Time follows geodesics on a curved spacetime manifold, so it’s linear locally but not necessarily globally. In theory a manifold with the right curvature could have geodesics that form loops (which would imply time travel), but there’s no practical way to cause such curvature.

Not just travel, but faster-than-light travel. Either one implies the other.

• The rate at which pathogens, predators, etc. evolve to exploit a species is dependent on the size of the species’s population—and once a pathogen anywhere in the world evolves to spread through the species, it can take out the whole population at once.

• The more different species fill the same niche around the world, the more likely it is that some of those species will successfully adapt to changing conditions. The local ecosystems with species that don’t adapt might collapse temporarily, but the successful alternatives can replace them and re-diversify.

So reduced biodiverity makes the remaining species and ecosystems more fragile—and the species that are dependent on all the remaining globally-distributed monospecies are as vulnerable as all of them combined.

Fred Rogers.

Trump just told his chief of staff to write down the nuclear launch codes somewhere where he wouldn’t keep losing them.

Mark Zuckerberg, probably.

There’s no objective measure for quantifying similarity. We can measure relative similarity, though—but that scale will vary depending on what it’s relative to.

We could measure genetic similarity relative to a typical unrelated person, or relative to the nearest non-human animal, or relative to the most distantly-related living organism, or relative to random noise. (And you can do the same for facial similarity.)

I assume everyone is too good for reddit, until they prove otherwise.

My first thought is survivorship bias: in states with harsh winters, the unwell move away or die.

Kava root.

“This code is too dangerous for me to look at, so it must be fine.”

deleted by creator

The creation of new Pareto efficient alternatives.

In plain terms, energy has gravity.

Through mass/energy equivalence, E=mc². Energy distorts spacetime the same as its equivalent rest mass.

Energy bends spacetime, just like matter. Is that what you mean?

Currently reading Hiron Ennes’ The Works of Vermin—it’s very reminiscent of Miéville, especially Perdido Street Station.

• Are you aphantasic (unable to form mental images of things based on descriptions)?

• Have you tried audiobooks?

• Have you tried reading books of movies you’ve already seen (so you don’t have to keep track of characters and plot, and can focus on the elements unique to prose)?

It gets worse over time but it also eventually gets better, after the deleterious recessive alleles have been eliminated. Like in herd animals where a herd has only one breeding male per generation, so every generation is half-siblings.

The general rule is that a population with a fixed degree of inbreeding will have a corresponding number of deleterious alleles so that the selection pressure balances out; but when you change the degree of inbreeding, you get a spike in expressed mutations until things balance out again.

I assume it’s an access plate to service the door mechanism.