Samuel Arbesman
WIRED
Kansas City, MO, United States
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Past articles by Samuel:
I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You
It’s not just a nostalgia thing. Sifting through the past often leads to something new. → Read More
The Mathematics of Food Pairing in Indian Cuisine
The best way to tell if foods taste good together might be...math. And a crew of researchers are testing that idea with spices. → Read More
Photographing Snowflakes in Freefall
A camera has been developed to show photographs of snowflakes in freefall. → Read More
Academic Hiring is an Uphill Battle
Using a new network-based method of ranking departments, you can see the bias and hierarchy of academia very clearly. → Read More
A Sandbox for the Anthropocene
Earth: A Primer is a new app that bridges disciplines and allows you to play with our planet. → Read More
Software Clones: Genetic Variation and Technology
The issue of genetic variation is not just for biology, but is increasingly relevant in the world of software. → Read More
From 53 kilobytes of RAM in 1953
“In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on planet Earth.” This line from George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral makes it clear how far we have come since computing’s dawn. My own laptop now has more than 100,000 times the RAM of the entire planet less than a century ago. While I… → Read More
Measuring Inbreeding in the Greek Gods
In population genetics, there is a method of measuring how inbred a certain individual is, known as the inbreeding coefficient. Previously, I used to this technique to examine the amount of inbreeding in the X-Men and was intrigued to find that there wasn’t any. However, it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to mythology.… → Read More
When Computer Users Were Programmers
There is a lot of excitement around the current trend to get more people to be into computer programming. Whether or not they end up becoming coders, we can all at least can gain a bit from “computational thinking.” Perhaps with this movement, computer users will all eventually become computational creators. Unlikely, but we can… → Read More
The Network Structure of Jewish Texts
Jewish texts are a complex web of references, annotations, and allusions. But, they lack any formal citation structure. A UC Santa Barbara researcher is working on a visualization tool to make the connections clear. → Read More
Long-Term Reading of a Single Publication
It’s fun to look at old issues of a magazine and see how interests have shifted, cultural norms have changed, and even how we use language differently. These are often the kinds of changes that occur slowly, over the course of decades or even lifetimes (see mesofacts). But few people have had the opportunity to read a single publication for that long, in real time. One notable exception is my grandfather,… → Read More
The Perils of Passwords That Are Seemingly Well-Known Facts
I recently learned that well-known facts—specifically those that would be well-known to Americans during World War II but not Germans—were used as passphrases during the Battle of the Bulge: > The list of questions was endless: Who plays centerfield for the Yankees? What’s a Texas Leaguer? Who’s married to actress Betty Grable? What’s Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend’s name? Now, of course, what is considered… → Read More
The Return of History at Long Timescales - Wired Science
Talk to many scientists involved in computational social science, complex systems, and related fields, and at a certain point, someone will mention psychohistory. → Read More
Vanity Science: Eponyms, Knowledge, and Twitter - Wired Science
You know you've always wanted your science equation, theory, or principle -- like Newton, Heisenberg, or Einstein. WIRED Science blogger Sam Arbesman has created a twitterbot that will bestow scientific greatness upon you. → Read More
Is technology making the world indecipherable? — Samuel Arbesman — Aeon Essays
Human ingenuity has created a world that the mind cannot master. Have we finally reached our limits? → Read More
Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge
Some of the most exciting advancements in computing right now come from the field of deep learning, and companies such as Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are all involved because frankly, this kind of interdisciplinary approach isn’t happening in academia. Where are all the generalists, anyway? The startup world is beating academics at their own game. → Read More
Predicting Highly Cited Scientific Papers - Wired Science
Lots of people make predictions. But very few—especially in the pundit world—are held accountable, or even reexamine their predictions. Recently, Mark Newman, a physicist and network scientist at the University of Michigan, decided to actually check his predictions. Five years ... → Read More
The Universality of (Sephardic) Ethnicity, as Explained by Mathematical Genealogy - Wired Science
Last year, Spain announced that it would provide a fast track to citizenship for Sephardic Jews—Jews of Spanish descent (the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492). While there hasn't been movement forward by the Spanish government on this proposal, ... → Read More
Five myths about big data
It’s hardly new. And it won’t revolutionize how we live. → Read More
Five myths about big data
It’s hardly new. And it won’t revolutionize how we live. → Read More