Ask A Genius 935: Mathematicizing Our Collaborations

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There it is. So we are back after a while. I wanted to cover a little bit about the colossal amount of work over a decade or more, in fact, more than a decade, doing a lot of the independent journalistic work that I've done. I typically pick a topic, and …

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Ask A Genius 934: A badass with fruits and a knife

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: All right, I eat fruit with a knife because I’m a badass, or maybe because I don’t want to break off my old teeth. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m skeptical of the badass. Rosner: Say again? Jacobsen: I’m skeptical of the badass. Rosner: I’m sitting here with a knife, just cutting on a peach. I don’t even …

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Ask A Genius 933: Population Dynamics and Energy Consumption

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: Okay, we will discuss population dynamics and energy consumption. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you want to start with population or energy? Rosner: Well, I am just going to start with how I came upon it. I just read an article that people have been saying for a while because it’s true that a quarter …

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Ask A Genius 931: Italian Micromosaics in “Bloaty” Los Angeles

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did these mosaics start in Italy? Rick Rosner: Yes, it started in the 1500s because the Pope noticed that tourists in the Vatican. All of their breath was fucking up the frescas. It was making the walls moist. The frescas were falling apart. He commissioned artisans to replace many frescas …

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Ask A Genius 930: Supplements, Heartburn, Twitter

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about these randomized supplements? Rick Rosner: I take a bunch of vitamins. I’ve put them in various places to remind me that I need to re-order them, or that’s where they end up, and I don’t clean them out: Heartburn pills. Jacobsen: Do you get heartburn?  Rosner: Every once in a while, I’ve …

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Ask A Genius 929: I offered to help clean: or, Diary of a grotesque foot in a messy office

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: Somewhere there is a photo if it exists, of Tom Cruise holding my grotesque foot, because it resided at Jimmy Kimmel’s for several years, he was at a party there. Somebody made him hold the foot. I saw the photo, but I didn’t get a copy sent. Then it is resting …

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Ask A Genius 928: More Chapters in Rick’s Forever Book

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: I'm just going through my chapter outlines here. Yesterday I think, we were talking about how we are used to crappy service and glitches and hacking of our devices. So, even though we've got these cutting-edge devices and tech that stream more information into our homes than ever before, we're also used to …

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Ask A Genius 927: Women’s Increasing Domination in Key Industries

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we are continuing to see women take over key Industries: medicine, law, and some areas of science, which has been a trend happening more rapidly progressively in the last three decades, maybe four, where women are more educated, and they are picking more relevant industries for sort of long-term employment in …

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Ask A Genius 926: Machines Fighting Machines?

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk very briefly about reductio ad absurdum of the concept of war, technically in the state of modern warfare because we're moving into a world more and more where drones are becoming part of things and I don't mean just drones that fly around and suicide themselves into …

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