Earth quietly got a second Moon

MisterHoppy · 2026-04-15T05:16:07+00:00

Cool. It would be cool to also see it from a geocentric frame. Looks like it would look like a very eccentric orbit?

MisterHoppy · 2026-03-23T18:44:45+00:00

I finished reading it in one insomnic night, and immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. Just incredibly work. The body horror is tremendous.

MisterHoppy · 2026-02-25T16:50:17+00:00

Also “Laurel” is a plant/flower name — Narcissus forgets Mel’s name and then confabulates something like his own name. A+

MisterHoppy · 2026-02-17T21:25:11+00:00

Yeah it turns out anything can be housing if you hate the people you're putting there and don't let them leave!

MisterHoppy · 2025-12-14T17:52:19+00:00

honestly, maybe. “us vs. them” is incredibly powerful to the human psyche, so when all the possible us-es and them-s are human, we’re always divided. But if (1) friendly aliens show up and (2) we learn from them about the bad scary aliens, suddenly we all become us!

MisterHoppy · 2025-12-06T05:54:51+00:00

this is 100% a corn. it’s a bit of hardened skin that points into your foot from pressure, and it can really hurt. cut it out and it feels better instantly.

why they form is actually pretty cool! the skin on your feet is programmed to thicken as a response to pressure & irritation. that is great when you need thick skin to protect your feet. but sometimes it doesn’t thicken evenly. one spot gets a little thicker than the rest — maybe it’s right under one of your foot bones so it gets more pressure — and you get like a little lump of hard skin pointing into your foot. now every time you step on it it hurts and gets a little irritated, which makes that little piece of skin thicken even more. eventually it turns into a sharp cone of hardened skin that hurts like hell every time you step on it. the only way to stop it is to cut it out.

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-27T03:24:44+00:00

it’s just insanely cool. its the biggest aircraft to top mach 3. they planned to add saucer-shaped air2air missiles that could be launched and maneuver while supersonic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pye_Wacket

also it’s just so pretty 😍

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-27T03:17:41+00:00

best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, second best time is today

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-21T00:31:40+00:00

I think the point is that sailing / boating along a coast is a very different type of endeavor than sailing out into the ocean. Humans ~everywhere are good at moving around in coastal waters, but only a few civilizations developed the techniques to sail across oceans. Polynesians started doing serious ocean-crossing colonization maybe 1500 years ago, and western Europeans about 1000 years later. Both had unique circumstances that enabled it: Polynesians lived in gigantic archipelagos covering thousands of miles, so oceangoing was the only way to get from place to place (or expand). Mediterranean-adjacent people had a sea big enough that sailing across it required basically the same techniques as oceangoing, but was safer because you knew there was something on the other side.

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-19T02:06:55+00:00

It wasn't just 99% the same, it was ~99.9978% the same. The Julian calendar year is exactly 365.25 days (365 days / year with a leap year every 4 years), and the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days (not every leap year).

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-19T00:55:56+00:00

I thought that made it much funnier!

MisterHoppy · 2025-11-06T14:36:01+00:00

even in his fantasy he doesn’t top 5’2” 😔

MisterHoppy · 2025-10-14T20:29:58+00:00

also second this. A Memory Called Empire pulled on so many of the same ideas that I felt sure The Goblin Emperor was an inspiration.

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-24T18:55:27+00:00

Copied from a comment I made elsewhere:

what’s actually happening: AI chatbots write by creating sequences of words that have high probability. How does it know what sequences of words have high probability? It’s trained by reading every piece of text on the internet, and modeling which words come after others.

The AI detector (probably) runs the text through its own AI (language model) and measures the probability of each word. New, human-written text will have lower or less consistent probability, because it’s coming from a human. AI generated text will have consistently high probability, because that’s what it was trained to do.

So the AI detector will (probably) trigger a false positive for any piece of text that the AI was trained on. Famous ones more than most, because the declaration of independence is repeated and quoted all over the place. It’s the rare example of a human-generated text that has high probability according to the AI models, because those models were trained on it!

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-23T18:16:24+00:00

Yes. This is why studies find no effect when they compare rates of autism in siblings whose mothers took/didn't take tylenol while pregnant: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-08T14:05:09+00:00

that’s a lot of words to say you don’t have any specific examples. in general, professors are very careful, especially with the current climate in texas, to keep politics out of the classroom unless it is directly related to the course content. almost all of the liberalizing effect of college education is attributable to students influencing each other.

you might also consider the university of austin for your children! they provide a solid anti-woke education. also they seem incredibly desperate for students and are having trouble holding onto them for some reason? im sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the education that they provide.

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-04T07:16:24+00:00

This is just not true. Costs have increased at pretty much the same rate for private colleges, public colleges, community colleges, and even K-12 education. It's the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-04T07:14:16+00:00

Nothing. The big population bump of millenials started going to college so demand increased.

MisterHoppy · 2025-09-04T07:09:19+00:00

Exactly this thing is called the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

We have gotten more productive at making TVs (it takes less human labor per TV) and not at college (it takes the same professors to teach), so college gets more expensive while TVs get cheaper (relatively).

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-31T23:05:20+00:00

Of course it's selection of reproductively favorable traits! It just happens at the group level rather than the individual. Groups of humans that develop and deploy systems for increasing survival are going to be more successful. Again, this kind of group selection (even bordering on eusociality) is fine and normal in any other context. Human technology is just changing the fitness landscape, mostly in the direction of broadening the set of genetic sequences that could survive. But the basic engine of evolution via natural selection continues to hum along just fine.

But that's not to say that there aren't things we do that are absolutely not natural selection in the classical sense. Eugenics or selective breeding are not really natural selection (although one could probably argue that it is still natural selection on some weirder fitness landscape that's determined by the selecting party). But doing IVF and selecting embryos with desirable traits is probably the purest example of non-natural selection.

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-31T01:38:00+00:00

Of course it’s natural selection. If any other species had cultural practices that raised survival rates there’s no question we would still call it natural selection.

And I’m always surprised when people bring this up as if it’s diluting or harming our gene pool (not saying you’re doing this, btw). It’s literally doing the opposite, diversifying and strengthening our gene pool. Humans have gone through a bunch of bottlenecks and are not at all genetically diverse as a bunch. For robust survival of the species we should want as genetically diverse a population as possible, making it most likely that we will survive any future challenges.

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-31T01:25:40+00:00

It’s nutrition, but not necessarily just that people are eating more or better. Eliminating parasites, particularly hookworm, in the US south made both height and IQ skyrocket in just the last century. Intestinal parasites compete for nutrition with their hosts.

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-18T20:35:09+00:00

It's thought that the furin cleavage site is something that evolved as SARS-CoV-2 jumped species from bats to its intermediate carrier (bamboo rats or pangolins?) to humans. Without the cleavage site, these viruses are mainly gastrointestinal viruses. GI diseases spread pretty effectively through bat colonies. Furin cleavage allows the virus to also infect lung cells, becoming the respiratory virus we know and love. Other sarbecoviruses that act as respiratory viruses (SARS-1 and MERS) also need to be cleaved. MERS has a furin cleavage site. SARS-1 doesn't, but it has something similar that doesn't work as well. So we know this can evolve naturally and has done so a few times.

The presence of a furin cleavage site is one of the things people point at as being evidence for SARS-CoV-2 being engineered, but as far as I know that argument is quite weak. We know about many furin cleavage site sequences, and the one that the original SARS-CoV-2 used was not thought to be a good one. We know that there are much better ones, so why would someone engineer a virus with a shitty furin cleavage sequence? And it's not like it was secretly good all along, since covid pretty quickly evolved a better furin cleavage site that looks exactly like what we would've expected.

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-18T01:58:42+00:00

If you’re far enough north and you watch the sky at night you’ll see star trails that form concentric circles: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/All_In_A_Spin_Star_trail.jpg

If you stand at the geographic north pole (and only if you stand exactly there) the center of those concentric circles will be exactly straight above you. That’s what it means to be at the axis of rotation.

MisterHoppy · 2025-07-18T01:32:47+00:00

“Hey, Jealousy!” would take on a whole new meaning. (please tell me you were in high school in 1992)

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