It’s not a common occurrence, but a snake will eat itself — it mistakes its tail for another snake and then devours it until it essentially devours itself, becoming both victor and victim. We are now witnessing an interesting phenomenon. Humanity has been posed with a once-in-a-millennium contagion yet has…

When I was a kid in Nebraska, my heroes were Batman and Bart Starr, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. At 7 years old, I wasn’t particularly fond of football, but I had a mess of older brothers…

For a few seasons in the late 60s, there was a show on TV called, “The Invaders.” It was about aliens who walked among us, looking like humans in every way except for a stiff little finger. The aliens were invading Earth by infiltrating the police force and military and…

Maybe you’ve heard this story before, but during the Second World War, warplanes returning from battle were examined for the damage they sustained, and it was assumed that bullet holes indicated places needing armor reinforcement — you know, to keep the planes flying. But then a statistician named Abraham Wald…

Way up at the edge of the Arctic Circle, a dot in the middle of nowhere, is the Nordisk Vulkanologisk Institut (NordVulk), one of the world’s most prestigious institutes of volcanology and related earth sciences. Oddly, this past March, just 50 kilometers away, a mountain named Fagradalsfjall erupted with spectacular…

There’s been a lot of talk this past year about “Freedom!” …Freedom and “Tyranny!” …Tyranny and “My Rights!” How cheap we are, throwing those words around as if we own them. As if we even know what they mean. Imagine, for just one moment, the most frightening experience in your…

There’s a cool thing in statistics called the “normal distribution”. Basically, nothing really happens in the same way and all at once, but if you plot the details, they always tend to fall along a nice and neat bell-shaped curve. For instance, this is the “bell curve” that teachers use…

One of the most inexplicable phenomena of this pandemic is a supposed “survival rate” of something like “99.9%” or whatever high number the arguer pulls out of a hat. The gist of this logic is we should not care that much about the people who succumb to COVID because so…

Yesterday I sat on hold for an hour and twenty minutes, and then the automated system hung up on me. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Isn’t it weird that you know exactly what I’m talking about? You’ve been there too, haven’t you? Haven’t we all? We expect things…