You can have the world’s most elegant model, but if it can’t predict what happens in real life, then it’s just a pretty piece of mathematics.
Author: Ben Orlin
Letters from a Calculus Class
Dear Student, I’ll put it this way: You don’t seem to understand me yet, but you keep getting closer. -Limits
“Dead Poets Society” for Skeptics (or, How to Inspire Your Way into a Godawful Mess)
As guiding principles go, “carpe diem” seems to have all the intellectual heft of a Dos Equis commercial.
The Death of Science Fiction
"Real sci-fi challenges our complacency, but Hollywood sci-fi encourages it!"
Art Museum in Utopia
It’s just not… very… interesting. Don’t you have anything by tortured geniuses?
One in a Million
"Wow! I love you too, but statistically, it's VERY unlikely that you're anywhere near 'one in a million.'"
Your Own Biathlon
Biathletes aren't the world's best skiers. And they're not the world's best shooters. They've just found a hybrid task that perfectly suits their weird mixture of talents.
Random Victories
Your team's victory was just a fluke, an anomaly of small sample size!
The Voldemort of Calculus Classes
16B is merely Franken-calculus, stitched together from the corpses of actual classes.
Nonstandard Dancing
You know how they've got nonstandard analysis, right? Could we do the same... for dancing?
Math with Bad Drawings 