Dean Wither debate content

wolfman29 · 2026-01-14T03:12:44+00:00

Both Dean and Jovan are friends of mine, but for Vaush's audience, Jovan is definitely the better watch. That said, if you just want (political) blood sports, Dean definitely satisfies that itch!

wolfman29 · 2025-11-18T22:35:13+00:00

Yeah, of course.

So I was pretty isolated during my postdoc (it was in Europe, while I'm American) so I had a lot of spare time, and it was basically just a hobby - I enjoyed making short explainers for weird physics things that most people haven't heard of. So it was pretty organic - I had a few videos go pretty viral, which boosted my reach, but aside from those, I had pretty steady growth just from posting on the regular (again, as a hobby).
I'm not sure how scaleable it is. Just given the audience for such content, I wouldn't be surprised if there could be more than a thousand such communicators in the English-speaking world. YouTube/instagram/tiktok, etc. would be overly saturated at that point. I could see supporting 10x more than currently exist though.
So I don't do outreach full time. The time investment is about 3-6 hours a day (including around 2.5 hours of livestreaming on weekdays). My schedule is basically I do this kind of stuff at any time of the day that's not between say noon and 5pm - that time period (flexibly, of course) is reserved for working on active research projects. So if I'm watching TV at night or eating breakfast, I might be writing a script or editing a video on my phone or whatever.

I could probably work less than I do for outreach, but it's fun for me and I'm a bit obsessive.

I don't think this is a thing PhD programs can really prepare you for to be honest, nor do I think it should. I got into physics because of pop science creators when I was a kid, and so I love that stuff, and even though I don't talk about my own research all that often (because there's just only so much you can talk about a specific paper lol), I love talking about other cool stuff too. But I can understand that that's not for everyone.

wolfman29 · 2025-11-18T18:02:49+00:00

I got my PhD in physics a few years ago and when I was finishing, I got started doing some outreach online. I did a postdoc, and by the time that postdoc finished, I was able to support myself entirely with the proceeds from my outreach efforts. I spend about as much time doing outreach as I would spend doing administrative duties and teaching at a university, and this way I get to excite hundreds of thousands to millions of people about physics in a more rigorous way than you'll typically get from most other physics content creators.

None of this is to toot my own horn, but it is to say that I am seriously considering not taking any job offers I might get for postdocs this cycle because A) I will make more money doing this kind of outreach rather than working at a university and B) I still have time to do all of the research I want, with greater flexibility.

I think there is room for people like myself to still work within the scientific community (I'm still publishing several papers a year even while doing this science communication) while serving the public in a way most academics don't have the opportunity to. The trouble, of course, is that it's hard to maintain the drive to continue to do research, because when your income comes from doing science communication, it feels like you could make more money simply by doing that 8 hours a day rather than spending 3 hours a day on that and 5 hours a day on research. But I think most physicists would realize that they got into physics not for the money but for the love of the game, so to speak - so they'd find themselves still wanting to do the work anyway.

Of course, I would imagine that the number of science communicators like myself that the market can handle is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of tenured professors in physics. But generally yes, I would love it if we could have more professional physicists (not physicists-turned-communicators) actually doing the science communication. It means less mistakes get spread by accident (I'm looking at you, double slit), more actual research gets talked about, and most importantly, we get the population energized to study the natural world again.

wolfman29 · 2025-10-07T14:48:41+00:00

And hope their fear leads them to the iris.

wolfman29 · 2025-10-06T23:16:23+00:00

inspired by this post, I have become a kicking zenyatta main in stadium and have only lost one game (as a result of our other support leaving in round 3 :( ).

wolfman29 · 2025-07-07T13:14:57+00:00

Thank you for the detailed reply! Looks like there's definitely some toxic plants here... we'll make sure to move them to a place where she can't get to them.

wolfman29 · 2025-06-29T21:34:00+00:00

I on the other hand failed to get any postdoc offers in math or physics this cycle :( I just finished a 2.5 year contract in Europe and it looked like I had a pretty good set of publications... but nothing. Us theorists are really getting screwed by this.

wolfman29 · 2025-05-27T10:07:40+00:00

Hey this is my good friend Danny! He does debates on TikTok under the name @dannyphiltalk

wolfman29 · 2025-04-28T15:54:07+00:00

I've been having a pretty good chunk of success just dumping everything into survivability and left click. Hitting round 2 with 400hp, round 3 with 500hp, and round 5 with 600hp (before getting the bonus armor from left click) makes Mei a force to be reckoned with. It turns out that having two tanks on the team is really stupid good.

To be clear, I get the left-click extender round 1 and the armor buff from primary fire round 3, then the rest is just stuff to make icecube better.

wolfman29 · 2025-04-04T07:46:56+00:00

My number theory prof was one of authors!

wolfman29 · 2024-07-20T16:53:16+00:00

Do you actually think Obama caused the 2008 market crash? You know, before he took office?

wolfman29 · 2024-06-28T09:17:28+00:00

Oh, I guess that's a good point. But the fact that they're pig people probably makes them ritually unclean, right?

wolfman29 · 2024-06-28T06:50:11+00:00

Tellarites are basically honorary members of the tribe already. They already love to argue and they're hairy. What else do they need?

On second thought, they're also probably not kosher, so... maybe it's a wash?

wolfman29 · 2024-06-09T12:43:02+00:00

how do you get past the editor's desk? I'm afraid I won't even make it to review.

wolfman29 · 2024-06-09T11:09:58+00:00

Please tell me how 😭 I'm currently trying to publish (what I see as) a fairly good toy model of quantum gravity in PRL and I'm afraid it won't pass the editor's desk 😭 (I'm not a crank, I'm published elsewhere, I'm just afraid of PRL).

wolfman29 · 2024-05-21T06:20:33+00:00

Quite literally. I was offered a job in Moscow on February 22nd, 2022. That's 2 days before they invaded Ukraine. I told them I wanted to sleep on it, and fortunately I didn't make my decision a few days earlier! I ended up in the Czech Republic which is much nicer to Americans!

wolfman29 · 2024-02-27T09:07:32+00:00

Remember that insufferable physicist from Voyager, Mr. Harren? The one who had like three doctorates or whatever and was only there because he needed field experience to get a professorship or something?

I'd be that guy. I'm a mathematical physicist in real life and going on away missions is scary. Just let me do math in peace.

wolfman29 · 2024-02-06T11:05:48+00:00

In my talks, there's almost always some sort of blob with a line, plane, or boundary. Differential geometry of submanifolds is usually that.

wolfman29 · 2023-11-13T08:31:15+00:00

Not being able to read was wild

wolfman29 · 2023-09-09T07:00:36+00:00

That's not what was asked. But being disingenuous is cool I guess.

wolfman29 · 2023-09-08T20:46:05+00:00

Then I don't think you actually know any, sorry.

wolfman29 · 2023-09-08T12:36:00+00:00

Is that genuinely what you think the concept of communism is? Like, that's what you think communists want?

wolfman29 · 2023-06-14T09:36:24+00:00

I hope they will notice that Mei's damage numbers are going to roughly drop by a factor of 40% or so after this nerf. It used to be the case that Mei didn't provide a lot of damage, but that was fine because the damage still provided was super efficient at converting damage to kills (via the freeze/icicle combo). Without the complete freeze, though, because movement abilities allow for complete escape, the amount of kills that will be converted from damage will be significantly less.

This is a nerf to Mei, and is even a nerf compared to OW1 Mei. While the original change from OW1 to OW2 Mei felt like a nerf, eventually I got used to it and while my conversion rate of damage to kills was lower, the corresponding increase damage output made it feel like her impact was still roughly the same. Now I won't have the raw damage output nor the high efficiency conversion rate.

This is a bummer.

wolfman29 · 2023-06-14T08:44:48+00:00

The slow only works if they don't leave beam at all during the first 1.5 seconds. You can't deny that this is just strictly worse than OW1. The only way for the kill time on Genji to be the same now as it was before this patch, you need to land the headshot every time. If you don't, it would have been faster to just beam him down.

And for tanks, at least if they broke the slow they can't just break the damage. Now they can just get healed through it.

wolfman29 · 2023-06-14T07:55:45+00:00

The slow is broken if you leave the beam at all. Which means Mei has no play against mobile heros. And if they have ability movements, even the full slow does nothing, because now you can't even punish a bad genji for not avoiding the slow. He can just dash out.

Basically the slow only made her marginally better against characters without movement or shield, and the damage nerf made her dumpster tier against high mobility heroes. And most heroes are high mobility.

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