Disqus - Friends of justinhaynes

Re: Frequently Asked Questions

Tim Urban — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:59:22 -0000

Yessss an old turban reader. Good to have you. Please don't tell anyone all the things I said on that blog.

Re: Frequently Asked Questions

Tim Urban — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 03:03:19 -0000

I've thought about that and keep deciding not to put the dates on. The benefit to no dates is that very few of the articles are time-sensitive—they apply just as much a year after they're published as they do on the day they come out. And for those, I don't want people who happen upon them being turned off that the article is a few months or over a year old, when the experience of reading it should be the same either way. Certain posts should have a date on them—like the Iraq post—and others, like the Time in Perspectives post, need an update from time to time. But for the most part, it seems to make more sense to leave dates off. In your case, the best way is to just go to the archive and skim down until you see where you left off. There are few enough posts now where that should be workable. But I know that's not ideal.

Re: Religion for the Nonreligious

Tim Urban — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:51:56 -0000

The source is me with my calculator and 15 minutes I couldn't spare at the time. Here's the math:

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

9.46 trillion km in a light year, so the Milky Way diameter is about 946 quadrillion km.

Sun diameter is 1.392 million km, so you'd have to line up about 680 billion suns to stretch across the Milky Way.

Bringing that down to the scale of the US, the US is about 4,300 km across. So if the Milky Way were that size, dividing that by 680 billion gives us a sun with a diameter of 6 micrometers, or 6 thousandths of a millimeter.

An amoeba is about .3mm across, so the sun's diameter on our scale would stretch only 1/50th of the way across an amoeba, and you could fit 2,500 suns inside the area an amoeba takes up.

The human eye can see things that are about 100 micrometers, but you'd definitely need a microscope to see something only 6 micrometers across.

In fact, forget the US. If the Milky way were the size of the Earth's circumference (so it fit just inside the Earth's equator), the sun would still be under 20 micrometers across, and you'd still need a microscope to see it.

Insane right? No one realizes how big the Milky Way is.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 11:47:44 -0000

Yes. Often, the modern parenting strategy is telling the kids again and again how smart and special and superior they are, which sends the message, "You're already endowed with success, congrats!" It's not that there's no place for self-esteem building, but it serves the kid much more to get them obsessed with the concept of putting their heart into things they do to become great at life.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:16:06 -0000

Great point.

Re: Introducing the Dinner Table

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:31:46 -0000

Good points. We thought a lot about it and decided that posting early on Sunday was the best compromise for weekend and weekday people. But there's also nothing wrong with waiting until the next weekend to jump in.

Re: Introducing the Dinner Table

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:33:55 -0000

Well posting a Dinner Table topic is about 1/280th the work of posting a post, so hopefully keeping this schedule regular is less of a problem.

Hopefully.

Re: Introducing the Dinner Table

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 13:09:31 -0000

We were trying to be edgy.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:06:30 -0000

That made me sad. Sorry for your loss.

Don't be so hard on yourself. You're definitely smarter now than you were 5 years ago.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:10:02 -0000

Shit. We'll look into that. Why is tech stuff so mean and hard.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:13:10 -0000

Nice ones. A lot of those resonate with me, despite being from a totally different world. Funny how that happens. I'm very bad at #11, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:43:27 -0000

"I'm just beginning to know more about the world." Ridiculously wise thing for a 13 year old to say. At 13 I legit thought if someone had made me president I'd have been able to pull it off fine.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:57:57 -0000

I think we do that because we don't want to accept that being just kind of happy, with some ups and downs, is all life is. Looking toward some far more blissful future is a kind of protest against life being the way it actually is. It's saying, "Well this is not good enough so it must be later when the good stuff really starts." But "today," with its ups and downs and its maybe-contentment-but-probably-not-much-bliss, is in fact what 95% or more of actual life is.

There's no way to label that as "good" or "not good enough" because "good" is an endless spectrum no matter what life is—always a ton of better and a ton of worse, whether you're a king or a peasant or a grasshopper—so it's about being realistic about life and getting the expectations in check. Humans aren't built to be in a permanent state of bliss, so expecting that is just setting your expectations way too high in the [happiness = reality - expectations] equation, dooming yourself to dissatisfaction and frustration—and this is what people react to by rushing to their imagined much-happier-future and hugging its leg.

So it's all about recalibrating expectations around the reality of what life actually is, and then today seems like a perfectly good thing. That's the only way to be present, since rejecting today as not good enough kills your ability to live for the present moment.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 15:01:16 -0000

YUP. I had many many days when I was younger with nothing to do, and that really never ever happens today. Back then I was depressed about all the free time, now I have this disease where I feel like non-productive time is wasted. Stupid human condition.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 15:36:50 -0000

It's really a big deal.

Re: What’s something you know now you wish you had known at 22?

Tim Urban — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 15:59:57 -0000

Totally. This is a huge problem.

Re: What’s Something About Your Job We’d Be Surprised to Learn?

Tim Urban — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 14:05:57 -0000

How! Explain.

Re: What’s Something About Your Job We’d Be Surprised to Learn?

Tim Urban — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 15:15:41 -0000

The dog needs to learn to walk himself. Otherwise this all makes sense.

Re: What’s Something About Your Job We’d Be Surprised to Learn?

Tim Urban — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 19:41:49 -0000

Really well explained. I think people think of cancer as a puzzle and it's actually that each instance of cancer in a single human is its own unique puzzle with only certain similarities to others like it. I know how complex cancer is, but I always still assume that in 50 years, the general technology for detection and eradication of most kinds of cancers will be so much further along that cancer will cause far less harm than it does now. But maybe I'm just not understanding how little different cancers have in common with one another.

Re: What’s Something About Your Job We’d Be Surprised to Learn?

Tim Urban — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:20:51 -0000

Jealous. I went to roughly 300 Red Sox games growing up, and now anytime I'm back it's all comforting with the familiar sounds, smells, and sights. It's like the feeling you get when you visit your old grandparents' house except there are 35,000 drunk grandparents with Boston accents.

Re: Where Wait But Why Gets Its Traffic

Tim Urban — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:45:23 -0000

This is a perfectly valid point.

The thing is, it's important that I write in my most genuine voice, and that voice definitely curses. But I do think it would be great to have a Rated G version of posts available for people who want them (on top of readers who prefer not to read cursing, many teachers have emailed us asking for Rated G versions). We're going to look into some way to offer this to people who want it. (If any readers are tech savvy and know of a good way to do this, let us know - contact@waitbutwhy.com.)

And people who prefer to hear me talk like your drunk grandfather, have no worries—I will continue to.

Re: Where Wait But Why Gets Its Traffic

Tim Urban — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:49:01 -0000

Kurzgesagt is an amazing YouTube channel. Everyone who likes WBW should check it out.

Re: What’s Something About Your Job We’d Be Surprised to Learn?

Tim Urban — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:50:08 -0000

When I started reading this, that isn't where I expected it to end up.

Re: From 1 to 1,000,000

Tim Urban — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 13:27:20 -0000

I'm disappointed in you, Jan. But yeah my eyes are a disaster after this post.

Re: How Long Would You Live if You Could Choose ANY Number of Years?

Tim Urban — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:34:27 -0000

No. You can't die. Trying to commit suicide would just really hurt (like Jed said). Whatever you pick is final, meaning you WILL live that long, period.