Quotes by Matt Parker

“I think the perfect cross country course needs to be varied. It needs to have some hills, some woods, trails, flat areas.”

“This place has so much history. A great course has to have some history. They were running championship meets here back in the 1960s. There is just a feel to it.”

“This is just ridiculous. Theres no way to explain this.”

“Jason passed five guys right at the end. That won the meet for us.”

“A lot of people stepped up real fast to make it happen.”

“I thought it was very interesting. I liked how he used business (examples) as part of everyday life.”

“Theres no reason to go that way. They are going to kill someone going this way.”

“When one guy is off, we have another guy who picks us up.”

“Cory has come through for us in key situations all year. He has some pop.”

“Its one of our top companies, their headquarters is based here and that has significant impact on our national presence.”

Never forget you are the successful product of a harsh universe; the simple fact that you exist, whence trillions of other organisms do not, is a mathematical miracle.

“A correlation is never enough to argue that one thing is causing another. There is always the chance that something else is influencing the data, causing the link. Between 1993 and 2008, the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious “phantom of Heilbronn,” a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s “most dangerous woman,” and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.”

“A crude analogy for resonance is that of a pendulum, often modeled as a child in a swing. If you are charged with pushing the child and you just thrust your arms out at random intervals, you will not do very well: you’d hit the child coming toward you and slow the swing down as often as you’d give the swing a push as it’s going away and speed it up. Even a regular pushing rate that did not match the movement of the swing would leave you pushing empty air most of the time. Only if you push exactly at the rate that matches when the child is directly in front of you and starting their descent will you achieve success. When the timing of your effort matches the frequency the swing is moving at, each push adds a little more energy into the system.”

“People stepping up and down should not be a problem, and even the 1-Hertz sideways back-and-forth movement of humans walking should not have been a problem, as everyone is likely to be stepping at different times. For anyone pushing with their right foot, another person would be pushing with their left, and all the forces would pretty much cancel each other out. This sideways resonance would only be a problem if enough people walked perfectly in step. This is the “synchronous” in “synchronous lateral excitation” from pedestrians. On the Millennium Bridge, people did start to walk in step, because the movement of the bridge affected the rhythm at which they were walking. This formed a feedback loop: people stepping in sync caused the bridge to move more, and the bridge moving caused more people to step in sync.”

“Even when we cannot see parts of the moon, they are still physically there. During a new moon, when it is completely lit from behind, it appears only as a black, starless circle in the sky. For while we sometimes cannot see the moon, it is still there as a silhouette. Which is why I get upset when a crescent moon is shown with stars visible through the middle of it!”

“The sixty-story John Hancock Tower was built in Boston in the 1970s, and it was discovered to have an unexpected torsional instability. The interplay of the wind between the surrounding buildings and the tower itself was causing it to twist. Despite being designed in line with current building codes, torsional instability found a way to twist the building, and people on the top floors started feeling seasick. Once again, it was tuned mass dampers to the rescue! Lumps of lead weighing 330 tons were put in vats of oil on opposite ends of the fifty-eighth floor. Attached to the building by springs, the lead weights damp any twisting motion and keep the movement below noticeable levels.”