From a (review?) of the new Star Wars trailer...

I want to address some confusion online regarding why the events of the Original Trilogy have become a legend that most characters think is total fiction after only 30 years. It is a bit odd until you realize that it was only 19 years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and that Han Solo ( Read more... )

So here's a question I was noodling about last night. If you reset human history to 10,000 years ago and let events run their course, which 5 modern cities would you bet on to be the most populous/prosperous/significant in whatever world resulted ( Read more... )

My son had a friend over for a play date yesterday, who was bringing over a board game he was excited to teach Pickle to play. Turned out to be Diplomacy, which he plays in school(!) twice a week as an "academy ( Read more... )

The great Matt Levine has a wee bit of an ethical blind spot that annoys me (along the lines of, "well if you bought it from me you knew what you were doing tee hee") but is still by far the best financial blogger I know of. His latest: Leave a comment  1 

OK, I'm curious if someone can lay out the EXACT calculations for that old "how many people need to be in a room before two share the same birthday" game. It seems to me like the odds (really, the calculations) vary depending on whether someone has a February 29th birthday in a way that I'm having trouble with.

Am I supposed to give the great man credit for the cosmological constant, even if he disavowed it?

When a smart guy like Barack Obama says something nakedly disingenuous like "We can't cut our way to prosperity" it makes me want to strangle him. What CAN we do on our way to prosperity? Spend? Spend borrowed money? Pay the highest health care costs for elderly in the world? Can we TAX our way to prosperity ( Read more... )

Who were the five most influential people of the 20th century (your definition of influential)?

I ask b/c I mused about this myself, then in asking my parents found their answers remarkably similar to my own. So I thought I'd ask a wider sample...you know, science!

My firm's name stems from a Magic: the Gathering card, the Skirk Outrider.

...there, I finally said it.

I just said I liked X more than Y, and someone else said in reply, "Those are apples and oranges ( Read more... )