The prize wasn’t included in Alfred Nobel’s will and the funding for it doesn’t come from Nobel’s estate (it’s funded by the central bank of Sweden). However, the prize is administered by the Nobel Foundation and announced on their website.

The official name of the prize is THE SVERIGES RIKSBANK PRIZE IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES IN MEMORY OF ALFRED NOBEL which makes the distinction a bit more clear.

The post is by someone named UTJD16. If I had to guess, they’re a UT fan!

You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!

Whoever said anything about that? You can make positive changes, just don’t expect them to be permanent. Nothing is permanent. That’s life! Eventually we all die.

They go around calling people bootlickers. That’s projection. They fantasize about cozying up to Stalin and his jackbooted thugs. It’s the same fantasy as the one shared by Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and their neofeudalist followers. Same goes for all the MAGA morons, the Putinist Z radicals, the 50 cent army, and countless other authoritarian groups.

The world is a very complicated, dangerous, and frankly scary place right now. When people are unable to cope with all the uncertainty they reach for a strongman. This leaves the rest of us Ambiguity tolerant folks to actually try to deal with all the insanity, or to keep our heads down.

It’s a Red Queen’s Race.

Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

They’re actually going after all of them at the same time. They’re just at different stages in each case.

In the long term, no. It’s a temporary measure. It’s like fighting against entropy.

Oh definitely. That’s the argument from pragmatism which I wholeheartedly support. At the end of the day, we need to feed and shelter ourselves and keep ourselves safe from aggression and violence.

The moral argument is a much more difficult one to tackle. Much has been written on this topic: consent of the governed, responsibility of the individual towards society and vice versa.

The whole libertarian argument is that the government is just the most powerful gang who goes around extorting everyone to pay taxes. If we’re not morally obligated to pay up when it’s a small gang, why does morality change when it’s a large gang?

That’s for modesty!

No it’s to wipe the sauce off his chin after finishing a burger!

Tropical regions? Look at the guy! This is clearly somewhere in Eastern Europe!

Thanks for this. Now I’m on a major Wikipedia deep dive on Polaris and cepheid variables!

The harder thing to convey is the full dimensionality of it. With the rubber sheet (or trampoline) you can show a small ball orbiting around a larger one but only in a single plane (around the “equator” of the large ball). However in reality you can orbit in any direction you like and many satellites actually orbit over the poles. Trying to show that with a small model seems extremely difficult!

Furthermore, most children are raised on the idea that gravity is pulling them down. They intuitively understand the idea that when they climb a ladder and drop a ball from the top, the earth pulls the ball down. General relativity tells us that this is not happening at all! That there us nothing pulling us down whatsoever. I have yet to see anyone provide a lay person GR explanation for the ladder problem.

Yes, in particular the non-stick forever chemicals known as PFAS (aka Teflon and its precursors). The same chemistry that makes these plastics so non-stick also makes them resilient to being broken down chemically in our bodies. And the more the government tries to regulate them away, the more the industry plays whack-a-mole with modifications to the formula. It’s the designer drug problem writ large!

Oh because that incorrect analogy is the most common “lay person” analogy for describing gravitational curvature of spacetime. The most common reply from children is that it’s the earth’s gravity pulling down on the bowling ball so that the trampoline demonstration wouldn’t work in space.

Also the trampoline analogy doesn’t show us how gravitational lensing works, nor does it even touch how different gravitational reference frames affect the passage of time (GR generalizes special relativity, after all).

That’s special relativity. General relativity is the theory of the curvature of spacetime as the mechanism for gravity. Large masses curve spacetime more than small masses. Under GR, gravity is not a force.

I would’ve loved to hear him explain general relativity to an elementary school kid. No bowling ball on trampoline nonsense either!

I actually prefer to watch without captions. The lack of speaking, peaceful sounds of nature, and sounds of the work he’s doing all combine for a very relaxing watch.

Plus I also enjoy trying to figure out what he’s doing without having it explained to me.