Richard Feynman was born on 11 May 1918. Today would have been his 95th birthday. This isn’t a paean to a physicist – it could be, but I’m sure millions of words have been published on this – but a game for wordsmiths and numberphiles.

Within the highly restricted format of the Pilish Poem, the aim is to be both enlightening and eloquent; plus to have some fun playing around.You can follow my train of thoughts at my first article on this so, without repeating myself, I’ll jump right in with the basic rules of what constitutes a Feyman Point Pilish Poem.

The well-known moral dilemma about sacrificing a few to save many has now been answered by extraction of empirical data from conceivable parallel worlds via obvious-operators instantiated in neural networks that were tuned by evolutionary algorithms into weak quantum measurement of counterfactuals. The scientists came up with an intriguing variation of the traditional setup:

There are three gondolas suspended from cables over an abyss, all attached to one main beam which will break soon if not at least one gondola’s cable is cut.

The gondolas are prepared as follows:

An anti-cocaine vaccine has been successfully tested in primates, bringing it a step closer to human clinical trials.

Do you support unions, a minimum wage, dislike business and hate child labor and then tell all of your friends on your iPhone?

People rationalize moral standards when it comes to their own lives, say economists writing in Science. It's easy to lament child labor and exploitation of the work force but if you are not willing to pay $2,000 for a phone, you are part of the problem and Tweeting about social issues on that phone helps precisely no one but corporate shareholders.

'Pestilence', widespread outbreaks of deadly contagious disease, are known throughout history. In popular translations of the Christian Bible, Pestilence is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Today we call them pandemics but they are nothing like plagues of old, when up to 33% of a population was eradicated, like during the Black Death of the 14th century.

Using advanced underwater imaging techniques, one of the most detailed analysis ever of the archaeological remains of the lost medieval town of Dunwich - 'Britain's Atlantis' - have been revealed.

The Carmona necropolis in Spain is a collection of funeral structures built between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. One of them is known as the Elephant's Tomb because a statue in the shape of an elephant was found in the interior of the structure.

Hopefully You Will Get Smarter


Despite the wide use of sentences beginning with a word ending in -ly  and despite the acceptance of such usage by people who know how language is used in the real world: despite these facts there are still some people who throw up their hands in horror at such "abuse" of language.  Having been taught no doubt by repeaters of that Latin-based snobbery which was once peddled as English grammar, such people insist that -ly words are adverbs and as such they must, must, must - on pain of death - modify a verb.  "Where is the verb?", they cry.  That is woo of the first water.

We all know about people’s personalities, and anyone with a dog or a cat will also tell you about their temperaments. More surprising, though, is how many others, from octopuses to frogs and even spiders have them. So why behave according to a personality, when flexibility could allow smarter choices?

Cirrus clouds, the thin wisps of vapor that coalesce in the upper layers of the troposphere and trail across the sky, often more than 10 miles above the Earth's surface, influence our global climate, cooling the planet by reflecting incoming solar radiation and warming it by trapping outgoing heat.

Understanding the mechanisms by which these clouds form would help scientists make accurate predictions about future climate patterns.