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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Parent/child height data shows a regression to the mean.
I’ve heard that intelligence works the same way. Even if both you and your spouse are intelligence outliers, there’s a good chance your children won’t be.
[Image by u/takeasecond on Reddit]
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Egypt is a long skinny country that happens to have a big desert around it.
[image: Milos Popovic]
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
The location of all earthquakes since 1980. We live on a cracked shell.
[Image: The Concord Consortium, via Kottke]
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
This isn’t a close up of a computer chip, it’s an aerial photo of a giant steel plant in South Korea called Gwangyang Steel Works (courtesy of @DOverview).
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Little graph to remind you how unbelievable it is that you can instantly contact someone anywhere on the planet for free
[graph from The Rise and Fall of American Growth]
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
In the year 116 AD, Eurasia was blanketed by four mega-empires:
Roman (max population: 60 - 75 million)
Parthian (max pop: 7M)
Kushan (max pop: 10M)
Han (max pop: 60M)
The four empires contained around 150 million people—20 million less than the population of Bangladesh today.
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Just a couple thousand generations ago, all of our ancestors were African. We're recent immigrants everywhere else.
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
The Webb telescope recently set its sights on a little piece of the night sky, capturing thousands of galaxies in a cluster 10 billion light years away. Every tiny dot in this image (obvious stars aside) is a cosmic megalopolis that may be home to millions of civilizations.
Would you rather be an emperor in 116AD or a poor person now with all the fast transportation, immediate communication benefits that come with modern life (along with all the other things we take for granted)?
The pyramids are always portrayed as being in the middle of the dessert.
My father told me about a trip he took to Nigeria in the early 1950s - took him about three / four days even though he went by aeroplane.
Scales wrong but it’s probably still the same map! Some of those places are tough to get to.
It's Weird Being The Same Age As Old People Funny Vintage T-Shirt
Order here: ducon.space/it-s-weird-bei
Africa is wider than Russia...
But yeah let's ignore how small Africa is depicted on all maps!
Much faster than I had expected. Now half a day to Japan feels too long. I would be fine with an ICBM ride to cut this to 6 hours all included door to door.
These party pics are so hot 
Sharing 11th
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Vishal Bhargava
@VishalBhargava5
Mumbai: When you see nothing at all
"The image...depicts the estimated time it would take for a traveler to journey from London to various parts of the world using the fastest available routes and transportation methods of the time..."
poe.com/s/W6VVpYkQ9s44
From six-week steamship voyages to Beijing in 1881, to today’s six-hour flights—that’s the same quantum leap we’re seeing in dev: from manual coding to lightning-fast builds with & v0. It’s 1881-to-2024 all over again
wild how in 2050 we'll probably laugh at "only" 3hr flights to Beijing... quantum tunneling pods gonna make this map look like dial-up internet 
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Sourced from across X
The basic issue is that either you are running a global empire with 750+ military bases worldwide, the world reserve currency, the headquarters of the UN in New York, and so on — in which case you really do need to be global #1 on everything — or you are just running a country.
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Bro to bro,
if you attract a woman based on the watch you wear you’ll get exactly what you pay for.
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Steven
@StevenPulteFam
If you’re a guy in your early 20s, buy a Rolex.
Go into debt if you have to
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Steven
@StevenPulteFam
Replying to @StevenPulteFam
This is not satire. You can get a Rolex for 4 grand
Having a nice watch communicates status to women and business relationships
And if you buy it right it will hold its value if not appreciate