arctanthrope

when I see people bragging about their high IQ it reminds me of those people who buy sports cars and then take them around to shows on a trailer with 5 miles on the odometer to talk about how it has 750 horsepower and a top speed of 300mph

one of the most retroactively embarrassing moments in my life is in like 2015 or '16 I was doing some dumb team-building thing for some school-adjacent activity, and the task was to create a “new Mount Rushmore,” basically as a group nominate four people who are doing good and important work in the world. I suggested musk. at the time most people there hadn’t heard of him, so I gave a little spiel about how he was the “founder” (which I thought was true at the time) of PayPal, Tesla (which people were just becoming aware of), and SpaceX. every time I remember it I cringe and hope nobody else does. although most other people in the group suggested Beyonce as someone doing “important work for humanity” so idk if they have much of a leg to stand on to criticize my choice

Boromir would know how to spell Faramir

I guess when the consumers you’re targeting are apparently the type to need a demonstration of how a card fits in a wallet, you shouldn’t expect them to understand that that card is in fact solely for the purpose of that demonstration

also the Richter scale is logarithmic; each point is ten times as much as the previous. so a 3 is not 30% as much as a 10, it’s one ten-millionth as much

yeah I had something similar with the Beatles, where literally my first memory of music is Abbey Road, so my whole life I was like, I don’t get the hype, that’s just what music sounds like. it was only recently I went and listened to the album again with context of what other music from the 60s was like, and I finally realized that they were truly doing some wild shit with songwriting and production

I don’t understand why they removed Denethor’s Palantir from the movies, it’s like the whole point of his character, without it nothing he does makes sense

I had to check if this was loss.jpg

I think equally important as teaching these things to begin with is letting students know when they’re being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they’ve cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like “I know there’s two genders because I learned it in high school biology” and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.

ever heard of the Lone Ranger?

a million documents is on average about one document every 35 minutes for his entire life. that seems like a lot, even for a broad definition of “document”

Saturn’s coming back around for older gen-z’s

yes, I know, and I did. what I had read was not to smoke for at least three days, I decided to do four. I asked the doctor like two weeks in advance if there was anything else I should do, he said no, it should be fine. everyone was aware of everything and all the doc’s instructions were followed. obviously I didn’t go in stoned

apparently smoking weed regularly can make anesthetics less effective too. when I had to get put under recently (nothing serious), I was aware about that and told them ahead of time. they gave me a dose that apparently was supposed to put me completely out, and I just sat there for at least a full minute, fully conscious but incredibly relaxed, before they realized they would have to give me more. and then I definitely started to wake up in the middle and had just the briefest, vaguest awareness that they were moving around me before I was out again, so I assume they gave me more at that point. and then when I woke up after they were like “wow, already?”

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins be like

not necessarily. for example we say things like “the lion is the king of the jungle,” but that doesn’t mean there’s only one lion per jungle. sometimes we refer to an archetypal singular to convey something about every member of a group

it always bugs me that this phrase isn’t even grammatically correct. mitochondria is plural. it should be “the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell”

one more cup of coffee - Bob Dylan

https://youtu.be/zul4Ln-0md0

“Cloak of Feathers” by The Sword https://youtu.be/AlCJ1BsfMWc

“of owl and of raven, of peacock and dove, of swan and of sparrow, woven with her love. face hidden in shadow, beneath a hood of quills, the pinions of her raiment conceal all her ills.”

I do that and I have a BS in mathematics. and in 4th grade I literally used to write “I hate math” at the top of my math homework. as much as primary education systems want it to be, computation speed is not mathematical aptitude. you can memorize multiplication tables up to 20, that’s not gonna help you understand Cantor’s theorem