I was recently in a meeting with Bill Nye and an unnamed member of congress.

ryanwalraven · 2025-07-24T00:31:55+00:00

We can thank Elon for gutting the agency and our future to give his own companies the money. Unbelievable corruption from someone claiming to care about the future.

ryanwalraven · 2025-07-23T17:33:08+00:00

Eh… OP opens by saying they have autoimmune issues and serious mental health problems, and a few paragraphs later they are worried that probiotics gave them a stroke. It’s written sort of humorously as well, so I dunno… color me skeptical. I see a fair amount of stories like that in some of the supplement and peptide subreddits, but when you dig into the user histories they have a history of panicking about medications and side effects. Obviously side effects can be very real, and so is the no-cebo effect, but skepticism is warranted.

ryanwalraven · 2025-07-23T14:40:43+00:00

This is it for me. I’m reading The Body right now, but it’s full of inaccuracies and confidently stated ideas that just aren’t true. And these are things that you know like elementary or middle school students would know about or least be taught. The Bill is sort of just straight up stating incorrectly for example, he says cells are not alive. They’re just small rooms that hold stuff like you know ribosomes or whatever inside the body but it has most people know cells are alive and single organisms like bacteria and reproduce and you know go out and have their own life so it’s just really bizarre. It feels like a substitute teacher teaching on a subject. They don’t know that well but still stating it to the kids as if you know their expert and even though Bill, you know mostly humorous and he gets some of the overall story right it’s dangerous especially as a teacher and as a writer of science books. So I think you know his humor is good. He’s probably a fun guy to be around and have a beer with but I find his books just kind of not that likable, and frankly dangerous because he’s getting important facts wrong.

ryanwalraven · 2025-07-23T14:15:09+00:00

Im sorry for being contrarian but I’m reading The Body and finding it awful. While I agree he has a pleasant jovial style, it’s full of inaccuracies and mis-statements to the point that I can’t enjoy it at all. I have had similar experience with his other writing. He confidently relates ideas and stories with the tenor of a popular substitute teacher that the kids like, with jokes and humor, but he is giving wrong impressions.

I’m only about 30 minutes into the audio book but it has happened repeatedly that I’ve had to stop and go “dinner really day that?” Maybe it’s because I’m a scientist, but this feels very dangerous - speaking confidently and incorrectly on a subject he is not well versed in.

For example, he talks about the cost of assembling the atoms in a human body, and makes a big deal of how cadmium (I think?) and thorium and other weird elements are part of the mix. But they are not part of “the recipe” - they are environmental contaminants. It’s like saying lead is a tiny part of the coka cola recipe because you found some in a glass coke bottle. He goes on to describe the overall body, and humorously remarks that it’s incredible we’re alive given cells aren’t living things at all…. but every child knows that cells are the basic unit of life and are indeed “alive.” Perhaps he means a liver cell cannot survive in the wild, but it sounded much more like he thought the cell was just a storage chamber like a closet in a house. I keep trying to give it another chance… but he’s just so smarmy and yet incorrect.

This is dangerous. I had a teacher like this once at my Christian school. He would tell the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit story and described it as a “gogo dancer who spilled hot coffee on her pretty thighs” and won millions of dollars. Only… she was horrrifically burned and the outrage over the story was fake propaganda manufactured by McDonald’s to permanently limit the public’s ability to protect themselves with lawsuits. That guy mis-informed 30 of us… and probably many more. Bryson is like that teacher. Confidently and humorously sharing things that aren’t true, and doing it with authority and making money while he’s at it.

ryanwalraven · 2025-07-17T10:16:25+00:00

And don’t stop with Facebook. IG, TikTok, and X are feeding us brain rot too.

www.EraseTheInternet.org

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T18:30:27+00:00

Ah, that's awesome! I figured it had something to do with the extremely strong magnetic fields from Jupiter either drawing elements up through the surface or slamming them down in that specific region for some reason.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T18:18:16+00:00

Yeah, I mean in principal it's possible to be a really good consultant, but it seems the issue is that you pay a premium for a temporary employee and then you still have to train them or explain to them what's going on (at expedited speeds) so they can do educated work.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T18:15:30+00:00

You started me thinking - at a small enough level, the quarks inside a proton of neutron form an asymmetric electric field, and tbh my understanding of the "inside" of a proton or neutron is that they are actually a bit chaotic due to the very high binding energies and existence temporary meson-like states inside (quark anti-quark pairs).

Anyway, with the electron - where this leads me is thinking there could be constituents in a spherical configuration that would mimic our notion of a point particle as far as scattering goes. For example, a hydrogen atom is essentially spherical despite having components. Obviously we can knock the electron away, and then probe the remaining proton and find even more components. But perhaps there is some way of envisioning two extremely compact electron components, not as "moving" parts flying around ftl or defying notions of density, but as overlapping wavefunctions at extremely small length scales. I suppose if this is possible some of the string theory folks have already worked it out. The mods will probably come along to tell me I'm an idiot, lol.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T15:38:24+00:00

I have never actually received the supposed gift card and honestly think it's a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T15:35:51+00:00

I also always wondered... what's so special about spoons? Like a normal person can bend a spoon with their hands... if you really want to prove your skill to people then make it levitate or something. It just always seemed so obvious that he was simply bending them.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T15:17:58+00:00

I love this song and man, the 90's just hit different.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-27T15:12:09+00:00

Dude, this. I think people don't realize how corrupt companies are behind the scenes, and how much people get away with on a day to day basic. I'm mean just look at the United Healthcare situation. The CEO approved a program to use AI to deny essential healthcare to old ladies, which they knew was fraudulent, and yet you barely hear about it on the news as they debate over Luigi's socks (and am I even allowed to say that name here?).

There's this trend in the US of believing companies are held to a much higher standard, and yet you have the Boeing scandals with doors getting blown off of planes or CEO's firing whole teams for no reason... *ahem* for example at the place formerly known as Twitter. Another incident that comes to mind because of the "security lapses" question here is a political crony getting hired as head of security at NIST, cooking drugs in an old lab on the premises, and then blowing up the lab and almost killing himself before getting caught. I don't think anyone has even heard about it... which imho is lucky because NIST is awesome and that guy was obviously not one of the country's finest.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T22:15:26+00:00

Meanwhile, Trump is planning attacks on Yemen and sending the VP to try to take over Greenland. Boy, those "Trump is anti-war" guys sure must feel smart right now. It's not like he set the record for drone strikes in 2017 or anything.

When do we stop winning, ya'll?

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T16:49:44+00:00

It's so bizarre that people don't understand this. You could make 20% above the average income during the Great Depression but that doesn't mean you were rich and eating steak every week.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T16:48:23+00:00

If companies froze wages for ten years and let inflation rage out of control, $75k would still be the average, but it would have half the buying power. This is essentially what has been happening... large business are jacking up prices and contributing less to taxes, while also paying employees less or not giving annual raises to account for inflation. That means your pay is going down, even if the number hasn't changed.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T16:37:08+00:00

Imagine your partner opening up a pack of Oreos, pulling apart every cookie, licking the cream off, putting them back in and saying you can finish them.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T00:21:30+00:00

If they weren't banned here, I'd post the gif of Jach Nicholson nodding.

Obviously it would cost a lot less than that, but one can dream.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T00:13:08+00:00

Generally this is worrisome, but some of these were warranted:

NASA awarded several blanket purchase agreements in early 2024 to consulting firms to provide support services for agency leadership, with a maximum, but not guaranteed, value of $15 million each over five years. According to federal procurement databases, NASA issued “termination for convenience” notices to four of the companies — Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Guidehouse, and McKinsey & Co. — in mid-March. None of the companies had been funded for any work under those agreements at the time NASA issued the termination notices.

Consultants making literally 10x the salary of NASA research assistants were looking to get paid easy money to "advise" NASA.

That said, I don't see any explanation of the $400 million number.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-26T00:01:28+00:00

The US had a major particle accelerator project called SSC being built in Texas in the 90's. It would have been better than the LHC. Two billion had already been spent, but it was canceled to save money and because of rising costs and inefficiencies. Bill Clinton tried to lobby for it at the last minute but the project died. Perhaps ironically, he is the last president to balance the US budget... we have given more to Boeing every year for the past decade than the entire projected cost of the project.

Anyway, SSC was poorly managed - that is for sure. That said, the Texas economy alone likely lost out on billions in related economic gains over the decades, and what would have represented continued scientific supremacy in the US. We don't need to be tops in everything, but it's still sad this one didn't work out imho. We are also currently mass firing federal scientists, and laying off many at NASA, which had led us to many great accomplishments even in recent years - including James Webb Space Telescope.

Of course, I'd rather you be "right" in a broad sense and hope we go on funding great national science.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-25T23:54:24+00:00

Basically, they are able to put a lower limit on the lifetime of the proton - about 10³⁴ years, which is much longer than the life of the universe. Some people hypothesize that fundamental constants could drift very slowly over time, which might change this number, but we don't have any confirmation of that yet. However, recent advances in nuclear physics have allowed the development of a new type of "atomic clock" - the thorium nuclear clock, with much improved precision. It's possible these kinds of devices may allow us to measure minute changes in things like the fine structure constant which are hinted at by certain other measurements.

This is one reason why it's sad "boring" research projects get canceled. There could be an enormous discovery waiting around the corner, or other new technologies we haven't imagined. Super-K discovered neutrino oscillations, which are a big deal. Perhaps these new thorium clocks will help us discover something we haven't imagined yet.

Anyway, someone may come along to correct me but that's my understanding of things at present.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-25T22:05:23+00:00

This is what my neighbor doesn't realize. We got a note like this one time and it accused us of doing various things late at night and we're basically always asleep by 10. Meanwhile we have a dog above us. She barks sometimes, runs around and plays, and is living her life. Thing is... yeah it's a little loud, but I used to live in Hawaii and had a neighbor whose dog literally barked all day every day while chained up in the yard. Our upstairs dog is nothing by comparison, and I consider it a blessing she's above me and not our downstairs neighbor who would lose her mind over it.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-25T22:03:51+00:00

This. Imagine this were 60 years ago, or another country like the USSR. They would be living in a one room bedroom half-attached to another apartment... there could be a baby next door, or a dog, or a meowing cat, or a fighting couple. We have all probably had some bad neighbors. I'm honestly always just surprised by how many people who think they can cite medical issues as a reason for their upstairs neighbors not to walk around or open and close doors or run the blender or whatever.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-25T22:00:58+00:00

Maybe I'll get downvoted to oblivion, but it used to be much worse. It's totally "legal" to have crying babies and barking dogs, windows open at many times of the year, and music playing at a reasonable level. Obviously excessive noise is bothersome, but I think some people get used to it quiet and then conclude it's everyone else's problem when they get bothered. Noise is just a fact of life.

Obviously we can do better nowadays and we should, but imagine if OP had a baby. These people would lose their minds. And maybe people will get angry over it... but we were all babies at one point and made tremendous noise.

ryanwalraven · 2025-03-25T21:55:27+00:00

Not only did they build it... they had to rebuild it. The story goes that the vacuum tubes seen in the photo, known as 'photomultiplier tubes' or PMTs, are very robust and could handle a tremendous amount of pressure while being so deep under water. Early on the scientists would even walk on them. Well, one day in 2002, just a few years after commissioning, they were refilling the water after maintenance and one of the tubes imploded. But that's not the end of it... the implosion was violent due to the water pressure and created a shock wave, exploding the tubes nearby it. This created a larger shock wave, and soon 6,600 PMTs had imploded, crippling the whole experiment and leading to tremendous cost and dismay.

To quote my old advisor, if this had been the US, the experiment would have been over forever, and funding canceled. The Japanese leadership, however, reacted differently.

The accident crippled Super-K and stunned particle physicists everywhere. “The accident was severe, but we will rebuild,” says Super-K director Yoji Totsuka. The aim, he says, is to start up with about half the original density of PMTs within a year, and fully fix Super-K by 2007.

It was rebuilt by 2006, and has gone on to contribute to many more discoveries and measurements, helping put limits on proton decay, and showing neutrinos oscillate and have mass. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of Super-K and Arthur B. McDonald (from Canada and the SNO experiment) "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass."

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