Tim Urban Profile picture
Jun 21 4 tweets 2 min read
I tweeted this at the exact minute of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, when Northern Earth is tilting as far towards the sun as it ever can. Here's my slightly hectic visual explanation:
A cool visual by @Climatologist49 showing how many hours of daylight each northern latitude will get today. (h/t @simongerman600)

The Arctic Circle is the southernmost latitude that experiences at least one day of 24-hour sunlight (or darkness, in December). That happens today.
The Tropic of Cancer is the northernmost latitude that ever has the sun directly overhead. At mid-day today, people living on the Tropic of Cancer will have no shadow. This happens twice a year for everyone in between the two tropics and never for people outside of them.
If today is the solstice, why are July and August the hottest months? The amount of heat entering the atmosphere each day starts to decrease post-solstice, but each day is still a heat net positive until mid-summer, so the temperature continues to rise till then.

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More from @waitbutwhy

May 28
Betelgeuse is 642 light years away and we can easily see it with our naked eye. Which means it’s at the center of a vast sphere, thousands of light years across, entirely filled with its photons. Go anywhere in that sphere & look toward Betelgeuse & its photons will hit your eye.
Of course, the telescope shows us that each star’s “photon sphere” is actually much bigger still. And the fact that we can see galaxies billions of light years away means that galaxies emit photon spheres tens of billions of light years across.
The sheer volume of these spheres is unimaginable. Billions of cubic light years completely saturated with the photons of a single star (10^30 cubic light years or more for a galaxy). The number of photons it takes to fill these spheres is mind boggling.
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May 23
In case we're ever in a bind, I figured it out and all humans can fit snugly inside New York City, all standing on the ground next to each other without touching each other. We can organize ourselves by geographical region:
Or by religion:
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May 12
Some mantras for political thinking:

Truth is hard.

Humility is hard.

Independent thinking is hard.

Resisting tribalism is hard.

Over and over, you will forget that these things are hard, and that's probably when you'll fail at them.

1/5
Bullies come in many forms. Stand up to bullies. And don't be a bully.

Political parties are big lame corporations. They're not worthy of your identity.

Angels and demons are a delusion. Everyone is flawed and everyone is complicated.

Courage is criticizing your in-group.

2/5
When you feel disgust for people based on their politics, it's a sign you're not in your right mind.

When you let politics damage your relationships, it's a sign you're not in your right mind.

You're probably in more of an information bubble than you realize.

3/5
Read 5 tweets
May 6
Two neighboring buildings: one with a 10-year-old child alone in it, the other empty except for a vessel containing 5 human embryos created yesterday using in-vitro technology. A tornado is about to destroy both buildings and you have time to save either the child or the embryos.
A friend suggested I repeat the poll multiple times, changing just the age of the group of five. The rest are below in this thread.

Who would you save?
Who would you save?
Read 6 tweets
Apr 29
Today, Elon tweeted this diagram by @SwipeWright, which sums up how a lot of people (including me) feel. Then a bunch of ppl responded w/ graphs showing that Republican politicians have moved farther right in that time than Dems have moved left. Here's what I think is happening:
It's true that on aggregate, the right has moved more to the extreme than the left in Washington. But the small group on the far left has become very *culturally* powerful & out of fear, the rest of the left has often allowed them to speak (and make policies) for the whole left.
So even though the left hasn't moved that far left (as is shown by voting results), the left is in a sense being held hostage by their extreme wing, making a lot of people who enthusiastically voted for Obama feel politically homeless today.
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Mar 25
To commemorate 500,000 followers, I collected all of your profile photos and drew a picture of each of you.
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