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Who Can Name the Bigger Number? -- Scott Aaronson
- You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.
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Gravitational Fire Drills: the story of the LIGO signal injection team -- Nautilus
- I had helped build the first quick-response alert software pipeline for two gravitational-wave observatories, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. This system was designed to search for astrophysical signals in data as it arrived, to alert people who could check if a signal seemed valid, and share the message with astronomers around the world if needed. Every alert carried the possibility of a positive detection—humanity’s first direct observation of waves traveling through the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein in 1916.
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The Print Apocalypse and How to Survive it -- The Atlantic
- The opposite of a sudden and shocking calamity exhaustively covered by every media organization, it is, rather, a thousand local disappearances, with nobody left to report on what has gone away.
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Write Like You Talk -- Paul Graham
- The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:
The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence." Funnies
Today's Electoral Map -- Scott Bateman, The Nib
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