Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.
January 26th, 2009 — Art, Design, Mathematics, Pop Culture
Burlington, VT freelance graphic designer Jess Bachman’s Wallstats.com: The Art of Information blog converts statistical facts about American culture into picturesque visualizations. This piece, above, makes comprehensible the quantity of suds gulped down each year by thirsty USA-ers—50 billion pints, more per capita than any nation on Earth. I mean, check out the size of that Boeing 747, in comparison. Hey, Sully: Try landing your plane on this.
March 26th, 2008 — Books, Culture, Mathematics, Science
Book agent John Brockman’s Edge site is like crack if you’re into reading some of the world’s smartest thinkers address compelling questions related to their own typically cutting-edge research, or larger issues about the role of science in human culture.
Reuben Hersh is one such Edge intellectual. He’s professor emeritus in the University of New Mexico’s department of mathematics and statistics and author of the 1999 book What Is Mathematics, Really?, right.
Hersh’s 1997 mind-blowing elaboration on numeracy, below, is proof perfect, not only of the maxim that the more one understands a subject, the more simple and elemental their questions become but, that those questions—the simplest ones—are always the hardest to answer.
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