My theory is that the federal nature of the US leads to a default popular attitude of hostility toward any policy that originates above the state level, unless there are commercial interests willing to pay for the marketing and campaign contributions to sell it to the people and/or legislators. And businesses aren’t that interested in an improvement that only marginally affects their profits.

About half of my books.

Mineralization is a slow process, and the photo in the article could pass for a fresh tooth—which is why I looked to see if there were more precise definitions.

Alpacas, crows, and jaguars.

Would a 10,000 year old tooth even be considered a fossil?

One technical definition defines fossils as remains “‘not demonstrably postdating the beginning of the Holocene” (i.e., older than 11,700 years).

Apple said his office received a tip Friday from an outside source that Moore was using a Flock camera to track a former acquaintance, and an internal investigation began immediately.

I wonder who the outside source was. Was it someone at Flock, or another third party able to monitor law enforcement searches? Or was Moore bragging to her friends about illegally stalking her ex?

• Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting
• Iain Pears’ Arcadia
• Jo Walton’s Or What You Will
• Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail
• Neal Stephanson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
• Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

It sounds like the key theorist that convinced you of this is Jeffrey Bub.

Has Bub himself implied that his criticism of Frauchiger and Renner’s conclusion contradicts special relativity?

“It’s not priced in by the markets,” BlackRock’s Louise Kooy-Henckel said at an event in Hong Kong on Monday. “But it is potentially also the chronic risks where institutional capital can come in because of the investment horizon.”

Does institutional capital price in the risk of scenarios in which the institutions cease to exist?

The data centers will be towed beyond the environment.

The Mercator projection is a legacy of people needing a world map in which local regions preserve accurate directions and proportional distances (i.e., people who need a map for navigation instead of a global dick-measuring contest).

The Mercator map, which has been in common use since the 16th Century, has come in for criticism as it shows Africa as similar in size to Greenland, even though it is 14 times larger.
Critics say this leads to the development needs and potential for countries near the equator to be minimised.

I think that’s got more to do with the systemic legacy of colonialism than with which world maps people look at.

Maybe it’s made of a less-conductive materal (e.g., plastic with metallic paint).

Yeah, that’s my understanding.

That’s how I understand it: the volume element surrounding any given point has to be contracting, but it can expand in some direction(s) if it has at least one other direction to contract in for compensation.

As for qualitative differences, I’m not really picturing what the difference would be—but trying to intuit the effect of extra parametric dimensions might be like trying to explain trichromancy to a color-blind person.

Ever read Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius?

You could fake a publication date in the 20th century, then have AI generate a bunch of circular fake references and seed them on forums and wikis, making it look like there’s an extended history of other works referencing your fake work.

Do your writing in a public place, then ask Flock to turn over their surveillance videos of you writing it.

I liked Trust—I’ll have to check out Distance.

I think you’d immediately collapse into a shrivelled-up ball of super-dense matter.

The Pauli exclusion principle keeps particles like electrons from occupying the same physical space, which is what makes them take up volume and gives atoms and molecules their size. If they were free to move in an extra spatial dimension, they could pack much closer together, and their volume would collapse.

Just finished There There by Tommy Orange; just starting MAYA: Seed Takes Root by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon.