It would be interesting to try and add up the person/time it took to fly that far, and how much time ( 50,000 years?) sitting around in airports!
Oops, I was off by a few decimal points. A quick back of the rabbit figuring has it at 5.1 million years sitting around the airport.
(bad Statisticks works both ways) Add in the total time spent and you are just about at the age of the Solar System!
Not really.
You can look at chances of incident and death per mile traveled as a gauge of danger.
In the US in 2022, driving was 1.33 deaths per 100,000,000 miles of driving. [source: State by state]
This is 13.3 trillion miles of flying with no deaths. If you did equivalent driving miles and counted the deaths it would total about 177,000 deaths from driving. On average planes have about 160 passengers, so lets underestimate and say that you’d have to crash over 1,000 planes to match that. One thousand!
People who are afraid of flying yet commute all the time just don’t have good risk assessment.
I can usually count on @evansd2 to post for me when I am late. The whole “light year” thing was cringy but passenger miles is the only thing that makes sense when comparing vastly different ways of getting somewhere. I don’t want to fly places but it’s not due to saftey concerns.
The five million years of hassel is also a frequent de-motivator, but a look from a very different perspective would have us abandon cars also. What I was interested about it when seen was what I was saying about AI.
We always called that a SWAG…Scientific Wild A$$ed Guess. It is really just meant to get you to an order of magnitude answer. How long to people live? 8yrs, 80 yrs, 800 yrs. Usually it’s close enough to make a point.
I’ve always used “Fermi Estimate”.
Sounds fancier that way (err, assuming your interlocutor has heard of Fermi, I guess? Maybe not)
I picked up SWAG in the Navy, and it could mean Silly or scientific, depending on the context. We even had a rubber stamp with it on it in the SONAR shack.
I’ve always called them “Order of magnitude estimates”.
https://c21.phas.ubc.ca/article/order-of-magnitude-calculations/
It’s a good way to quickly assess if something is way off when dealing with large quantities.
This discussion about plane deaths passes that test because even if the numbers are wrong by two orders of magnitude it’s still much safer per mile than driving.
OK this is laser related, but it’s about the theoretical limits of how powerful a laser can get:
Super interesting.
That entire series is hilarious, until someone with just enough smarts to try it accidentally blows up the moon…and then where are we?!
All of his books are great.
Up goer five is funny 
I am so falling behind in learning how to use the Rabbit r1, but one way I use it frequently is to avoid spending weeks looking stuff up and doing the math for a spur-of-the-moment answer. It might be a ballpark answer to a silly question, which (as the video points out) is very irrelevant as it will be a while before anyone drives from New York to Old York or takes the plane to the grocery down the street (though in some places it might end up being the only other way to get there without a car as the video points out).
There is a place along a bike trail in the Orlando area that has a quarter-mile tunnel to get diagonally across an intersection, but you risk your life to cross the other diagonal that is a similar distance.
I knew this was going to be good when I saw the scientific notation , then I saw who it was by. Did not disappoint ! I had no idea that a LASER/MASER/GASER beam would become impossible at some power. No worries for me as I stick to under 100w.
Bioluminescent wood anyone?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202403215
A more lay article summarizing the paper:
Yellowheart works with out the rot.
Yellowheart and Redheart fluoresce which isn’t the same thing as bioluminescence.
This is an interestijng article about modern life. It had this one passage that reminded me of some discussions I’ve had about not monetizing everything that you enjoy:
When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
This seems somehow relevant as a creative person making things with a laser, so here I am.
While sometimes frustrating, I am happy that my brain has a literal dopamine off switch the moment I monetize something. I’ve done it here or there, and literally forced myself to keep going when there is no joy in it - but as soon as I’m done with whatever project I move away from that art entirely. Over the years I’ve learned to see it coming, and if it’s an art that I enjoy to not give into the “but you could sell those” that I get from well meaning friends. Yes, I could, but then I will likely never make another and I’d rather gift them to the world than lose them entirely.
So in a different way than the author, I completely understand.
I have had a very different experience 60 years ago. I initially set my sights on being an artist, and sought to add value to materials thinking in terms of expecting to have them kept with pride for many years. Working in gold, the result had to pay for the materials and did so very well. However, the world at that time is not the world at this time, and even Miami is not as bad as Tampa
(though I have not been there in a long time so it might be)
Still, there is just so much you can make of 3D work to not be inundated with it, and in giving it away (in this culture now) you have only set the value of it.
for those who enjoy watching things made by hand, with antique tools: you will enjoy watching this video. Almost no talking, and there are enough subtitles to follow the process–it’s a fascinating action story.