waitbutwhy.com

One neuron's take on how 300 million people can think as one.

An excellent illustrated explainer about what separates animals from humans will make you laugh, cry and say “hey, that’s how my brain works too!”

In the aftermath of Holzhauer’s one bad game, there’s been a lot of discussion about his Final Jeopardy bet, and this is the exact kind of thing I need to discuss.

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the exponential growth of computing intelligence.

Most people sleep about seven or eight hours a night. That leaves 16 or 17 hours awake each day. Or about 1,000 minutes. Let’s think about those 1,000 minutes as 100 10-minute blocks. That’s what you wake up with every day.

What do you call that specific kind of sadness where you feel really sad for someone who isn’t that sad? It’s not a German word.

You probably think cryonics are nonsense. Here’s why you might be wrong.

We all know what sound is. Except actually, no we don’t. Let’s fix that.

Three beans. Two of them are poisonous. You grab one at random. Then a poisonous jelly bean is taken away. Now you have a choice: eat the one in your hand, or switch to the other jelly bean?

History is indescribably complex, and often we find ourselves oversimplifying just to make sense of it all. But mapping out who was alive when offers a better way of understanding the various competing influences during a given timeframe.

Note: Hi. The last few posts turned out to be quite…thorough. So to bring things back to Earth, this will be the first in a string of short posts that will be coming out over

The conventional wisdom might be that this is a case of, “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” We went to the moon over four decades ago, 15 years before anyone owned a computer, so it seems like Mars could have been perfectly doable by now — the limiting factor must be a lack of will. But Musk believes it’s the other way around.

To commemorate the end of the annual Great American Sports Lull (the six week gap between the Superbowl and the beginning of March Madness), it’s time that we had a long-overdue discussion about one of humanity’s oddest phenomena—sports fandom. Throughout the world, the way people feel about sports spans a wide range. Let’s start with what […]

It’s really hard to wrap your head around big numbers. But then, somebody goes and makes it very easy. And very fun. And very, very sour.

One of the things about humans is that they die sometimes, and one of the things humans pay a lot of attention to is other people dying.  We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole “I’m gonna die one day” thing, but the fixation is there, underneath the surface, and one […]

7 Ways To Be Insufferable On Facebook The memory is vivid. New Year’s Day, 2013.  I’m going about my afternoon pleasantly, when I open my email and a friend has forwarded me what she calls a particularly heinous Facebook status from her newsfeed, written by someone we’ll call Daniel.  It read: By the time I […]