Repost: Philip Ball, "A New Idea for How to Assemble Life"
“assembly theory provides a consistent and mathematically precise account of the apparent historical contingency of how things get made — why, for example, you can’t develop rockets until you first have multicellular life, then humans, and then civilization and science. There is a particular order in which objects can appear.”
Repost: Sunny Labh, "Tracing the Origins of Mathematical Symbols: =, +, -, ×, ÷, √, ∞, π, Σ, ∫, f(x)"
It was in 1557 when the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde who introduced the equal sign. In “The Whetstone of Witte,” Recorde explainedhis choice of two parallel lines to represent equality, as “nothing could be more equal.” The symbol has since become universally recognized.
Repost: Radimentary, "Pain is not the unit of Effort"
Oftentimes the defining difference between the protagonist and the antagonist is that the antagonist did not have enough pain tolerance and allowed the (unbearable physical) suffering in his life to drive him mad.
Ask Chat GPT -- Writing vs Typing Math
If you have learned to visualize fractions in a vertical format, you might find it challenging to read typed-out math that displays fractions in a horizontal format (numerator / denominator). However, with practice, most individuals can adapt…
Repost: Neia Balao, "Woman sneaks into Columbia University’s surf-and-turf event, reflects on institution’s ‘hypocrisy’"
Brenna Lip (@brennalip), a New York City-based content creator, posted a TikTok in which she admits to attending a surf-and-turf brunch at Columbia University despite not being a student herself. What started off as a harmless ruse, however, soon turned into an eye-opening look into “the hypocrisy of this whole place.”
The Keffiyah, Pal-Chilean and Pop Star-Politician Farce
Claims of Palestinian thobs and jillayehs undermine distinct Arab cultures for pan-Arabism. These claims amount to, “Well, actually, the warring Arab tribes all identified as Palestinians! [citaiton nonexistent]”
On Joke Theft
Comedy is delicate. So we ignore that everyone has retold someone else’s joke.
Repost: Selena Simmons-Duffin, "'Live free and die?' The sad state of U.S. life expectancy"
"Everybody has a pet thing they worry about and say, 'it's oral health' or 'it's suicides' – everyone has something that they're legitimately interested in and want to see more attention to," says John Haaga, who was the director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging at NIH, before he retired. "The great value of an exercise like this one was to step back and say, 'OK, all of these things are going on, but which of them best account for these long-term population level trends that we're seeing?' "