End of the Year Roundup

It’s been a great first year blogging at Wired Science! Therefore, I thought it would be appropriate to do a little roundup of some of the most successful and/or my favorite posts from this past year (out of a total of 90, including this one). So here’s a list:

• New Ways to Measure Science: an essay about how the current methodologies of measuring contributions to science are far too narrow and need to be expanded
• The Mathematics of Lego: exactly what it sounds like!
• The Inbreeding Coefficient of Superheroes: Need some mathematics for calculating the amount of inbreeding among superheroes? Look no further.
• How to Search for the Golden Age of Television and Television Show Longevity By Network: Some simple attempts at the mathematics of pop culture, focusing on television.
• The Genetics of Luck: Wherein I speculate (lots of speculation!) about what it would mean for luck to be genetic.
• How to Evolve a Constant of the Universe: A fun essay that combines genetic programming with fundamental constants of the universe.
• Measuring the Complexity of the Dates of Holidays: Kolmogorov complexity meets Labor Day.
• To Understand 3-D Printing We Need to Remember 2-D Printing: Taking the analogy between the two types of printing to some logical confusions.
• Spider-Man Has Good Taste in Textbooks: Proof that Peter Parker is a fan of my grad school advisor.
• Kansas City and the Flash’s Hometown: Evidence that the Flash is from Kansas City!
• The Results Are In: Scientists Are Workaholics: Research for something that everyone already knew.
• Collective Nouns for Facts: a miscellany of facts.
• Writing Pi Text by Accident: Math in literature.

And here are three Q&A’s on this blog I’ve done over the year:

• The Beauty and Delight of Mathematics – Q&A with Steven Strogatz
• Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success – Q&A with Michael Mauboussin
• Polio and Undiscovered Public Knowledge – Q&A with Harvey Arbesman

As a bonus, here are three caricatures that have been published of me over the course of the year. I dub them Pep Boys, Mr. Clean, and Old Man, respectively: