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November 22 - December 11, 2022
When you stand near something much colder than room temperature, the heat you’re losing in that direction isn’t balanced by any incoming heat, so that side of your body gets cold much faster. From your point of view, it feels like the object is radiating cold.
Engineers working with cold industrial equipment have to watch out for this oxygen buildup, since liquid oxygen is pretty dangerous stuff. It’s highly reactive and tends to cause flammable things to spontaneously ignite. A really cold object can set your house on fire.
If you live in New York and you see a T. rex, don’t worry. You don’t have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.
But don’t head out on a crime spree just yet. I asked a federal prosecutor about the “Yellowstone loophole.” He laughed, then said that you would absolutely be prosecuted if you tried to take advantage of it. I brought up the arguments that Professor Kalt made in his article. He replied, and I quote, “Law professors say a lot of stuff.”
You’re not descended from most humans who have ever lived. You’re probably descended from about 10 percent of them, although it’s going to be hard to get an exact number.
A 2004 simulation by Douglas L. T. Rohde and colleagues estimates that the identical ancestors point is likely somewhere between 5000 and 2000 BCE. At that date, everyone who left descendants at all is an ancestor of everyone. Each lineage from that date has either died out or expanded to include all living humans, and so all living humans share the same set of ancestors from that point backward.
After the identical ancestors point, your set of ancestors no longer overlaps exactly with everyone else’s, but it still includes a lot of people. Before the identical ancestors point, your family tree resembles a braided stream. Only in the final millennium or so does it shrink to resemble a tree. Over this time, you probably add another 5 to 10 billion ancestors. All in all, your family tree likely includes 10 to 15 billion humans out of the 120 billion or so who have ever lived. That means that, under a modern calendar, 33 million of them have a birthday today. Unless it’s February 29.
The US State Department publishes an annual list of all the United States’s active treaties and agreements. The 2020 list is 570 pages long. That’s not how long the treaties are, that’s just how long the list of treaties is.
How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva?
The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day,
A typical tensile strength for well-packed snow might be a few kilopascals, which is stronger than wet sand, weaker than most kinds of cheese, and about 1/10,000th that of most metals.
Looking back, I notice that I started this paragraph with “there’s some good news.” I don’t know why I did that.
This scenario is a catastrophe even by What If standards.
thank you to the federal prosecutor who told me that committing crimes is bad but asked to remain anonymous because “it’s funnier that way.”
And maybe consume the Earth.‡ ‡ The fact that the destruction of the Earth is relegated to a footnote is a good sign for where this chapter is headed.
