Frank at ADK Homeroom

I remember when the New Yorker used to make fun of small local papers by publishing the papers' errors - misplaced modifiers, funny typos, etc. If the New Yorker had any spine left, they could make fun of the NYT.

@robinhanson Disagree

My wife says I should no longer wear a shirt due to this hole that constitutes a 5x10^-5 fraction of the shirt's surface area. Unseen if the shirt is tucked into my pants. Do you agree?

🚨Nuclear Tests, Missing Objects, and a New Paper That Corroborates Vasco's Findings There's a new replication paper out looking at those Palomar sky survey plates from the 1950s. Using the same dataset Villarroel and Bruehl worked with, but this time Brian Doherty ran the analysis independently to see if the claims hold up, and they did. We're talking about thousands of one off light events captured on photographic plates between 1949 and 1957. They show up once, then they're gone. No matching object either before or after. That is already a bit odd, but the issue is what happens when you line those dates up with nuclear tests because when you look at days within one day of a detonation, the number of these transients goes up. Not by a tiny amount either, there is roughly a 45% increase in likelihood compared to normal days. That holds even when you factor in weather, cloud cover, moonlight, all the usual things that could mess with observations. They shuffled the nuclear test dates thousands of times to see if random timing could recreate the same pattern but it couldn't. The real dates keep producing a stronger signal than the randomized ones and at that point you've got a correlation you can't just brush off. They also checked where these transients show up in the sky relative to Earth's shadow. Anything inside that shadow can’t reflect sunlight. So if these were random flashes, or plate defects, or something atmospheric, you'd expect them to be spread out more evenly. They show up far less often inside the shadow than they should. About a third of what you'd expect based on the geometry. This tells you that whatever these things are, they tend to be visible when sunlight can hit them. This is all pre-Sputnik. During that period there were no satellites up there. No debris fields, or orbital junk reflecting sunlight back toward Earth. If you try to explain it as atmospheric effects, you run into the shadow problem. The upper atmosphere doesn't care about a geosynchronous shadow cone. If you try to say it's just bad plates or scanning artifacts, that also doesn't explain why the events avoid specific regions of the sky in a way that lines up with orbital lighting conditions. So you end up in a tight spot, you either have some unknown interaction between nuclear detonations and observational conditions that produces both a timing signal and a spatial pattern tied to sunlight, or you're looking at something that behaves like reflective objects in orbit before we officially had anything in orbit. This is further confirmation of the Vasco teams findings. Replicated, tested and confirmed. Source: arxiv.org/pdf/2604.00056 #ufotwitter #uapX #Science #Astronomy @DrBeaVillarroel

I don't find this to be true. I mean WW1 is the watershed event of the 20th century. Frost. Millay. Fitzgerald. Lovecraft.

I have 6 close friends—late 30s/early 40s, all liberal, progressive women—and out of the 7 of us, only 2 have children. All the rest have expressed concern or regret, wondering if they made the right decisions in life putting off family. The oldest went to freeze her eggs thinking she had time and they said “you should have done this years ago,” devastating her. All have told me they feel like the messaging over our lives devaluing motherhood, glorifying career and saying we had lots of time impacted their life choices, and they’re frustrated. One of the friends with a child says she feels guilty sometimes that she has a toddler while the rest are struggling over this in different ways. Yes, we’re from big cities so it might be more common, but there are so many women out there who are struggling right now with being older and childless. We need more women speaking up for them, and warning the next generation of women about the reality of waiting too long. The Matt Yglesiases of the world can sit the f down.

@davepl1968 I saw it live in my HS library. The French teacher gasped and ran out of the room crying. Do you have any evidence for your claim?

99.9% of people who "experienced" the Challenger disaster saw it on replay and now remember it as live. Almost NO ONE was watching. Everyone thinks they were. It's a fascinating collective false memory.

@ydeigin Oh come on. Gaetz is a fool, and the US government is incompetent, but do you not think aliens could get around high school biology? I mean WE can get around high school biology so... yeah. Maybe this was a 4/1 joke.

LOL, what? High school biology FAIL 😂

@bernardtjoy Glitter from @ae_stallings is on that list.

Which would you say are the best sonnets to have been written in the last fifty years?

Those last two responses will switch over the next century. Eventually speciesism will be as reprehensible as racism is today. Sad that people today don't see this. Evidently, they aren't reasoning about racism, they're just doing what they're told.

@WKCosmo @ahron_maline Now, what do you think is going to happen?

@ahron_maline I thought they would detect WIMPs.

I swear to god I posted two replies to this tweet that disappeared completely. Psych.

My personal wish list includes: 1a. Frank Ramsey 1b. Kit Marlowe 2. Keats 3. Byron 4. Emily Bronte 5. Pascal 6. Galois 7. Ramanujan 8. Abel 9+ for me would be another tier with Plath, Rimbaud (done anyway?), Mozart (I know but I don't like his stuff), et al.

@WKCosmo (Inequality force)/area, duh.

And also, what is an "inequality pressure," exactly?

OK so which 5.8 billion people do they think should die?

@GaryWinslett Debt, maybe, but the "reduces demand" argument doesn't justify inflation. People know computers, solar panels, TVs, communication, and, like, food, are all getting cheaper, but they still buy them now. Sure, demand falls in some sectors - but not enough.

Sure. Deflation is bad because it hurts people associated with debts (and that’s tons of people), and reduces demand (why buy things now if they’ll be cheaper in the future?). That first one can hurt investment and that second one hurts employment which has all kinds of knock-on negative effects. There are more negatives than just this but that’s already a pretty bad list. High inflation is bad because it undermines people’s purchasing power and savings, and can -in some circumstances- unleash wage-price spirals. We have all kinds of historical and contemporary examples high inflation causing pain and creating political instability. So then you want keep inflation in that thread-the-needle sweet spot of about 2% (I am not here to quibble with people who say 1.5% or 3%) but you want in that low steady sweet spot. Debts aren’t crushing, savers are ok, investment makes sense, price increases are manageable, demand and employment don’t get undercut. That’s your target zone. x.com/captgouda24/st…

That you actually want about 2% inflation, not zero and certainly not deflation. Deflation is bad.

@SamoBurja WAYTAW. Delivers to whom? Either of the players? The audience? Idk what even is meant.

You're playing a game of chess. While you're playing someone delivers a scathing but intentionally misleading critique of your opponent's play. Whose side is this bystander on? It feels foolish to even ask, they're helping your opponent. Yet, in politics we fall for it.

@jasonguriel @arttavana Have not seen the movie but this sounds like the same old "comedies are inferior to tragedies" bs.

@arttavana Hoppers was great, but they should've let King George die. That would've made the movie a masterpiece.

Project Hail Mary and Hoppers are masterpieces we’ll talking about for decades, so for anyone arguing “Hollywood is dead” or that there’s no good movies or that everything is a sequel or recycled IP—I just saw two original masterpieces in the span of like 20 day 🤷‍♂️

@tgof137 Isn't that data (where people got sick in the earliest cases) from the WHO and China? Given the WHO and the CCP's records and incentives, why would you believe that data is accurate?

There are lots of ways to distinguish between these two. I've written before about looking at where people got sick. They were all clustered around the market: x.com/tgof137/status…

Thread on the A24325G mutation. Yet another obscure reason why we can tell that Covid started at Huanan market.

@MinuteofZombie @WKCosmo Yes. This sentence from upthread "We just aren’t that motivated" isn't the best way to put it imo. More like, "We were motivated, but then people started to fear anything with the word nuclear in it. They were cowards, and now nuclear anything is all but banned."

I’m certainly not saying it’s easy but it’s also absurdly depressing to realize that the basic architecture for this propulsion scheme is about 65 years old. I did my graduate thesis on pulsed fusion in space propulsion. If we’d thrown money at nuclear propulsion (even fission) we would be within striking distance on all the supporting subsystems. It’s largely impractical in the extreme because we don’t really care very much about it, not because it is technically insurmountable.

A homework problem I give when I teach Classical Mechanics is to calculate the reaction mass necessary to accelerate 1 kilogram to 0.1c, assuming a rocket ten times as efficient as current chemical rockets.

"They're going to do a bad thing, so we better hurry and do the bad thing first!"

@scottsantens Capitalism doesn't require that.

If I lost a brain cell every time I saw someone claim that Universal Basic Income was communism, I'd have become stupid enough to say it myself. AI is here. Jobs are being automated. And capitalism requires consumers with money to spend. Consider where this is going without UBI.

@AndrewFuery @JustinMacmahan Are you kidding? Take the limit: would Michigan have just ended the game there if they could? Sure. So why not work toward that?

@JustinMacmahan You can’t blame the announcer. ZERO teams are worried about burning clock with 11 mins left. That’s insane!

It’s pretty ridiculous to be a basketball announcer and still not know why teams do this. That said, it’s also ridiculous for such an effective clock killing tactic to exist