Sorry What

i cannot emphasize enough how tremendously proud hannah gadsby should be of what she has created and released into this world. 

The Royal Institution: Eugenia Cheng — “How to Think Like a Mathematician”

Echoes

I made this painting for the Spellbinders gallery show at @gallerynucleus 💕✨ The opening is on 23rd, if you are in LA then come check it out. I’ll be there signing my new books and also holding a workshop ✨

Visionary Brain Genius Elon Musk Has Invented The World's Worst And Most Expensive Subway

If you are anything like me, many times you have been riding the subway and have had the thought, “What is wrong with this dang subway is that it is not exponentially more expensive and slower than this.” Many times you have seethed, through clenched teeth, “Goddammit, it just churns my guts that this subway does not require me to own and bring along—and also to have outfitted with a special set of retractable sideways wheels that serve no other purpose—my own Tesla-brand autonomous electric car.” If you are anything like me, when you get off the accursed normal subway and do not have to then hunt for a place to park your Tesla-brand autonomous electric car, it fucking burns you up inside. It makes you sick! You have had it up to here with these goddamn cheap, fast, mass-transit options that do not require each rider to have brought along an entire specially outfitted self-driving electric car.

Holy shit

Write, write, write...

Missing the maths part :'(

Mr. Hozier, ladies and gentlemen

Joi Ito:

“What I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function.

That life, human life, was just optimizing. And that the world could be simulated in a computer.

This is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game.

Where they say: “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and how many minutes do I have to do this.”

I tweeted out the other day: “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”

A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer.

But if you go into the humanities or the East Coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer.

They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter. (…)

A lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say: “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that.

And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual.

My concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity — that’s the stuff that makes us obese, creates climate change, income inequality.

The problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created.

But I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and productivity will fix everything.

I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists.

And I would put economists and neoclassic economics in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP. (…)

If you go to places like MIT, the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. 

And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. 

I think that we need the historians, social scientists, anthropologists, qualitative people involved in asking the questions: why are we here, what are we doing?”

Source: Recode Decode — MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito on the problem with tech people who want to solve problems

The Universe's Brightest Lights Have Some Dark Origins

Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe. 

One of those satellites is our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies in the 10 years it’s been operating, and there are many more out there!

Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing - not light, not particles, nada - can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers - these are black holes that are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun - but active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) are surrounded by gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.

The disk’s heat gets emitted as light - but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We see light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.

About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes - which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity - somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.

Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.  

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources for 10 years. More than half (57%) of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.

So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.

Fermi’s helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about Fermi and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments all year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.