As a parent you know, of course, that your kid is the Ship of Theseus. But there are moments when that feels like more than an academic point and those moments are always a little sad.

Michael Nielsen There is a well known order of magnitude calculation which relates the size of the mountains, the radius of the planet, and a bunch of fundamental constants (h, c, G). It gives reasonable numbers for Earth, as well as maximal radius of dwarf planets
(I'm looking for it)

against my better judgment I shall proceed to unpack this shitpost

“When I was younger than about 10 years old, there was nothing more terrible than being made to wait… When I asked my mom why waiting was so much easier for adults than for kids, she said that people measure time relative to how long they have lived.” ⌚️🧵

Brian Skinner David Z. Morris David Chapman Scott Alexander Brian-100% agree. I try to do that here, starting with a broad prior distribution and at the end integrating over a posterior distribution: 'Robust Bayes'. Then readjusting the prior distribution to a new distribution for use next time.
open.substack.com/pub/michaelwei…

Twitter’s new AI-powered trending tab thinks Klay Thompson is being accused of vandalizing houses with bricks

This comes after shooting 0-10 against the Kings

I watched the eclipse from just inside the path of totality and was surprised to see that the last point of light to disappear from the sun was in almost the same location on the sun's perimeter as the first point of light to reappear.

Can you figure out why?

James Propp 1/8

What fraction of the tiles are black? How did you get your answer?

Rising Stars in Physics 2024 will be hosted Columbia Physics Department ! It’s a two-day workshop for early academic career women in physics. I was honored to be a participant last year and really enjoyed the whole program!
Check out the link for more information. physics.columbia.edu/content/2024-r…

wondering if my crusade to make smart people realize how bad the evidence for things is might be doomed because smart people SUPER want there to be evidence for things, like way more than real people do