Wes Phillips

I'm fascinated by how tiny little things affect world history—take the malaria parasite for instance. Forget the Black Death or the Influenza outbreak of 1917, Malaria has had a bigger impact on humanity than any other rampaging pathogen—yet, we still don't completely understand how it works.

Good Math, Bad Math says phi is more fun. After all, "if you write φ as a continued fraction, it's [1;1,1,1,1...]; and if you write it as a continued square root, it's 1 + sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1...))))."

My buddy Jeff Wong sent this little video along and I initially resisted posting it, primarily because I used to work in a light show that featured strobe light effects (ah, the '60s, I'm told I enjoyed them). We used to create lots of chaos with unsynchronized strobes moving in different planes, so I was blasé about The Time Fountain's reversing time schtick.

If you're like me, it might seem in retrospect that you spent longer laboring over Thucydides than it took Athens and Sparta to fight the dang thing.

Hilarious send-up of Internet advice columns: An "expert" advises great photographers on how to improve their iconic images.

It's Monday, I have a Jon Carroll column that discusses a new book on the differences between men and women, and it reveals the secret to stimulating a "major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm." So how could I not link to it?

Yeah, that's a shock to anybody who has ever seen any of those commercials on late-night TV. But here's the thing, this Claire Hoffman article from The Los Angeles Times is a wonderful piece of participatory journalism.