Links for 2010-08-24

"Put simply, it makes just about as much sense to obsess over these numerical rankings as it does to try to numerically rank favorite restaurants, or jazz songs, or single malt scotches, or ... you get the point. It is a false quantitative-ness about unquantifiable qualities that I've seen people deploy in all sorts of situations and to which I am occasionally prey myself, to be honest.

The unquantifiable nature of these things doesn't mean that there is no comparing these things. Of course there is. I've spent lovely evenings exploring different versions of the same song (including different takes by the same artist) or comparing Islay malts to Campbeltowns (or to each other or to itself as it ages ...) and it's pure pleasure to notice the distinction in such things and to talk about it with friends. And even more fun to do the jazz thing and the scotch thing at the same time."

"Professor [an Nobel laureate in Physics Robert] Richardson believes the price for helium should rise by between 20- and 50-fold to make recycling more worthwhile. [NASA], for instance, makes no attempt to recycle the helium used to clean is rocket fuel tanks, one of the single biggest uses of the gas.

Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain."

"It's an obvious fact that circles should have 360 degrees. Right?

Wrong. Most of us have no idea why there's 360 degrees in a circle. We memorize a magic number as the "size of a circle" and set ourselves up for confusion when studying advanced math or physics, with their so called "radians".

"Radians make math easier!" the experts say, without a simple reason why (discussions involving Taylor series are not simple). Today we'll uncover what radians really are, and the intuitive reason they make math easier."