New Improbable Research Blog Entry: "Galam’s Work on Galam Models (Reviewed by Galam)"

Here is my latest post for the Improbable Research blog. It is called "Galam’s Work on Galam Models (Reviewed by Galam)".

Pedestrian Standoffs and Symmetry Breaking

My latest post for the Improbable Research blog concerns pedestrian standoffs and symmetry breaking.

The Acoustics of Breaking Chopsticks

In my latest post for the Improbable Research blog, I discuss the acoustics of breaking chopsticks.

10 Years Later

Things have been so crazy lately that the 10th anniversary of my first entry in this blog has come and gone. The present entry is number 3984.

I knew the anniversary was coming this month, and I had meant to check which exact day I started. But then I got ridiculously busy and forgot all about it until I had a moment to breathe today, and then I remembered.

Controlling Our Bladders Makes Us Better Liars

As I describe in my most recent blurb for the Improbable Research blog, a new study suggests that people are better at lying when they are controlling their bladders.

(Tip of the cap to Karen Kustedjo.)

New to the Blogroll: Improbable Research

I probably should have added the Improbable Research blog to my blogroll years ago, but I have a special impetus to do it now: I'm now going to be writing some blog entries for that site.

The people behind that blog, by the way, are the ones who award the Ig Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, I don't (yet) have an Ig Nobel Prize. On the bright side, I am a proud member of Luxuriantly Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

Additionally, a couple of my papers --- this one and this one --- have been covered by the Improbable Research blog, and Marc Abrahams wrote about them in The Guardian. (I included the links to the Guardian articles above rather than to the associated blog entries.)

I have also performed in a cover of the Improbable Research shows. You can take a look at one of my blog entries from last year for details.

I'm not sure how often I'll write blog entries for Improbable Research --- it essentially depends on my own business and desire to avoid the work I am supposed to be doing --- but I'm certainly looking forward to it! I really like quirky scientific and mathematical (and scientific-ish and mathematical-ish) things, and it will be great to have a wider circulation for my particular brand of snark.

My Blog Entry for Oxford University Press about "Multilayer Networks"

Here is a blog entry that I wrote for Oxford University Press to accompany a review article on multilayer networks by my collaborators and me.

There are also tutorial slides (from a 3-hour tutorial I gave at NetSci 2014) to help guide people through the review article.

Manlio De Domenico, Alex Arenas, and I also have developed software for analysis and visualization of multilayer networks. (There is also an article about our software.)

And if you want to learn more about multilayer networks, we're holding a workshop in July 2015 at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany.

(As a brief correction, "interaction oscillators" in the article should read "interacting oscillators". I didn't catch that typo until reading the published version of my blog entry a few minutes ago.)

Best. Spoiler. Ever.

I can't help it---this demotivational poster is just too funny. Does that make me a bad person?

(This, by the way, is blog post number 2000. I produce a lot of text.)