Beyond Euclid #184
Welcome to Beyond Euclid #184, the newsletter for the best mathematics and science stuff of the week. I am Ali, and I curate cool math and science stuff every week to help you have a better week.
Hey! Here we are with issue 184 of Beyond Euclid.
What makes this week special? I found some seriously solid content. And not just a few things — the kind of stuff that makes you think, "Okay, I think I’ll never run out of good material again."
Also, I tweaked the format a bit. Still trying to find the most useful, most digestible version. Change is good. From now on, I’ll start each issue by diving deep into one thing I learned that week — something truly worth your time.
Then I’ll follow up with shorter, sharper finds — the kind you won’t see everywhere.
If you want to support this thing: Share it with a friend, pass it around, or consider a paid subscription. Seriously — every bit of support, every message, every new reader makes me want to keep going.
Facts That Should Be Illegal to Be This Cool
The Voices in Muse’s “The 2nd Law: Isolated System.” In Muse’s 2012 album The 2nd Law, the song “The 2nd Law: Isolated System” includes voices in the background. These are a mix of lines specially recorded for the song and clips from real news broadcasts. Together, they create a dark and chaotic feeling.
The main voice — a clear woman’s voice explaining the second law of thermodynamics — belongs to Channel 4 news presenter Katie Razzall. Muse asked her to read a short text that matched the theme of the song. The text explains how in an isolated system, disorder (called “entropy”) can only grow. This idea is also the main theme of the whole album.
In the background, you can also hear other voices. These are real news clips, not made for the song. Fans have found out that these clips were taken from different radio and TV channels, all aired on March 29, 2012, between 6:48 PM and 7:10 PM. The band used them to make the song feel even more chaotic and real.
Some of the topics you can hear in those news clips:
Crime: A report about gunshots heard at 3 a.m. in a low-income housing area.
Economy and politics: Rising diesel prices (146.98 pence), struggles in the European Union, and poor families falling behind.
Protests and activism: Speeches about trying to build a united opposition movement.
Time pressure: A clip mentioning the phrase “beat the clock,” about working under constant deadlines.
Muse used these mixed voices to show how complex and overwhelming modern life can feel. The song isn’t just music — it’s also a picture of global problems and nonstop information.
In live shows, the band sometimes replaces these spoken parts with different sound samples. One of the best-known examples is a clip from a BBC documentary about “numbers stations” — mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts used for spying during the Cold War.
Mathematics + Physics + Art
📍160 days until evenings officially start getting lighter again.
🔤 TLA stands for three-letter acronym. Think CEO, FBI, PDF, OMG, WTF — the list goes on. Linguists love that sort of thing. Total possible combos with 26 letters: 17,576 (26x26x26). At least 94% have shown up in scientific papers in a dataset of 18 million scientific article abstracts.
📍 The beautifully simple proof that √2 ∉ Q. Assume √2 is rational. Then show even numbers can’t equal odd numbers. Boom. Contradiction.
📐 17-year-old trashes a 40-year-old conjecture. Hannah Cairo disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture — a problem untouched since the 1980s. If the conjecture were true, several other results would’ve automatically stood. And yes — the person who did this hasn’t even graduated high school yet. She starts her PhD at Maryland this fall.
📍 I have curated 10 fascinating scientist biographies. Genius, madness, obsession — and the occasional explosion. These aren’t just stories of discovery, they’re portraits of wildly human lives.
🧠 “How Mathematics Built the Modern World.” A perfect read for a quiet moment. It gently walks you through how numbers went from clay tablets to building the very foundations of modern life.
📍 Stick-Boy builds a da Vinci bridge — and teaches Dad how No nails. No glue. Just genius. A sweet little lesson in physics, balance, and parenting.
Bookmark This Gem
📍 If you ever find yourself in Tokyo: There’s a place called “Book and Bed” where you can sleep among bookshelves. I’ve added it to my bucket list — maybe you should too.
📍 You can vote for Tree of the Year: But don’t just vote — each tree has a fascinating story behind it. Take a moment to read them.
📍 All paper sizes in one place: A clear, comprehensive site with every international paper size and format you might need.
📍 Online spirograph alert: Massively addictive drawing tool you didn’t know you needed. Go ahead, lose an hour: inspiral-web.nathanfriend.com
📍 The beautiful geometry of Budapest's staircases. They are like time machines.
📍 How to make a Lego Commodore 64. Old-school tech, brick by brick.
📍 Hundreds of knots. All animated. All actually useful. A dangerously satisfying rabbit hole: animatedknots.com
📍 The Public Domain Review’s image archive is a gem. Weird, wonderful, and beautifully curated. A visual rabbit hole you won’t regret falling into.
📍 A lovely short doc on Gramercy Typewriter. A father and son keep the typewriter trade alive in NYC — 84 years and counting. Part of a series on family-run crafts that refuse to disappear.
News
🧪 Nanoplastics: invisible to the eye, impossible to ignore. A new study in Nature reveals that the upper layer of the North Atlantic alone holds around 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics. These are plastic fragments smaller than a human hair — and they’re everywhere. Why it matters? They’re already in the food web.
🐢 Turtles don’t get cancer. At least not like we do. Researchers analyzed hundreds of turtle necropsies. The result? Cancer is vanishingly rare. What the study found? Only about 1% had tumors. And even when tumors appeared, they almost never spread.The next breakthrough in cancer research might come not from a lab, but from inside a shell.
🚰 Your tap shouldn't be a cancer delivery system. A new EWG study finds that treating water for multiple contaminants — arsenic, chromium-6, nitrate — together could prevent over 50,000 cancer cases in the U.S. The current model: “One pollutant, one solution.” What we need: “Treat them all, save more lives.”
🍭 1 in 5 U.S. food and drink items contain synthetic dyes — and they’re targeting kids. Researchers from the George Institute analyzed nearly 40,000 packaged products. Result: 19% contained synthetic food dyes. In kid-targeted products, that jumps to 28%. Why it matters? Synthetic dyes are linked to hyperactivity and attention problems. 60% of Ferrero products contain synthetic dyes.
💉 MIT just built a tiny device that could save lives during blood sugar crashes. MIT engineers developed an implantable device that releases glucagon when blood sugar drops dangerously low. Glucagon is a hormone used to reverse severe hypoglycemia. The device kicks in automatically — no injections needed.
🍷 1 in 10 young workers is clocked in — and buzzed. A new study shows 8.9% of U.S. workers in their 30s use alcohol, marijuana, or hard drugs during work hours. The highest rates? Food service and safety-sensitive jobs like construction.
🌵 Drought may be here to stay. "Is this just a climate cycle, or a human-made disaster?" The answer: the second one. A new Cornell study led by Flavio Lehner shows that declining rainfall in the American Southwest is directly linked to human-caused climate change and air pollution. And the drought? Likely permanent.
☀️ 4.6 billion years in, the Sun is finally trending. From the first solar panel in 1954 to 2022: 1 terawatt installed. The second terawatt came just 2 years later. The third is already in motion. Today, a coal plant’s worth of solar is added every 15 hours.
In 2024, 96% of new global electricity capacity came from renewables.
In the U.S., it’s 93% — mostly solar, wind, and batteries.
California ran on 82% renewables for an entire day.
💸 In 2023, migrants paid $51 billion in transfer fees. The U.S. gave $66 billion in foreign aid that same year. Not far off — nearly equal. Hard to tell who’s helping whom.
This Week I Learned That
✏️ Portugal’s only pencil factory is still standing — and still family-run. Viarco is Portugal’s first and only pencil manufacturer. Now managed by the fourth generation of the same family. Old machines, colorful pencils, slow but steady production.
💇♂️ In North Korea, there are 28 state-approved haircuts. Freedom not included.
North Korea allows just 28 official hairstyles: 14 for men, 14 for women. Married women must keep it short. Single women get a bit more flair — longer, maybe wavy, but still controlled. Men can’t grow hair longer than 5 cm (2 inches). Older men get a 7 cm pass.
I always enjoy these posts but today you have excelled yourself.
This was fun! I read straight through without clicking any links because I didn't want to get distracted from your post. Scrolling back to the top now.