Otto Kretschmer

Merry Christmas to you and everybody else!

TIL that Bill Nye the Science Guy is on Youtube with full episodes:

I've just reached a conclusion that everyone (myself included) is actually an infinite idiot. If there is an infinite number of universes (the multiverse), then there must be an infinite amount of knowledge. Thus, any living human possesses only an infinitely small amount of that knowledge. I feel a bit humbled.

A. Neve's An Economic History of the USSR.

Today I learned that in the UK there is The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers. Yes - they like very small art.

Thanks! 👍

Mr. Tyson, named Neil, with broad interests, Who sports fabulous, galactic vests, Made space stuff cool, Though math still rules, And inspires our cosmic quests,

Now my favorite nerdy scientist: A physicist expert, Kaku, Said, "Parallel worlds might be true." With theories of strings, And the future of things, He broadens our cosmic view.

Oh, now it makes sense.

A scientist known as Bill Nye, Always wore a distinctive bow tie. With facts that are cool, He proved "Science Rules!" And encouraged the world to ask "Why?"

I have heard of that but haven't tested it empiricaly... sadly. "baby tiger"? Is that a hyperbole?

https://youtu.be/J11uu8L8FTY?si=jU9KlJ-rd8cQ3npm

Today I learned that box occupancy behavior is scale invariant within the Felidae family.

That meme mocks Prof. Kaku's controversial tendency to mix actual science with some dose of science fiction-inspired speculation 😆. Though i am sure you know that. He occupies a strange space between a respected academic and a hype man for the universe.

Veritasium rocks BTW!

I think this could be explained by the Flynn effect - if you gave a modern IQ test to 100 people from 1920, the average score would be around 70 which would indicate intellectual disability. I highly doubt that my great grandparents were stupid (they weren't, one of them actually ran a pretty large estate by the standards of the time).

A similar argument was used in the past to justify social inequality within western societies themselves, i.e. poor people are poor because they are stupid. There was also a supposed hierarchy of races within what is today considered white people, i.e. the British were (unsurprisingly) considered to be at the top of the hierarchy while Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans and the Irish were considered to be at the bottom. This directly led to Hitler's racial theories which combined with Italian Fascism and German nationalism (Volkism) resulted in Nazism. TL;DR: Not the best vibes IMHO.

James Randi supported Social Darwinism BTW. The thing is that intellect and personality are largely independent, the probablility of being in the top 1% of the smartest people (however understood) AND top 1% of people with best personality a the same time is 1%*1%=1 in 10,000. Very few people statistically speaking.

There are two kinds of freedom - negative and positive. Negative freedom = freedom from other people's interference Positive freedom = freedom to be able to actually do something The definition of freedom most commonly used in the US is negative freedom which IMHO is less important - it doesn't matter that you're "technically" free to stop working and embark on a world trip if you don't have the money to do that.

It's now up and running.

Bump. It's still down for me in Poland so I guess it's something much worse than a temporary server outage. Edit: What's up with those huge emoticons?

I can confirm that, I ran a controlled experiment to test this. It's down.

He was likely a narcissist. BTW, go to any communist- or USSR-related subreddit and say something negative about Stalin. Then observe the number of downvotes...

@sethoflagos A curious note - I've just read why Stalinist USSR wanted to ban quantum mechanics. The reason seems cringeworthy from the objective perspective - it was about the observer effect and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Soviet authorities believed that the idea of an act of observation collapsing the wave function is idealist since it's about mind influencing material reality instead of just being a product of it. There was also the second, less important argument relating to the Heisenberg uncertainity principle that operates on probability and supposedly refutes the dialectical materialist claim about the universe being a perfectly knowable, clockwork-like mechanism.