A Mathematician, A Physicist, And An Engineer Were In A Hotel For A Convention.

Physicists often quote from T. H. White’s epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, ‘Everything not forbidden is compulsory.’ In other words, if there isn’t a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)

Michio Kaku

Just for your info, actually he’s talking (without quoting) about the Gell-Mann’s Totalitarian Principle:

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

(via scienceisbeauty)

Terrible! This is stupid math, I hate this!

Complex analysis professor after his spur-of-the-moment example problem turned ugly (via mathprofessorquotes)

THIS IS REBLOG RELEVANT FOR ONLY TODAY IN THE WHOLE OF HUMAN HISTORY AND ITS FUTURE

my writing style could best be described as “probably more commas than is entirely necessary”

A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.

This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented. 

… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.

Image credit: Levenson et. al.

The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” published in The New Yorker (via bostonpoetryslam)

Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so. Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, ‘Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?’ ‘Oh, because I’m a poet.’ ‘Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?’ ‘Because I’m a poet.’

Jericho Brown, interviewed by Elisa Gonzalez for Washington Square Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

I wrote the wrong equation on the last problem on the exam, but some of you did heroic things with it.

Numerical analysis professor (via mathprofessorquotes)

you know those girls that always seem to have unlimited sports related shirts and old camp shirts and work out shorts and their hair is always soft and they’re friends with everyone