Ask HN: Teach me something new

Quantitative easing (sometimes mistaking called "money printing") isn't directly inflationary. Because when central banks buy bonds, they do not pay with normal money. Instead, they pay with a special type of money that can never enter the real economy (as to not create inflation). This special type of money are called "bank reserves". And bank reserves can only be used to 1) settle interbank transfers and 2) buy more bonds. They can never leave the loop of the banking system. So the next time you see scary looking charts showing that the total amount of money increased a lot in the last two years, keep in mind that that "money" includes bank reserves that are stuck in a closed loop. This is also why Japan, who is the king of QE and "money printing", barely has any inflation.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Lee Richmond threw the first perfect game in history in 1880. He later became a school teacher in Toledo, Ohio. One of his students was Norman Joss. Norman's dad was Addie Joss.

Addie Joss threw the fourth perfect game in MLB history, in 1908.

Consider arm sized, hand sized, fingernail sized, and pinched-fingers "tiny" sized. About 1000, 100, 10, 1 mm. Tray of cookies, hand-sized cookie, chocolate chip, and tiny crumb - yum. Now zoom 1000x, taking tiny sized to arm sized, and they become 1000, 100, 10, 1 um. Call this microview, with microscopic microorganisms measured in micrometers. A grain of salt is sized like a cardboard box, a head hair like a hand-sized pole, your red blood cells like red M&M Minis candies, and bacteria like nonpareil sprinkles. Zoom 1000x a second time for nanoview, with nanotechnology and nanoscale nanoparticles measured in nanometers. Arm, hand, fingernail, tiny, are now 1000, 100, 10, 1 nm. Bacteria are garbage bags and benches, viruses are small sports balls, proteins are chewing gum, and atoms are sand. Beach world, with a grain of salt towering over the city skyline.

Scale/size can seemingly be taught accessibly young... we just don't. Nor use size as an organizational frame to catalyze understanding of the physical world. Asking first-tier medical school graduate students how big red blood cells are... goes surprisingly poorly. But there seems lots of fun to be had.

afaik the only way to get epoch with only posix-compliant tools is to use awk:

    $ awk 'BEGIN {srand(); t = srand() ; print t}'
    1651247949

explaination:

1. srand if not provided with a seed will use the current unix epoch as seed

2. srand will return its previous seed in a new initialization (and we assign it to t)

3. we print t

I learned this via a "Systems we love" talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfhMUed9RSE)

In your terminal Ctrl+a will return you to the start of whatever line you have typed, and ctrl+e will return you to the end.