(Thread) In the first What If? book, I answered a question about cooking a steak by dropping it from space. At one point, I commented—jokingly!—that if anyone put a steak in a hypersonic wind tunnel to gather better data, I’d love to see the video.

Well, I have good news. After What If? came out, I was contacted by Tom Fisher and Thomas Rees, University of Manchester researchers studying hypersonic heat transfer. They had finished their wind tunnel experiments early, so they decided to head to the corner store, buy a steak, and gather some data.

THREAD: The evolution of Pokémon cards through history, as generated by DALL·E 2

For starters, here’s what DALL·E 2 thinks 21st century Pokémon cards look like, using prompts like “A Pokémon card from 2001” By changing the year in the prompt, we can ask for older Pokémon cards. These ones are from various years in the 1980s. #dalle2

The DALL·E image generator can produce spectacular visuals, but really stumbles over text. As a result, the tourism posters it comes up with are extremely good. Visit scenic Colado! #dalle There’s so much to see in Canda 🇨🇦 #dalle

What If 2 comes out in 2^(e^(π/ϕ)) days! If you preorder a copy you’ll get it then: amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS… 57π kilominutes until What If 2 comes out

SEMANTLE NIGHTMARE ROUND

I went through the dataset behind the infuriating word game Semantle (semantle.com) to try to calculate what the hardest-to-guess words would be. If regular Semantle isn’t annoying enough for you, try solving these 10 nightmare words (thread): These aren’t obscure or specialized words; just reasonably common words without many close synonyms. We’ll start with a pretty easy one—difficulty is subjective, but I think this one isn’t too bad.

1. semantle.com/?word=dGltaW5n…

Using GPT-3 to gain new insight into historical figures GPT-3 is also useful for learning about contemporary political figures

2020 Election Map xkcd.com/2399 This map looks similar to some other election maps out there, but it’s a little unusual. It tries to address something that I find frustrating about election maps: Very few of them do a good job of showing where voters are. (Brief thread, because I am enthusiastic about maps!)

Learning new things from Google

Dialect Quiz xkcd.com/2372/ How do you address a group of two or more people?

I’ve thought back to this chapter from What If a lot this year Flipping through the other chapters, I’m sorry in advance for putting a specific year here

Hi everyone