Anyone who has been a part of athletics or a fitness community has likely heard this question in regards to a particular exercise:

“Yea, but what muscle(s) does it work?”

I have been asked this question by my collegiate teammates, friends, family, and strangers at the gym. I am never offended by it, but the asker is often disappointed with my response.

“I don’t think you’re asking the right question.”

Granted, for some people it is the right question. If you’re a body builder and one of the judges in your last competition complained about how your forearms are wider than your calves, it’s the perfect question. But I am not a bodybuilder, most people are not bodybuilders, and I have never been asked this question by a bodybuilder. A bodybuilder would answer it much better than I could.

But as a collegiate-turned-recreational athlete, training your body by isolating and activating specific muscles is like …more →

It’s a good question: where does plagiarism start? I can make a page of words that I never typed, that I put together using only controls c and v, and it could be entirely my own. Or I could put together words like these, for which I pressed each letter on my keyboard in the precise order I decided they should appear in, and none of it would belong to me. Plagiarized word for original word.

The thing is, you can’t type a word that hasn’t been typed before and still have it mean something. With the limited alphanumeric characters ascribed to English, you may not even be able to type a word that hasn’t been typed before period until you’ve reached a certain character limit well beyond the tweet threshold. Putting something into your own words is not overrated, it’s false. Impossible and untrue. There’s no such thing as your …more →

UPDATE: Since this article was first posted, new experiments have shown that neutrinos from CERN travel subluminally. Additionally, OPERA has since identified errors in their original experiment.

I’m about to use the word neutrino a bunch of times, so I’ll start by telling you what a neutrino is.

For those of you who took Italian in high school, no, a neutrino is not a little neutron. But it is little, and electrically neutral. In fact, neutrinos are so little that they were first thought to have zero mass, like photons, but more recent discoveries revealed that this cannot be true.

Where can we find these little guys? Everywhere. Our sun pumps out neutrinos like Universal Studios does sequels to the Land Before Time. When hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium, a neutrino pops out and starts barreling toward earth at 670 million miles per hour. Each second, trillions of neutrinos tear through …more →

I recently saw the total number of hours I spent playing a particular online video game between the ages of twelve and fifteen. It was a number I’d hoped never to see, and it was somewhere close to 1600.

I made some money playing that video game. I was good at it. I won’t tell you how much it was, but I’ve done the math and it comes out to somewhere around the minimum wage at the time I played, so I can’t feel too bad about the time wasted. A lot of people spend that sort of time working for that kind of money at some point. I was paid to play video games, eat ball park hot dogs and watch comedy central presents before I was even old enough to get a real summer job.

Still, that’s sixty-six days gone, more than a fifth of a year. Assuming I make …more →