Some hot stuff from Yeats on writing poetry:

You start with innocent stuff like why the sky is blue and relativity and next thing you know you’re in a truck stop bathroom begging for obscure mathematical paradoxes just to feel normal for a few hours

How do igloos keep people warm? Involves basic physics beyond just the "snow is a bad conductor of heat" that we were taught in school
www.mentalfloss.com/how-igloos-s...

What conclusions do you draw from this?

(via Bryan Caplan)

Is Universal Basic Income A Good Idea? How To Overcome Poverty In India - FutureIQ YouTube video by Future IQ

For more details on what is UBI and why some people think it is a good idea, see my video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-cj...

The problem with eligibility criteria is that 1. it costs a lot to enforce them, sometimes more than it would have cost to just give it to everyone without checking criteria, and 2. many eligible people get left out because they cant _prove_ they're eligible.

Similarities with UBI (these are pluses): 1. it is applicable very widely, 2. benefits are in cash, not kind, 3. there are no strings attached; you can use the cash for anything.

Differences (minuses) 1. there are eligibility criteria (age 18 to 60, annual family income <₹2.5L).

Is Maharashtra's "Ladki Bahin Yojana" UBI, someone asked me. (For those who don't know, this is a government scheme where women in Maharashtra, age 18 to 60, with household income <₹2.5L, get ₹1500 every month from the government).

My answer: yes and no. Details below...

The surface of Venus is a lethal crushing inferno BUT about 50km up in the atmosphere you have:
* Earth-like temperatures
* 1 Bar pressure
* sunlight for power

Aerostats filled with breathable air would float! We could live in cloud cities and even go *outside* wearing little more than scuba gear!

Interesting thing reading a bit about 19th century cooking is that, even for very expensive fine dining, the ingredient set is tiny. So a lot of the "fancy" is derived from labor-intensive presentation, e.g. patiently whipping things, or shaping the food in various ways.

I was even able to see the rotating cube in this gif!
(link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoste... )

This is the same technique used in "stereograms" to give you 3D images without the 3D glasses. (But I always found the stereograms much harder than the examples in the article above.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoste...

I’ve acquired a new superpower Yesterday, I was browsing Reddit. Midway through my feed, I stumbled upon a video from a German TV show, where a 9-year-old girl demonstrated her ability to ...

How to solve "spot the differences" puzzles in a few seconds... I tried the examples in the post and got them. I even got the impossible mode one:

danielwirtz.com/blog/spot-th...

Do what's right for you, agitate for regulations, call out Zuck, help your friends and family discovwr new social tools. Focus your ire on the systems rather than the individuals. Asking people to blow up their entire social and professional lives to spite a rich bigot isn't going to work.

strong argument that this bit from Satre's Anti-Semite and Jew is the key to understanding Trumpism: it is a joke, and the joke is precisely that you are required to take them seriously

I think about the conversation between these two posts a lot as an example of how this stuff is pretty counterintuitive sometimes

x.com/RyanRadia/st...

Top quality opening sentence

Out of context Mahabharata:
"It hath been said, O king, that it is not sinful to lie on the occasion of a joke, in respect of women sought to be enjoyed, on occasions of marriage, in peril of immediate death and of the loss of one's whole fortune. Lying is excusable on these five occasions"

Why avoid the Brahmana more than snakes or weapons? "The snake killeth only one. The sharpest weapon slayeth but a single person. The Brahmana, when angry destroyeth whole cities and kingdoms!"

Out of context Mahabharata 😂:
"The wise know that a Brahmana is more to be avoided than an angry snake of virulent poison, or a blazing fire of spreading flames" —Yayati (on why he can't marry Devayani)

I need to start double-posting... can't get myself to do so consistently yet.

@neerankarnik.bsky.social @makarands.bsky.social @meetalks.bsky.social please note...

And has two heads... You never know which head is going to pop up to make a decision...

Interesting take: you can't fight negative PR by denying it. You should replace bad PR with good PR

Similar to: it is much easier to replace a bad habit with a good one, rather than directly breaking a bad habit

And: Best way to get rid of an irritating earworm is to replace it with a better song

In high school, my social studies teacher took me aside and told me that "cynicism was the easy path" and that I needed to resist it. It's probably the most important thing I learned in school.

But there's a cold-start problem here: If I want to post something that is India- or Pune-specific, I'm likely to post that on Twitter and not here because that audience is over there while the audience here is more American (or more country-agnostic in case of my corner here)

I'm here but haven't yet found my groove, so haven't managed to post here as often as I do on Twitter. But I do like it here, so I expect that to get fixed over time.

In art and literature, "criticism" doesn't mean "pointing out flaws." It's something bigger and more interesting than a referee calling fouls. I think we should have the same ambitions for data visualization criticism!

One thing I've discovered is it's really enjoyable to listen to music in a language you are learning but not fluent in, mostly because (at least in my case) you tend to imagine the lyrics being much better than they are! I often regret really coming to understand a song.