Awwww this is cute. @YellowstoneNPS is 150 years old today. The first national park in the world.
On the 150th birthday of @YellowstoneNPS let me tell you how it is a symbol of humanity's greatest collective triumphs over our rapacious instincts AND also the thing that might kill us next week!

Let's get the terrifying part out of the way first. It is a volcano. Big volcano!
It is in fact a supervolcano with a magma field 8 km deep, 75 km long, 50 wide. It erupts every 650K years or so, and last erupted 650K years ago.

It's not a sure thing, mind you. It is possible that Yellowstone may never have a massive eruption again. Or it may erupt tomorrow.
What would happen if it erupted? Well, USA would pretty much be toast, especially west of the continental divide. Canada too. And the rest of the world won't fare much better.
That 75x50x8 km hollow bubbling with magma? That was leftover from the last eruption.
Imagine all that material being spewed in the atmosphere at a force 1000 times of even Mauna Loa, the biggest regular volcano. Fossil fuels will stop being a problem lol. Humanity itself might stop being a problem iykwim. There will be a cloud of dust in the air for decades.
But then again, it might not erupt at all. We'll see.

Not on to the heart warming stuff.

For tens of thousands of years, humans killed each other over land. Wars, colonization, slavery, all over land. To this day as Vlad is showing these days. Private property is King.
So the very idea that human beings can come together, right in the middle of stealing land from the native first nations, to designate a huge swathe of land as protected forever "as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people",

That's evolution
In 1872, Yellowstone became the first National Park in the world. Representing a huge step in the evolution of humans. That we can actually come together for something other than making money and stealing land.

150 years later, there are over 4000 national parks all over Earth!
Hehe, yeah, big fat difference it will make to us, getting advance warning, other than maybe having one big global party before we either all go extinct, or are so badly bruised that we kill each other over food.

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More from @gauravsabnis

Mar 2
Ugh, old age happening. I've been posting multiple choice quizzes for over a decade and the first time, I messed up. 🙈🙈 ImageImage
Online multiple choice quizzes based on assigned readings is a big part of my pedagogy.

I hate testing students just because I'm supposed to test students.

I want there to be a real educational point to anything I ask students to do. Then they do it and everyone wins.
One thing I do is assign students a LOT of reading before coming to my class. So they all have a grasp of the basics and we can have a more productive discussion in class than just learning ABCD. I expect them to finish the readings.

But I was a student once, assigned readings.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 2
Oh, there is a proper scientifically researched term in marketing for that widespread tendency - Lead-In Effect. Why the most watched FRIENDS episode when it aired wasn't the finale but The One after the Superbowl. Some fascinating research if you wanna Google Scholar it.
When some people genuinely ask, how exactly does one get a PhD in marketing, just a million different 2x2 charts? I tell about this research. Very intuitive and also cool.
Stickiness in media consumption habits. In many instances, as much as 25% of the audience stays on lazily.
So obviously, if you're a network executive or these days, streaming platform, you want to know what is the best way to make it work for them.

The biggest example is the show after the Superbowl. Biggest TV audience of the year by far. 100 million regularly. Nothing comes close.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 2
A friend messaged that her kid just made a "Ha glass kiti chhaan" joke and it's her proudest moment as a Marathi Mom. 😂😂
Toilet humor is a cornerstone of human civilization.
Okay, a lot of non Marathi friends demand an explanation though it is really hard to translate puns.

Here goes

"ha glass" means "this glass"
"haglass" means "you pooped"

So in Marathi "this glass so pretty" also means "you pooped so pretty"

🤭🤭
Read 4 tweets
Mar 2
The more time I spend in academia, the more it becomes apparent how "merit" in India is gaslighting concept used by the elites to justify not really delivering education but a stamp. Hence the obsession more on entrance exam ranks than what you do in college.
It's the same gatekeeping behind the whines about how more IIT/IIMs "dilute the brand". That's all they care about. The brand. If 300 mn Americans can have 100 univs with education AND brands better than the II's, why can't 1.4 bn Indians have a 100 IITs/IIMs?
Yup. This is also a tacit confession that our colleges don't really focus on teaching as much as on entrance exams.
Read 17 tweets
Mar 2
A 🧵 on Indian "placement committees" & also lack thereof.

Yesterday in my grad Mktg Analytics class, I ended with saying @clootrack CEO @shameelabdulla was visiting to meet faculty for research collaboration. If y'all free, come, listen, absorb, network, & of course, hustle! /1
And many of them did. All international students, mostly Indian. We had a standing room only crowd. Listened, asked great questions, talked about their resumes cleverly, inquired about internships, jobs, etc.

As I observed from sidelines, I contrasted it with my student days.
In engg college & also in IIM, placecom did all the hustling. Others just sat on their butt, went for interviews when summoned. A job fell in your lap cos COEP/IIM.

They had to have mandatory attendance policies to ensure students show up for "pre placement talks" by companies.
Read 30 tweets
Mar 2
Exactly. This is what I keep trying to say everyday with my #factcheckbait #QTbait threads.
The way to fight fascist disinformation, be it Putin or sanghi, is not to reflexively denounce their bait.
It is to keep them busy with our own bait. Not lie like them. But be smart.
Something simple you can do. Tweet regularly something like "Did you know that father of Hindutva Vinya Savarkar said Hindus should eat beef?"

Factually true. And enrages sanghis. They'll show up demanding source, cite etc.

Hide their replies, block. 😂

Repeat in a few days.
The way to defeat misinformation agents is not to QT them, but bait them into QTing you. Keep them in rebuttal mode always.

Every single day, there should be a coordinated new QT bait thrown at fascists. Exhaust them. Waste their time. Give them hypertension.
Read 8 tweets

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