Winter 2021 LC Thread—I Want Sous Vide

13-27

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Remember when Scott Pruitt demanded moisturizer and used hotel mattresses? True story.

https://mobile.twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1397893046159790082

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I bumped the Belarus thread. Seems like a pretty fucked up situation.

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THANKS OBIDEN!

Putting this here as its a decent article on our political class.

I need a new toilet. My instinct is to buy whatever is cheapest and looks ok. Any reason I should care about quality? Prices are nuts in terms of range from $250 to like $9k!

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Ha, I’m ordering a bidet today or tomorrow.

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This might still be available.

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usually, russia does something, the west sanctions russia, russia sanctions its own citizens from buying western shit.

now, it’s belarus does something, the west sanctions belarus, russia sanctions its own citizens from traveling to and from russia.

number one rule in politics, when dumb assholes are hurting themselves, the main strategy is to just let them do it.

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Go to some big box store web site and search for cheap toilets that have at least a 4.5 star average over 1k+ reviews. Pick one of them and then buy it from whichever retailer you most want to support.

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In which grad students make a program that writes gibberish for lolz and now the journals are full of nonsense papers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7

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Recalling the Einstein conversation from a couple of weeks ago. The Big E was a repeat offender.

Einstein then proceeded to give an explanation that assumed an incompressible, frictionless fluid—that is, an ideal fluid. Without mentioning Bernoulli by name, he gave an account that is consistent with Bernoulli’s principle by saying that fluid pressure is greater where its velocity is slower, and vice versa.

I always thought the physics textbook explanations were suspect but I was too chickenshit to push back.

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For sure, this is exactly what I was planning. I can’t see why I would pay a ton for a toilet.

Reminds me of this which happened when I was in grad school. It was a huge deal.

Wasn’t there also some basic experiment every physics student had to do, and it turned out the experiment was faulty or the principle it demonstrated false, and for like 100 years every physics grad ever had been faking the result? Can’t remember the specifics, but it was quite funny.

Feynman on Millikan

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

Feynman coming to the wrong conclusion from his own example.

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Yeah, that’s the one.

Congrats Bashar! Big win!

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1398016304582434818?s=19