We live in a world where it’s difficult to find reliable information. You can find it in articles and papers – if you understand the language – but most of them are specialised, and articles written for the general public tend to gloss over important things.
Distractions is a growing collection of articles, both scientific and philosophical, aimed at presenting various topics in a way which is readable and understandable, but which also carry with them supporting references which you can check out yourself if you want to dive deeper.
They’re written to make you think and hopefully send you down a rabbithole. Happy reading!
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Latest Articles:
- The Monty Hall Problem
This problem keeps cropping up online when really it’s been done to death and you’d think everyone would have agreed and understood it by now. Apparently not because it appears to still attract the same comments, so perhaps we can think about it in a different way. - Liquids and Capillary Action
If oxygen atoms didn’t pull electrons a little bit harder than hydrogen ones, water molecules wouldn’t be ‘sticky’, they wouldn’t form surface tension, vapour wouldn’t form raindrops, plants couldn’t take up water from the ground, and life as we know it would not exist. - The Train and The Fly
One of the enduring paradoxes is that of The Train and The Fly. It puzzled a lot of people until my physics teacher explained it. The answer turned out to not just be about the train and the fly, but about how we view the world and how we perceive reality. - Water Security in Africa
Egypt has a very strong agricultural base despite being one of the driest places on Earth, and yet Ethiopia receives far more rain but grows very little. It’s all to do with agreements reached in the 1900s about the use of water in the NIle. - Frost Flowers
I first heard about Frost Flowers in the waters of the Artic, but when I started looking into the science behind how they formed I discovered that similar structures also appear on land, and in freshwater, although they develop in a completely different way. - Cotton
Egypt grow what is regarded as the best cotton the world, but also use a lot of water which is badly needed by the other African countries upstream along the Nile. That led to me promising to write an article about cotton and how it’s possible to verify the source of cotton products. I sincerely wish I had not, for it is far more complicated than I had imagined.