For most of history, governments taxed things you owned or traded: land, livestock, goods moving across a border, and windows in your house. The idea of taxing what you earn, your income, as a percentage, is
Welcome to Monday Momentum! I’m Gabrielle Birchak. I love physics, and one of the things that fascinates me is momentum, how things actually move forward, whether it’s a flywheel, a steam engine, or a chain of gears. Nothing gets going without it. Life works the same way: ideas, skills, and opportunities don’t move forward unless momentum is created, pushed, pulled,
Today’s three flashcards look at three scientists whose work fundamentally changed their fields. They worked in different disciplines, lived in different eras, and faced different obstacles. What connects them is not symbolism or representation. What connects them is that their differences expanded what science was able to see and solve. Scientific progress rarely arrives because a community agrees. It arrives because
Science fiction is not valuable because it predicts the future. It is valuable because it trains the mind. It gives us a way to practice thinking about systems before we build them, and to practice caring about consequences before consequences have real names.
If you have ever felt your stomach drop when you’ve lost a file on your computer, then you already understand the first lesson of history. History is not only made by people. History is also made by what survives.
It’s Flashcards Friday! This podcast is a follow-up to Tuesday’s episode about Benjamin Banneker. This brilliant individual was predominantly self-taught. I found his story very inspiring because he was self-educated. In other words, he learned everything he knew about astronomy and surveying without being in a classroom. And today, when people say they are self-taught, that means so more than
The nation spoke in the language of liberty, but it had been built to deny liberty. It praised reason, but it fenced reason off by race. Yet here was a self-taught Black astronomer doing precise federal work for the capital of the United States.
It’s Flashcards Fridays. I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host, and today I’m going to do a callback to Tuesday’s episode, which was about capturing thoughts. Last Tuesday’s episode was about photographing thoughts. Today I’m going to talk about those moments where you wish you could have just thought about the subject better, especially when you’re trying to learn something new. But
Can we photograph thoughts? Today on Math! Science! History! we examine the Victorian craze that …
It’s Flashcards Friday, and today I want to talk about something that matters as much as any experiment: how we talk to people who do not trust science. Not how to win an argument. Not how to humiliate someone with a fact. How to build a bridge. Because science does not spread by volume. It spreads when people feel safe