science and music. and beer. and dogs.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let’s say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That’s more than 3000 years!

    Of course I did say “make a tiny dent,” but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.














  • The light that enters your eye carries enormous amounts of information with it. Your eye and a small portion of your brain comprise a highly specific tool for extracting a small subset of that information and processing it. The information you use is only related to the last object the light interacted with, not the light itself (with the small exception being the “brightness” - that has nothing to do with the object).

    No one claims to hear the air in their ears rather than the violin that is being played nearby. That’s just not what the word “hear” means.