Viewing profile — thicknavyrain

This is so cool. I used to work on urban heat island analysis and now work in natural catastrophe modelling, and in both cases knowing the average heights/volumes of buildings is a…

I know it's a reductive take to point to a single mistake and act like the whole project might be a bit futile (maybe it's a rarity) but this example in their sample is really quit…

That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me.…

I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) wit…

Urban heat island analysis. The physical volumes of buildings is an essential input parameter into calculating the estimated impact of the built environment and possible interventi…

Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is sti…

Well said, and not to mention the importance of common knowledge as a driving impetus for enacting a change. "Everyone knows Hollywood is full of abuse" was true for decades but wh…

Land is a Big Deal is a great place to start (and his three articles summarising Georgism for SSC, also on his substack named after Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty", whic…

The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk, a mostly even handed, sensible and necessary read for right now.

Skyfield is very cool. For my wedding, I wanted to give my groomspeople personalised thank you gifts. The idea I came up with was to find or ask for precise dates significant to th…

It's remarkable how many problems seemingly come back to Land Value Taxation.

Everyone always misses the corollary to this "groupthink is why we have dark matter" theory which is that academics are very heavily incentivized to try and overturn conventional d…

Certainly useful for thinking, but its lack of falsifiability, predictive power or validation is indeed why there's so much controversy around it and why it remains a hypothesised …

I find this kind of sentiment a little vacuous. Charitably, we might say "Much of the non-human life on Earth will be just fine without humans" but the kinds of ecological disaster…

The early research in support of this conclusion (despite the fact no subsequent research has born it out) was pure charlatanism, bad science and the theory is rightly derided beca…

Yes, that was exactly it although I should have qualified that's what I meant.

No because the marginal returns on utility to the average individual from working less is far, far, far greater than the marginal returns to utility to already insanely wealthy sha…

You're being downvoted, but you're absolutely right. Even though I personally enjoyed some of his books they'll never quite be in the same realm of those of my favourite authors be…

Do you have any sources on ULEZ not improving air quality? The latest research I can find indicates yes, ULEZ did lower concentrations of several pollutants: https://www.sciencedir…

This was already being talked about in the mid-naughties in "The Rebel Sell: How The Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture" by Heath and Potter. Had a big influence on me as a te…

Which, I should have pointed out in the original comment, relied on, yes, anthropogenic carbon emissions.

I'm not entirely sure what your graphs are presenting, but the IPCC climate models have done a pretty damn good job predicting global temperature rises since the 70s: https://www.c…

So sorry for your loss. Thank you for posting, it's a huge and difficult situation so many of us will encounter and it's good to know. Best of luck getting through this moment.

On average, yes, substantially, even _when_ you account for possible risks from accidents and potential pollution exposure: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.0901747