Clerihew

Gavin Newsom
Governed gruesome
Counseled by fools
Didn't open schools

The Ruler

The Magistrate's hands are tied

2026-04-05

You want to take a rocket to another star system a distance D away.

The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation shows that your delta-v depends on your engine's exhaust velocity V_e and your mass ratio f

$$ \large{} \Delta v = {V_e} \ln f \tag{1} $$

That's the ratio of your fully-loaded "wet" mass M₀ to your "dry" mass when all your fuel is spent, M_f

I recently asked Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT 5.2 Thinking to compute some radionuclide data. I have $20/month plans with GPT and Gemini and a $100/month plan with Opus, so it's not a fair comparison. But Opus did perform best.

From the Gemini UI, it wasn't clear whether I should choose Thinking or Pro. From a web search, it seems Thinking is the small model with CoT, whereas Pro is the big model. So I chose Pro.

Claude's split-view UI for artifacts is a big win. I'm amazed the other two haven't copied it. Though according to Claude, it doesn't know which artifact you're viewing, so you have to mention it all the time. How hard could it be to make Claude aware of this?

None of the models could produce a complete list of radionuclides with half-lives 4-40 years. So I made the list myself with NuDat 3 and gave it to them. Fun fact: there are only 24.

2025-03-04 - Real or fake (335) https://x.com/clumma/status/1897004025079587298

2024-04-12 - Infinite energy unlock (193) https://x.com/clumma/status/1778817780579750359

2025-02-27 - Valar prototype (147) https://x.com/clumma/status/1895358436516470931

2013-08-14

How many linear relationships in biology persist over more than 6 orders of magnitude?

Whether a given dose is hormetic or deleterious should depend on the stress on the animal at the time of exposure. I conjecture that wartime stress could be responsible for deleterious effects in Japanese bomb survivors at ~ 100mSv, compared to other exposure cases that suggest hormetic effects at that dose.

The doubling dose for double-strand breaks is about 1.5 Gy per cell cycle.[^1] That is, ROS from normal metabolism are worth about 0.3 Gy/hour. DNA repair machinery is nearly at capacity at that level, so an additional 1.5 Gy can be deadly. Exercise seems to derive its benefits from stimulating the same systems [^2][^3] and whether it is good or bad also depends on one's existing stress level. Exercising a fatigued person is deleterious, but exercising a sedentary person is beneficial.

If oxidative stress is hormetic, antioxidant supplements may be harmful.[^4]

2019-05-23

Light is made of photons.

Light has both color and brightness. Color is related to the energy of photons and brightness is related to the number of photons.

Color determines how light interacts with objects. Black surfaces absorb photons of all visible colors, while white surfaces reflect them. Glass is transparent to visible light; many materials are transparent to radio waves.

2012-11-26 - Possible vs Actual https://x.com/clumma/status/273138304449396737

2014-04-20 - Trade vs Production https://x.com/clumma/status/457949289658859520

2014-08-12 - Supply vs Demand https://x.com/clumma/status/499250743069532160

last update: 2022-11-12

1. How persistent is civilization growth? (Garrett 2011)
2. Can we predict long-run economic growth? (Garrett 2012)
3. Modes of growth in dynamic systems (Garrett 2012)
4. Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (Garrett 2013)

Starship Trooper - Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
I've Seen All Good People - Through the Looking Glass (Carroll)
Close to the Edge - Siddhartha (Hesse)
And You And I - Foundation (Asimov)
The Remembering - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Bach)
The Gates of Delirium - War and Peace (Tolstoy)
Awaken - The Singer: A Classic Retelling of Cosmic Conflict (Miller)
Circus of Heaven - Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)

2019-05-18

It's uncanny how closely this talk follows a line of reasoning I've been working on lately. If you're copied here, we may have discussed one or more of its aspects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

(Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer, speaking here at a conference in Moscow.)