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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • When the sun is very low (nearly touching or even partly below the horizon), it’s typically shining through such a large amount of atmosphere that the sunlight is significantly weakened by the time it reaches your eyes. This isn’t always true though, for ex if the air is unusually dry, clear, or thin (such as near the poles). Good rule of thumb is that if it looks red rather than yellow or white, it’s likely safe to look at for at least a few seconds.








  • Couple nights ago, but it was weird enough that I had to write it down, which I hardly ever do.

    I was shopping at a supermarket at night, with terrible weather outside. Pitch black, howling wind and rain, real tornado weather. Trying to use my phone to look up something when I started to hear ominous creaks and pops from the roof. An employee comes on the staticky intercom to tell everyone to proceed calmly to the back area of the store, which of course triggers a near-panic. As we’re all hustling to the back, the ongoing safety announcement sloooowly winds down in speed and pitch before everything kicks over to generator power. I’m one of the first to reach the back doors when I realize I left my phone behind on a shelf. Surely there’s time to reach it?

    Just as I reach my phone, the generator dies and everything is near-dark apart from a handful of emergency lights. The creaks and groans increase, then a huge tearing sound. It’s not a tornado – it’s some giant horrible Cloverfield/Lovecraft/War of the Worlds monster ripping a hole in the back wall. A two-story greenish blob heaves into view with searching tentacles. Dozens of them catapult forward in long arcs and strike people, the rest flee in panic. I notice that each tentacle strike transforms the victim into a smaller creature, a couch-sized blob with a crazy happy expression. As they see people fleeing around them towards the front of the store, they toss smaller arced tentacles forward at angles to grab them. As they inch forward they start merging together like the T-1000. Real Mr. Frundles/The Thing vibes. The only chance was to hide behind stuff while they herded past/over you towards the front.

    It kind of morphed from there into driving around outside in the daytime through a The Mist/Godzilla/Cloverfield pastiche, but that zombie arcing tentacle monster bit was really unsettling and I’ve got no idea where it came from.


  • Euler’s identity, which elegantly unites some of the most fundamental constants in a single equation:

    e^()+1=0

    Euler’s identity is often cited as an example of deep mathematical beauty. Three of the basic arithmetic operations occur exactly once each: addition, multiplication, and exponentiation. The identity also links five fundamental mathematical constants:

    • The number 0, the additive identity.
    • The number 1, the multiplicative identity.
    • The number π (π = 3.1415…), the fundamental circle constant.
    • The number e (e = 2.718…), also known as Euler’s number, which occurs widely in mathematical analysis.
    • The number i, the imaginary unit of the complex numbers.

    Furthermore, the equation is given in the form of an expression set equal to zero, which is common practice in several areas of mathematics.

    Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence”. And Paul Nahin, a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, who has written a book dedicated to Euler’s formula and its applications in Fourier analysis, describes Euler’s identity as being “of exquisite beauty”.

    Mathematics writer Constance Reid has opined that Euler’s identity is “the most famous formula in all mathematics”. And Benjamin Peirce, a 19th-century American philosopher, mathematician, and professor at Harvard University, after proving Euler’s identity during a lecture, stated that the identity “is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth”.