Human-like beings are doomed to drop toast butter-side down 🥪 In 1995, Robert Matthews wrote a paper showing that toast landing butter-side down isn’t just bad luck or evidence of Murphy’s Law ('If it can go wrong, it will') - it’s physics and ultimately ascribable to the values of the fundamental constants. Toast typically begins to rotate as it tips off a table, but the height of most tables (~75 cm) is just enough for it to rotate about half a turn, landing butter-side down. This isn’t due to butter's weight or aerodynamics, which are negligible. Rather, it's about the torque and time during the fall. In this paper, Matthews builds a detailed dynamical model of the toast’s tumble and shows experimentally that under realistic conditions (with little horizontal velocity), there's a built-in bias toward a butter-side down landing. Surprisingly, this bias is linked to fundamental constants: table height is constrained by human height, which in turn is limited by biomechanical stability and molecular bond strength (à la Press, 1980). Given the values of fundamental constants, the result is universal - all intelligent, human-like beings are doomed to drop toast butter-side down. To avoid this fate? A little push adds horizontal velocity, reducing rotational torque, a counterintuitive fix but backed by physics.

Paul Erdös on the infinitude of Mathematics

In 1960, Freeman Dyson proposed a megastructure to capture all the Sun’s energy - the Dyson Sphere. That’s what a Type II civilization needs. At ~2.5% annual growth (like 1960–2025), we’ll need a whole star in 1,200 years. A Dyson Sphere isn’t sci-fi - it’s a forecast.

The fifth hyperfactorial: 5⁵ × 4⁴ × 3³ × 2² × 1¹ = 86400000 milliseconds is exactly 1 day!

Happy 50th birthday Terence Tao! 🎉

The longest straw you can drink from on Earth is ~ 10.3 m (33.8 ft) long

George Green was born exactly 232 years ago today. Often called the Ramanujan of physics, he was the son of a miller in Nottingham and largely self-educated. At 35, he rented out his mill and penned "An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism." In this work, he introduced what are now known as Green's formula, the Green function, and potential, laying the groundwork for potential theory. He self-published this essay as a small booklet, with the financial support of friends. Only after this accomplishment did he attend Cambridge to obtain a formal education. There, he authored a few more papers on mathematical physics, though his initial work remains his most renowned. Tragically, he passed away at 48. Later historians delved into the resources available to Green during his self-education in Nottingham. Among their findings was an intriguing entry in the local gentlemen's club library: Laplace's "Traité de mécanique céleste." If this was the cornerstone of his learning, it remains a mystery how he mastered French, given that he had never attended school prior to writing his seminal work.

The ISS has a continuous background noise level of ~70 dB, generated by life support systems, fans, pumps, and scientific equipment that run 24/7 To protect their hearing and prevent fatigue, astronauts often wear noise-canceling headphones or custom-molded earplugs

French author Victor Hugo on philosophy

Over the years, pacemakers have used various power sources — including plutonium-238 Nuclear pacemakers could last over 40 years, compared to 5–10 for conventional ones. A small number of people in the U.S. still have them