Author Archives: gmcdavid
Hilbert’s Grand Hotel Paradox
I can think of a local science fiction convention that could use this hotel, except that Hilbert did not say how to deal with the congestion at the elevators. An exercise for the reader, I suppose.
Epic Fraud
How to succeed in science (without doing any)
Note the first “tip:”
01. Fake data nobody ever expects to see. If you’re going to make things up, you won’t have any original data to produce when someone asks to see it. The simplest way to avoid this awkward situation is to make sure that nobody ever asks. You can do this in several ways, but the easiest is to work only with humans. Most institutions require a long and painful approval process before anyone gets to work directly with human subjects. To protect patient privacy, any records are usually completely anonymized, so no one can ever trace them back to individual patients.
Entomologists: Producing their own raw materials for research
Why do physicists subtract infinity from infinity?
From Jennifer Ouellette
Note: Quantum Electrodynamics works. The predictions it makes have been experimentally confirmed to many decimal places.
A mathematician in Soviet Russia
Comic Book Physics
Don’t tell Darth Vader
From the “Be careful what you wish for” files
Why Amazon Wants To Pay Sales Tax
How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail.
Physical retailers have long argued that once Amazon plays fairly on taxes, the company wouldn’t look like such a great deal to most consumers. If prices were equal, you’d always go with the “instant gratification” of shopping in the real world. The trouble with that argument is that shopping offline isn’t really “instant”—it takes time to get in the car, go to the store, find what you want, stand in line, and drive back home.