Underrated reasons to be thankful V
11 hours ago
- Your dog truly loves you, not just because of evolution.
- Sexual reproduction creates genetic variance, allowing life to persist despite entropy.
- Curing the common cold is theoretically possible but currently too annoying to pursue.
- Historical plagues went from Europe to the Americas, but modern sanitation and vaccines hold diseases in check.
- We have many advanced strategies to fight engineered infectious diseases, and we can win.
- Clean water is abundant and almost free.
- Dentistry has greatly improved quality of life.
- Tongues are a wonderful sensory organ.
- Radioactive atoms have trade-offs: high energy but short life, or low energy but long life, making permanent poisoning difficult.
- Curing cancer, heart disease, and accidents together could nonlinearly extend life expectancy.
- Peroxisomes handle fatty acids too long for mitochondria.
- Having preferences and no universal ranking of goodness makes us happier.
- Cardamom is cheap but tastes expensive, adding luxury to life.
- Gregory of Nyssa was right about something.
- Grandma Moses shows it's never too late to start.
- Sleep provides a reset and pause, making life bearable.
- Air travel is very safe despite concerns.
- Markets are often less worried than individuals about most things.
- The bundle of sexual attraction, love, economic unit, and reproduction is strange but successful.
- Derivatives of elementary functions are also elementary, though larger.
- Gradients of expression graphs are the same size as the original, enabling large-scale fitting.
- Biological life and intelligence don't use this property of expression graphs.
- Five-dimensional light fields can be stored on 2D film via wave mechanics.
- The storage of light fields on film is a strange example of physics.
- Disposable plastic is popular for good reasons.
- Disposable plastic, when disposed correctly, sequesters carbon.
- Rocks breaking into pieces but verifying origin is like cryptography.
- Society's deal to help raise children works without constant transactions.
- Only 1% of humans lived under free democracies historically, now 10% — do not lose heart.
- Be thankful for being in three dimensions; eating in 2D would be problematic.