Smparticle2 - Untitled

Grading a slew of mediocre final papers, the grad student watches his months of arduous teaching bear little fruit.

Wanting to feel productive, the grad student prints multiple articles with reckless abandon.

How to Beam ➝ Noemi Makra Style

You are the center of wonderland & Keep the last glow in mind by Jana Luo

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Franz Kafka (via man-of-prose)

Depositing books due at the library, the grad student takes a humiliating whirlwind tour of everything his past self had planned to read.

Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text — even Vanilla Ice lyrics? Is there a deeper meaning? 

The answer is no, and we know that thanks to a mathematical principle called Ramsey theory. So what is Ramsey theory? Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge.

The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that, “while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible.” The sheer size of the Universe guarantees that some of its random elements will fall into specific arrangements, and because we evolved to notice patterns and pick out signals among the noise, we are often tempted to find intentional meaning where there may not be any. So while we may be awed by hidden messages in everything from books, to pieces of toast, to the night sky, their real origin is usually our own minds.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The origin of countless conspiracy theories - PatrickJMT

Animation by Aaron, Sean & Mathias Studios

Boardman Tree Farm

by: Jordan Lacsina

The U.S. Women’s Team win gold at the 2014 Nanning World Championships

Major Research Instrumentation Program

Credit: Photo by Lance Long; courtesy Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago

The Major Research Instrumentation program has helped to fund pieces of research equipment ranging from scanning probe microscopes, which have helped to visualize and characterize nano-scale biological tools, to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers, which allow chemists to identify the individual molecules they make. Not only does this instrumentation help scientists advance their own research, it’s also used to train the next generation of scientists. For example, an X-ray diffractometer at Utah State University allowed Joan Hevel and Sean Johnson to teach four high school students in their lab about protein crystallization. Learn more.