*Royal Institution

Faraday’s lab was at the RI.

Definitely read the book. The book is about the existential elation at discovering a solution to a dire problem, so knowing a poorly-communicated version of every solution will likely ruin the book for anyone serious about the hard Sci-Fi.

You know shit’s fucked when The King In Yellow, the very manifestation of the idea that knowledge can kill, is having to defend the value of education.

Every day we stray further from god toward lost Carcosa

If you didn’t have plate tectonics, you’d have a lot of problems with the atmosphere, and there’s a decent chance that life wouldn’t evolve, as the energy differentials generated by tectonic activity are those which life hangs onto, from nutrients, to oxidation, to geothermal heat.

Sounds like you would enjoy either “The Hungry Gods” or “Children of Strife” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you choose to read Children of strife, you really need to read the first three Children of Time books first, though.

I would point out that they also have long asses.

Yeah, it’s not as clear here that the entire joke relies on these being written out. I personally think this whole joke would actually work best as a person passing notes during a test and trying to cheat THAT way.

Smbc? This is just a compound version of smbc’s original comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2349

I mean, in human terms, that tomato is a bloated uterus, already filled with zygotes and amniotic fluid.

Actually, that’s a really good point to which I really want to know the answer. We have to assume that, since it’s effectively fermented meat, the prion would survive, but maybe they’re really efficient at turning all of the protein into unbound amino acids?

I believe that they contribute to understanding, because human minds are wired to engage with stories. If your chemistry teacher was worth their salt, they’d teach you Gay-Lussac’s law by telling you about how, when the hot air balloon was first invented, Gay-Lussac was seen as a mad young upstart by all of the older scientists for wanting to go up in one. Well, not only did he nearly die making measurements, he also showed that, at higher altitudes, there was lower pressure and lower temperature. Then, your chemistry teacher should pull out a spray-can of keyboard cleaner, invert it, spray the liquid into a beaker, and let everyone feel the adiabatic temperature depression from expansion (of course, most of the endothermicity is from the boiling of the liquid, but the point stands) they can explain that any compressed gas gets colder when you release it, whether the keyboard cleaner, spray paint, or the compressed coolant in the coils of your refrigerator. Lower pressure, lower temperature. Gay-Lussac’s law. Now, all of those students will, when they think about the relationship of pressure and temperature, remember Gay-Lussac in a hot air balloon, at low air pressure, and low temperature.

Quality shitpost, but the naming thing is true of virtually everything in mathematics, with good reason, because otherwise you’d just be talking about “that slightly different combination of arbitrary letters by which we do something very similar to, but measurably distinct from, the use cases of the other three equations like it”.

See:

• Pythagorean theorem (geometry)
• Dijkstra’s Algorithm (graph theory)
• Fermat’s last theorem (number theory)
• Peano axioms (formal logic)
• For that matter, the word “Algorithm” comes from the Latinised name of the dude who invented algebra, and the word “algebra” is just an overly truncated version of the title of that dude’s book.

This is also doubly true in science, where there are 5000 different “laws” and “theorems” surrounding something like gas behaviour, so at some point, you have to differentiate them based on their history, rather than what they do. Hence “Charles’ law”, “Boyle’s law”, “Gay-Lussac’s law”, “Bernoulli’s principle”, the “navier-stokes theorem”, “rayleigh-benard convection”, etc…