Arkapravo Bhaumik

Poet

[Arkapravo Bhaumik @ArkapravoTweets]

Pending El Niño 2026

1) https://t.co/JZaOIbR8TD

2) https://t.co/i1ZvXSh6yB

3) https://t.co/j4j55ZTNAM

4) https://t.co/rVW02PgITv

5) https://t.co/BX9Rm3gm9S

[Arkapravo Bhaumik @ArkapravoTweets]

El Niño warning
https://t.co/wcjoSXtG4n

[The Scientific Lens @LensScientific]

10 Best Books on Physics and Astronomy:

1. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands

2. Introduction to Electrodynamics by David J. Griffiths

3. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths

4. Classical Mechanics by John R. Taylor

5. An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie

6. Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity by Sean M. Carroll

7. An Introduction to Thermal Physics by Daniel V. Schroeder

8. Gravitation by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler

9. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

10. Cosmos by Carl Sagan

[Arkapravo Bhaumik @ArkapravoTweets]

@ClimateBen The very fact that such topics are now a part of mainstream scientific discussion speaks volumes on the precariousness of the times we live in.

[Ben See @ClimateBen]

'the consequences for mankind could be "unimaginable."'

[Philosophy Of Physics @PhilosophyOfPhy]

In 1898, an Austrian physicist published a radical mathematical theory that claimed the entire universe was slowly, irreversibly ticking toward its own death.

The elite scientific establishment mocked him so relentlessly that he slipped into a deep depression and eventually took his own life.

Only a few years later, the world realized he was entirely right.

His name was Ludwig Boltzmann.

Today, his breakthrough formula is carved onto his tombstone in Vienna.

Yet outside of the physics community, almost no one understands the brutal, mind-bending philosophical truth he discovered about how our lives actually work.

In the late 19th century, physics was neat, orderly, and beautiful. Scientists believed that if you knew the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future perfectly.

The universe was a flawless clock.
Boltzmann looked at the world and realized that was an illusion.

He wanted to solve a deceptively simple riddle: Why does time only move forward? Why does a dropped coffee mug shatter into a hundred pieces, but a hundred scattered pieces never spontaneously jump back together to form a mug?

The laws of standard physics said it could happen. The math didn't forbid it.

So why didn't it?

Boltzmann realized the establishment was looking at the problem completely wrong. They were trying to track every single particle individually. It was an impossible formula.

Instead, Boltzmann decided to use probability and statistics. He stopped looking at individual atoms and started looking at the chaos of the crowd.

He invented a concept called Entropy, the mathematical measure of disorder.

His breakthrough was simple but devastating:

There is only one specific way for the atoms in your coffee mug to be perfectly arranged. But there are trillions of disordered ways for those same atoms to be scattered across the floor.

Things don’t break because the universe is malicious. They break because chaos is statistically overwhelming. Order is rare; disorder is infinite.

Boltzmann proved that the universe is constantly, inevitably moving from a state of low entropy (perfect order) to high entropy (maximum chaos). This cosmic slide toward disorder is the very reason time exists. The "arrow of time" is just the universe getting messier.

The professors of his day were furious. They hated his math because it relied on probability instead of certainty. They refused to believe that the fundamental laws of reality were governed by statistics.

But Boltzmann’s math laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics and explained the fate of the cosmos.

The philosophical lesson Boltzmann left behind is a cold, liberating truth for everyday life:
Order requires deliberate energy. Chaos is free.

Most people treat problems in their lives, a collapsing relationship, a chaotic career, a messy mind, as a sign of personal failure. They think they did something uniquely wrong.

But Boltzmann’s math proves that if you leave any system alone, it will naturally decay into chaos all by itself. Your room doesn't get messy because you are a bad person; it gets messy because the laws of physics dictate that there are infinitely more ways for your clothes to be on the floor than in the closet.

If you want to maintain order, sanity, or success in any area of your life, you cannot rely on things "just working out." The universe is actively trying to scramble your plans.

What is an area of your life right now that is sliding into chaos? Stop waiting for it to fix itself. Chaos is the default setting of the universe. What is the precise, deliberate energy you need to inject into that system today to fight back against the entropy?

[Paco Arnau @ciudadfutura]

Dostoievski, el gran maestro de la novela rusa, sobre la primera novela universal:
«En todo el mundo no hay obra de ficción más sublime y fuerte que ésta. Representa hasta ahora su suprema y más alta expresión del pensamiento humano, la más amarga ironía que pueda formular el hombre, y si se acabase el mundo y alguien le preguntase a los mortales: "Veamos, ¿qué habéis sacado en limpio de vuestra vida y qué conclusión definitiva habéis deducido de ella?", podrían los hombres mostrar 'El Quijote' y decir: "Ésta es mi conclusión respecto a la vida… ¿y podríais condenarme por ella?"».
(Imagen: 'Don Quijote', Pablo Picasso, 1955).

[Cliff Pickover @pickover]

Mathematics, physics.

In her short life, mathematician Emmy Noether changed the face of physics.

Article: https://t.co/jKf2Ki3PQ0

[Phil Hoyeck @PAHoyeck]

Just ordered these two books. Metaphysics has never been more cooked.

[Paddy Briggs 🇪🇺 🇵🇸 🏳️‍🌈🇬🇱 🇪🇸 @PaddyBriggs]

Well said Beefy. All is forgiven.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A freelance journalist who had never taken a statistics course wrote a 142-page book in 1954 that professional statisticians still hand to students before anything else, because nobody before him had bothered to explain the tricks in plain language.

His name was Darrell Huff. The book is called How to Lie with Statistics.

I read it in one sitting and spent the next three days noticing the tricks everywhere.

Over 1.5 million copies have sold in English alone. It became a standard college textbook in the 1960s and 70s. Seventy years later it is still in print, still assigned, still the first thing a working statistician reaches for when they want to teach someone to think clearly about numbers.

The man who wrote it was not a researcher. He was a freelancer who wrote how-to articles for magazines. He had no PhD, no academic post, no institutional affiliation. He just understood that numbers could lie without technically being wrong, and he thought someone should explain how.

His opening line sets the whole tone of the book.

"The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense."

That one sentence is the entire argument. The manipulation is not coming. It already happened. It happened this morning in the article you read and the chart someone showed you at work and the study your doctor quoted. The only question is whether you know what to look for.

Huff called the first trick the Well-Chosen Average.

When someone tells you the average salary at a company is $80,000, they have told you almost nothing. If the CEO earns $2 million and the 20 employees earn $30,000 each, the mean is $80,000. The median is $30,000. Both are technically correct. One is a lie. The person reporting the number chose which average to use, and they almost always chose the one that served their argument. Huff's rule: whenever you see an average with no description of which average it is, ask.

The second trick he named the Gee-Whiz Graph.

A line chart shows company profits rising. The line shoots nearly vertical, almost doubling in height across the chart. You feel impressed. Then you look at the y-axis and notice the chart does not start at zero. It starts at 94. The actual increase in profits was 3 percent. The dramatic visual was produced entirely by cropping the bottom of the chart. Nothing in the data changed. The picture changed everything.

Every news organization on earth still does this every day.

The third trick is the one that should change how you read every study you ever encounter. Huff called it Post Hoc Rides Again, which is short for the Latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this.

Cities with more churches have more violent crime. Therefore churches cause violence. The logic is airtight. The conclusion is absurd. Both church attendance and crime go up as population grows. The two numbers track each other because a third variable drives both. The correlation is real. The cause is invented.

Huff showed that this structure is not a rare mistake. It is the default pattern of almost every study reported in a newspaper, because causation is a boring word and because proves is a better headline than correlates with.

The fourth trick was the one that floored me. He called it the Semi-Attached Figure.

A headache pill company claims their product is twice as fast as the competition. The study behind the claim is real. The product was tested and the numbers are accurate. What the advertisement does not mention is that the study measured absorption rate into the bloodstream, not relief of headaches. The two things are related but not identical. The statistic is real. It is attached to the wrong conclusion.

Huff said this is the most dangerous trick of all because the number is never fabricated. You cannot fact-check a semi-attached figure by verifying the statistic. You have to ask whether the statistic actually measures what the claim requires it to measure.

Almost nobody asks.

There is one part of Huff's story that most people who recommend the book leave out.

Years after he wrote it, he was hired by the tobacco industry. He worked on a follow-up manuscript called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, designed to cast doubt on the research connecting cigarettes to cancer. The book was never published. He testified before Congress in an attempt to undermine the statistical evidence against tobacco.

The man who wrote the clearest guide to spotting statistical deception spent the end of his career deploying those same tricks against evidence that was killing people.

That detail does not make the book wrong. The tricks he described are real and the defenses he taught are still the right ones. But it is a reminder that the tools in the book are neutral. Understanding how lies are built does not protect you from choosing to build one.

The crooks already know these tricks.

Some of them wrote the manual.

What is one statistic you have seen recently that you now think deserves a second look?

[Deep Vellum @DeepVellum]

The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali by Uzma Aslam Khan—a lyrical, gripping homage to those omitted from collective memory—will be available in paperback July 21st, 2026.

Pre-order here: https://t.co/tMnXyZ0XZD

[Sourabh Patravale @whyloop_]

People don't give enough credit to @AltCarbonIndia's magazine design aesthetics, so here's me doing my part.

https://t.co/AmNVcGVC7a

[Arkapravo Bhaumik @ArkapravoTweets]

Finally India wins at home, after 5 straight home tests defeats. The series with New Zealand was painful (0-3), and South Africa humiliated India (0-2). #India #Afghanistan #Cricket

[Pontus Karlsson @coolastekatten]

as coding agents are going to enter into new industries, here’s a good reminder

“If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.”

from the art of science and engineering

[John ‘NR’ Wayne @nr_wayne]

Currently reading:

Schattenfroh is undeniably challenging but often excellent. I’ve only just begun Proust, and I haven’t found my groove with it yet. The Bori Praper is a breezy, hilarious delight.

Cheers.
What’s everyone got goin on?!

[Kyle Kabasares @kylekabasares]

Finally going to learn what the fuss is all about

[Rod Serling Memorial Foundation @RodSerlingFndtn]

Sunday (political) comic!

[Robert Talisse @RobertTalisse]

I feel like I should have known about this sooner

[Arkapravo Bhaumik @ArkapravoTweets]

@SolvingForZ Goes on to show how e is such a unique number