Tidbits
Wednesday, Jan 15, 2025
If you ask any of OpenAI’s models what their favorite word is, they’ll say “serendipity”.
Sunday, Jan 5, 2025
Redwoods, despite the name, are not actually very red. Their bark looks a lot like cedar — in bright lighting, a light brown, interspersed with patches of a dilute burnt orange. However, if you take a knife and peel back the bark from a bough, you’ll notice a light red layer in between the brown bark and the white wood.
Saturday, Jan 4, 2025
Big Sur is a great place to go backpacking in in the winter. It’s 40-65 degrees and sunny (ymmv).
Friday, Jan 3, 2025
There is not a single Walmart store in San Francisco.
Thursday, Jan 2, 2025
In Legget (the town in Northern California where the 1 diverges from the 101), there is a redwood that you can drive your car through. Many decades ago, the people who owned the land cut an arch into it. The clearance is about 6’8”, and it costs $15.
Wednesday, Jan 1, 2025
The epic fantasy author Brandon Sanderson just released the 5th book in The Stormlight Archive, his gargantuan 10-book series (which he clearly hopes will cement his legacy as the greatest epic fantasy writer since Robert Jordan, if not Tolkien). However, he will not release the 6th book for at least 9 more years. This is because he’s planning on writing them all together before releasing any of them, ostensibly to make sure the narrative is as tight as possible. I think it’s fun to try to figure when famous artists are worrying about their legacies.
Sunday, Dec 29, 2024
Many roads in India (especially in the mountains) barely wide enough to support two-directional traffic. This poses a problem when the road goes around a turn, or if a portion of the road is washed out. Thus, in order to safely navigate corners, Indian drivers lay on their horns every time visibility is remotely obscured.
Saturday, Dec 28, 2024
The origins of the term "twink" are uncertain, but it most likely comes from the hostess snack twinky.
Friday, Dec 27, 2024
Thursday, Dec 26, 2024
Next JS's Image module gives you the ability to specify how your image will effect the way the page loads the first time someone opens it. For example, adding the "priority" tag blocks the rest of the page from being displayed to the user until that image has fully loaded and is ready to be displayed.
Monday, Dec 23, 2024
The original DTP (Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis) vaccine, was considered too dangerous for use in the USA in the late 1980s due to neurological side-effects, and was replaced by DTaP, which uses acellular components of Pertussis, rather than whole-cell. However, DTP is still widely used in developing countries.
Sunday, Dec 22, 2024
There's a narrative in the USA that we have an obscene amount of national debt. But, if you compare our debt to GDP ratio to the rest of the world's 8 largest economies (China, UK, Italy, Japan, Germany, France, UK, India), ours is better than 2 of them, and is comparable to another 2.
Saturday, Dec 21, 2024
California has 9 National Parks, the most of any state. I’ve been to 7 of them!
Friday, Dec 20, 2024
Jensen Huang went to Oregon State University.
Thursday, Dec 19
The non-profit that runs Signal is so blind to user data that they don't even know how many users they have.
Wednesday, Nov 13, 2024
Annapurna, despite being the mountain with the most dangerous 8km peak (one death for every three summits), was the first to be summited (in 1950).
Sunday, Nov 10, 2024
Pathao, a Nepalese ride-sharing app, doesn't even try and algorithmically generate a ride fee. Instead, it's a fully free market, with riders proposing a payment for a ride, and drivers being free to accept any bids. This was likely just done because it's easier to implement, but an interesting benefit is that Pathao avoids negative PR from accusations of "price gauging" during peak times.
Thursday, Nov 7, 2024
The reason the worlds second tallest mountain, K2, is named what it is, rather than some real name (Like Lhotse, Everest (aka Sagarmatar), Cho Oyu, Manaslu, etc) is that the locals didn’t know that it existed! It wasn’t visible from anywhere anyone would ever want to go. This is not true of any other mountains in the top 20.
Thursday, Oct 10, 2024
If you use an email marketing service like Mailchimp, they're able to give you information on which people opened your email. The way they do this is by embedding a unique, tiny image address in each email, which your email client then tries to load when it renders the email. Mailchimp detects which image addresses got GET requests, and uses that to track who opened which emails.
Tuesday, Oct 1, 2024
In Oregon, in order to offset lost gas tax revenue, it costs more than twice as much to register an electric vehicle with the DMV than a gas-powered vehicle. There's also a penalty for vehicles that get better gas mileage.
Saturday, Sep 28, 2024
The stability of consumer gasoline has deteriorated significantly since the 1980s, from ~9 months to ~2 months. This is largely due to the introduction of ethanol(modern gasoline contains ~10%), which absorbs water from the atmosphere over time, causing fuel to become less stable/efficient. Ethanol is introduced because it causes less greenhouse gas emissions, and it is able to be manufactured from agricultural products (corn, sugarcane, etc) rather than drilled for like oil.
Sunday, Jul 14, 2024
San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in your Hair), by Scott McKenzie, was the anthem of the summer of love, and actually drove a bunch of people to come to San Francisco (rather than the correlation going the other way as I'd assumed).
Saturday, Jul 13, 2024
Trumpets seem complicated to play. There are two ways to alter the pitch -- with your mouth, and with the valves. Your mouth gives most of the range, but because of how tubes work, you're only able to hit the harmonics, which decrease in spacing as they increase. So, for a "C" trumpet, you can (in order) play a low C, a middle C, a middle G, a high C, a high E, a high A flat, etc. If you want to hit the notes in between, you have to use the valves, which you control with your fingers. The effectively change the length of the trumpet tube by a fixed amount, which each correspond to a fixed decrease in pitch -- a half tone, a whole tone, or a minor third. By pressing them in combination, you can hit 8 ($2^{3}$) unique notes for each harmonic.
Thursday, Jul 11, 2024
If the moon lost all it's momentum (relative to the earth), it would take about two weeks until it crashed into us.
Monday, Jul 1, 2024
When estimating the net worth of individuals, Forbes values stock held in private companies at 90 cents on the dollar. So if you own 10% of a company that's worth 10 billion, you're "worth" 900 million.
Monday, Jun 10, 2024
OpenAI's model spec has nothing explicitly against racism, other than to encourage kindness and fairness while discouraging hate.
Friday, May 31, 2024
The Guinness in Guinness world records is the same Guinness as in Guinness beer. In order to write the first ever book, they reached out to experts in various fields. Instead of asking them for direct pieces of information, they stated facts that felt right, and experts eagerly stepped in to correct them.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
The British Library has super tight security. You can't bring your bag into any book rooms, and have to transfer anything you want to bring with you into transparent plastic bags that the library provides.
Monday, Mar 11, 2024
For any three variables $x,y,z$ that are all functions of eachother $$ \left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial y}\right)_z \left(\frac{\partial y}{\partial z}\right)_x \left(\frac{\partial z}{\partial x}\right)_y = -1 $$
Friday, Feb 29, 2024
The first primary use of Galileo’s discovery of the jovian moons was to redraw all of our maps! Since the Jovian eclipses happen very frequently, you can compare your local time to your global time (based off when the eclipse happened).
Sunday, Feb 11, 2024
Apparently MIT offers each of it's students an 4 year, interest free 5000 dollar loan. If every freshman at MIT took it out and put it into treasury bonds, they could get a free 1000 dollars when they graduate.
Saturday, Feb 10, 2024
You can automatically switch the image type of an image on mac by going "right click->quick actions->convert image" in finder.
Monday, Feb 5, 2024
You can add /students to the url in canvas to see everyone that's registered for a class.
Monday, Jan 29, 2024
Aluminum is much harder to weld than steel, primarily because it conducts heat faster, and has a lower melting point. This gives you a smaller "window of workability".
Sunday, Jan 28, 2024
New Hampshire is the only US state to have no laws requiring adults to wear seatbelts. However, in many other states (such as Massachusetts), it’s a “secondary offense”, which means you can’t get pulled over for not wearing one, but if you get pulled over for a primary infraction, you can get cited for not wearing a seatbelt.
Thursday, Jan 25, 2024
The tallest oil platform is 2100 ft tall! It’s called the Petronius Compliant tower, and is in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of it is under water though.
Wednesday, Jan 24, 2024
If clench my face really hard (kindof like I’m pooping), and wiggle my jaw, it works much better to clear my ears when I’m diving.
Tuesday, Jan 23, 2024
There’s this restaurant called Bali in Curacao that’s not worth going to.
Monday, Jan 22, 2024
If you don’t check in to your international flight more than 45 minutes before it leaves, they won’t let you on. On the upside, they can usually reschedule you for free.
Sunday, Jan 21, 2024
The front seat of a Uhaul cabin can fit 5 people if you really try.
Saturday, Jan 20, 2024
The building manager of The Stud (student center at MIT) is named Tim Woods and he can be pretty reasonable once you get to know him.
Friday, Jan 19, 2024
If you have a vertical wall holding back water (ie, in a rectangular tank), the center of torque is at 1/3 the height of the water.
Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024
In economics, there’s this thing called the “productivity J curve”, where basically, after a new technology is discovered, “productivity” (as measured via GDP) will stagnate, because free capitol is being invested into the new technology (ie, building railroad lines, integrating AI infrastructure, etc). But then, once these shorter-term investments pay off, GPD rises faster again, overcoming the rate of decreased productivity.
Tuesday, Jan 9, 2024
There are two styles of cross country skiing. There’s “Classic”, where you mostly keep your skis parallel to each other, and mainly use your arms. Then there’s ”Skating”, where you point your toes outwards and drive yourself forwards by pushing your legs outwards. Classic is more intuitive, but generally requires better packed/more consistent snow.
Monday, Jan 8, 2024
Apparently Oxford has a secret “night climbers” club where people climb the walls + towers + roofs around Oxford. It seems to have a bigger focus on athleticism than MIT's.
Sunday, Jan 7, 2024
The Estonian flag looks like the average landscape in Estonia: White snow, black trees, blue sky. Look it up, you’ll see what I mean.
Saturday, Jan 6, 2024
The ideal strategy in Ticket to Ride is probably to hoard cards at the beginning of the game (higher locomotives/card average, and you preserve optionality as long as possible). Also, start with game with fairly few tickets, and make sure they all can be linked together. People usually undervalue the utility of just building lots of roads and going out of trains. Also, in the EU version, Palermo to Moscow is the best long-route since that part of the board is much less crowded.
Friday, Jan 5, 2024
Apparently most countries other than the USA have interest free investment accounts with no restrictions on what they can be used for (Canada has TFSA, UK has ISA). The limits are higher or comparable to in the USA. The USA has the Roth IRA, but that has strict limits on how you can withdraw from it, and is intended just for retirement.
Thursday, Jan, 4 2024
Estonia, Finland, and maybe a few other countries are all in the same free-market energy pricing scheme. Due to extremely cold temperatures as well as less supply (I assume Russia/Ukraine stuff), energy prices are now such that running a small space heater for one day would cost ~€150. God bless America, and her oil.