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Cake day: September 6th, 2023

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  • Disclaimer: I’m not well versed in astrophysics.

    Ok, so: you know how Earth is part of the solar system? And the solar system is part of a large collection of stars and planets called a galaxy?

    Well, there’s lots of galaxies out there! And scientists for a long time have been trying to figure out how they formed - how did all the stars get close to each other? Why aren’t they just randomly drifting around?

    Currently, everyone believes that there’s this magic stuff called “dark matter” that pulled the stars together to make galaxies. Kinda like how magnets pull things close to them!

    And because galaxies are so big it would take a long time to pull the stars close together! Which means young galaxies would look less bright because the stars aren’t all close together yet, like they are with older galaxies.

    So that’s what everyone believes.

    But we’re getting pictures from a really strong telescope that’s showing us that young galaxies are brighter than we expected! Which is weird and exciting because it means that young galaxies might have been pulled together faster than we used to think! And our old theories about galaxy creation might be wrong!

    There’s a theory that explains how galaxies could come together quickly, without dark matter, but it doesn’t really fit with many other theories we have about how the world works, so lots of people are thinking really hard to figure out how they might fit together.

    And that’s what science is all about! Finding out new information that shows you that you were wrong in the past, and using that information to figure out new ways to act and think in the future!









  • I had a similar reaction!

    Spending a couple extra hours wrapping up quests and collecting conches (on the recommendation of a friend) wound up being well worth it for me, the true ending felt much more satisfying.

    For what it’s worth, all the quests take somewhere around 20-40 minutes each, if I remember correctly. Even the collection quest wasn’t too bad, thanks to the treasure finding parrot.


  • …kinda.

    The interviewer goes on to ask: “Does that risk add up, or does each roll of the dice stand alone?”, referring to whether subsequent COVID infections increase the risk of long covid. To which Ziyad Al-Aly replies: “That’s really hard to answer.”

    He goes on to speculate (his word, not mine) that there can be two outcomes of COVID infections:

    • One, that each infection causes some sort of subclinical damage that increases the odds of bad outcomes during new infections OR
    • Two, that the immune system may “learn” the disease and lead to milder outcomes in the future.

    So in a broad sense, the above TLDR is true because your lifetime odds of getting long covid go up in a way that is vaguely proportional to your number of infections.

    But it is NOT proven to be true that number of infections correlates to your odds of getting long covid during any one particular infection.


  • I mean, most idioms are silly if you take them at face value.

    To me, “easier said than done” is a response to an unrealistic idea that carries the meaning of “I don’t think that’ll work”/“that’s too much”/"etc.

    If I told a friend “hey let’s make spaghetti for dinner” and they replied “easier said than done” I’d be like “…okay, you’re technically correct, but I want spaghetti so I’m gonna do that anyways”

    But if I told a friend “hey let’s solve world hunger today” and they replied “easier said than done” I’d be like “yeah, I know…maybe we can go help out at a soup kitchen?”