls on their faces, always running off to their next Powerpoint Presentation. Who are these mysterious people? Why are they always so miserable and guarded? I [...]

So I programmed a page to randomly generate names of Japanese restaurants. It’s pretty cool, check it out here: Japanese Restaurant Name Generator. Not only does it come up with randomized names, but you can even vote on them So far it’s been a fun quick little project to give me more practice incorporating 3rd [...]

Two of the coolest things from Japan are: Ninjas and Koans. Mix them together and you get Ninja Koans. (Some of these, you’ll have to know what they’re a parody of in order to get the joke!;)) The Overly Clever Zen-master The ninja Nobushige visited the Zen Master Haukin and asked: “Is there a Heaven [...]

Japanese grammar is famous for being so out-of-order compared to English. Or is it the other way around? Maybe English is the out-of-order grammar! Just for fun, let’s imagine WWII turned out drastically different, computers were invented in Japan, and they got to make up all the syntax. What would a typical programming language’s syntax [...]

When I suggest people take work and jobs less seriously, a common reaction is: “I need money or else I’ll starve.” With technology continuing to obsolete human labor at a faster and faster pace, more and more jobs are gonna disappear, whether we take them seriously or not. A lot of people are free of [...]

This is a very long-delayed continuation of the Goldmine of Engrish I published previously. I wasn’t planning on posting an Engrish sequel, but the original was so popular, people are practically demanding an encore, so here we go These are some of the most horrifically badly translated subtitles ever put forth by any translation agency. [...]