I checked, and it looks like I'm a bit off: Anaxagoras estimated that the moon was the size of the Peloponnesus and the sun was somewhat larger—but how much larger depended on how much further away it was, which he had no means of guessing.
His estimate of the moon’s size was derived from observations of a solar eclipse, in which the path of totality was about the size of the Peloponnesus—but he probably missed a lot of places that experienced a partial eclipse and didn’t make note of it.
The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.
The issue I see is ensuring that a distributed archive is comprehensive. How do you know what’s missing and needs to be added unless there’s a central coordinating process aware of what everyone already has?
That seems about as smart as the “de-Baathification” of Iraq: it instantly creates a class of alienated ex-officials with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the state, who now find their interests aligned with the opponents of the new regime.
Microsoft Excel is eternal
Not true—cuneiform Excel was an inferior knockoff of the neolithic Lotus 1-2-3.
I tested mine with an infrared thermometer: Starting cold, I turned one burner to medium and another to high, and measured them as they heated up. They heated at the same rate until the medium burner reached its target temperature.
If everyone else is doing it, no one will criticize you for doing it too.
You know the old slogan: “Nobody ever got fired for buying from Ea-Nasir!”
With that much name recognition, he must be reliable!
The defining aspect of Borges’ library isn’t the content of the books, it’s the library’s form which gives its contents a semblance of intentionality.
that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker
Same with electric range/ovens.
See autocoup.
Although... I wonder if Trump’s followers could be convinced that Musk is controlling him with one of his NeuraLink chips?
Ask an LLM to find you such a list—if it doesn’t, then you have a documented failure right there.
“Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” Senator Hawley said in a statement.
So he should have no problem with anyone downloading their source code and running it locally, then? Since neither dollars nor data would be flowing into China or DeepSeek?
“...and that approval is for sale, if anyone cares to outbid him.”
With one exception: October 1582—when Pope Gregory switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar—had only twenty days.
I live in an apartment building with a stable enough temperature that I never have to use a heater or AC, but I do have a number of zigbee temperature/humidity sensors and a Home Assistant automation that turns on a window fan if the relative indoor vs outdoor conditions are favorable.
I think part of the unintuitiveness is caused by our knowledge that things quickly freeze in space.
Freezing is produced by a combination of temperature and pressure, but because the former fluctuates a lot more than the latter in our daily experience, the role of pressure isn’t part of our intuition. But in a vacuum, things freeze even at relatively high temperatures.
It’s not minus hundreds of degrees, it’s body temperature. Vacuum has no temperature, and it’s an insulator, not a conductor.
Probably significantly further away than the earth’s orbit, given that (1) you can die of heatstroke from exposure to the sun at earth’s surface, and that’s with miles of air still absorbing much of the radiation; and (2) in the vacuum of space, there would be no air or other substances to conduct away your body heat, so you’d have to rely solely on radiative heat to cool off.
I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it leads people to seek the wrong solution.
At least if you present it as a one-word summary, without an accompanying explanation that would be substantially longer than the thing you’re claiming to summarize.
Dolphins invent a new mass fishing technique, soon threatening the world’s fish population with total collapse. Humans must somehow convince dolphins not to repeat our mistakes.
Inspired by bubble-net feeding among humpback whales.
Is it possible to conceive of a universe macroscopically similar to ours in which matter is NOT fundamentally composed of oscillating waves, or would any such universe be logically contradictory?
Say we have all the empirical evidence from 19th-century science prior to the observation of the wavelike diffraction of matter particles, plus 21st-century math and theory to construct an alternative explanation.
Three independent expenditure committees are driving a secondary series of committees run by a close-knit group of political operatives associated with the Thao recall and Empower Oakland*. Together they make up the bulk of the money being spent on candidates in the Empower Oakland endorsement slate...

Non-language-using animals must think humans are the worst songbirds ever.
To clarify: I’m not suggesting animals think all sounds are songs—just that songbirds and humans are the only common animals that combine sounds into arbitrary sequences where each individual sound doesn’t have a single fixed meaning.
Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester
The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a quantum mechanics thought experiment that uses interaction-free measurements to verify that a bomb is functional without having to detonate it. It was conceived in 1993 by Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman. Since their publication, real-world experiments have confirmed that their theoretical method works as predicted.
A short documentary about her, her caretakers, and her fraught future premieres this Sunday at the New Parkway Theater.

Book Lovers Have Plenty of Oakland Shops to Choose From

A University of Melbourne researcher has spotted a rare evolutionary phenomenon happening rapidly in real time in bats living in the Solomon Islands.

"Are Oakland community ambassadors making a difference?"
Ambassadors are meant to improve public safety, de-escalate conflict, and help keep the city clean. Are these programs working?
