Because you get websites like Paul's Boutique Samples and References List, which, of course, attempts to codify every sample, quote, and homage from the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique. Probably more than you ever wanted to know, but (IMO) that's what makes it so cool: It was done out of love, pure and simple.
I'm not a member of the games generation—well, I kind of miss Zork! and Adventure, but other than Myst, most of them require hand/eye coordination that I simply lack—which is not to say that I'm immune to the levels of complexity and artistry that many games exhibit, simply that I don't get 'em, most of the time.
Have you tried to buy graph paper recently? Those 16-year-old clerks at Staples have no clue what you're talking about. If you really want to see their eyes glaze over, tell'em when you went to school you had to carry your own hand-powered computer called a slide rule.
Not the usual "ain't they cute?" discussion, but a look into Toxoplasma, a parasite that has a strange behavioral action on rats—and perhaps on men and women as well.
Huge database of animated .GIFs that demonstrate mathematic concepts. Need to explain the Conchoid of Nicomedes? Poincaré Hyperbolic Disks? Semicubical Parabola Involutes? Sweat no more—just point and click.
No, but it behaves like one, according to researchers who used an internet game called www.wheresgeorge.com to predict the geographical spread of epidemics. How's that work? Money, like viruses, is spread by people and, since people travel great distances these days, coming up with a way to chart how far and fast an epidemic can travel has been nigh on to impossible.
Audiophiles are lucky when it comes to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, especially when you consider the embarrassment of riches that are the Shostakovich String Quartets. If you dig LPs, there are two essential batches of complete recordings: the Borodin Quartet and the Fitzwilliam Quartet. On CD, there's the fabulous live edition by the Emerson Quartet, rendered in superb sound by Da-Hong Seetoo.
You simply have to read "The Peekaboo paradox," a fantastic piece of writing by Gene Weingarten. (It's long, so you might prefer to print it out and save it for later.) It conforms to a formula I admiringly call The New Yorker paradigm, in which a writer introduces you to a subject you think you don't have much interest in (in this case a children's party entertainer) and makes it fascinating. Then you discover that the real story is so much deeper and compelling than you could have ever imagined.