Latest Articles
How to Tame Quantum Weirdness
Can balloon animals help blunt uneasy feelings about “spooky action at a distance”?
Solution: ‘How Many Half-Lives?’
When do negative results from a half-life experiment mean a theory is dead?
How Many Half-Lives Do You Have?
Gaining an intuition about half-life requires some unintuitive thinking.
Solution: ‘Hanging Far Out Over the Edge’
A simple and elegant way to stack identical flat objects so that they project over an edge as far as possible.
How to Hang Far Out Over the Edge
What formula describes the farthest you can stack flat blocks over the edge of a table to form a seemingly gravity-defying half-bridge to nowhere?
The Devil in the Polling Data
The same problem that caused the 2007 financial crisis also tripped up the polling data ahead of this year’s presidential election.
Why (Almost) Everyone Was Wrong
The results of this year’s presidential election made a mockery of analytical election forecast modelers.
Solution: ‘Which Forecasts Are True?’
Aside from potential clues gleaned from a fluke result, it would take hundreds of U.S. presidential elections to definitely conclude that one election forecasting model is superior to another.
How Can We Tell Which Forecasts Are True?
Presidential election forecasts are historically successful and appear to be highly precise. Yet they’re often contradictory. What would it take to trust them?