2² + 3² + 6² does equal 7² -- whoa!

Alright, time to generalize into a generic base.

b² + (b+1)² + (b² + b)² = (b² + b + 1)²

is an identity!

I wonder if there are any other identities like this. The reason this looks like it can be in binary is in how there are no coefficients anywhere. Hmm..

(2/2) I know that mental health has become main-stream for teens to hear and talk about: in music, in fashion, etc. I have seen this hoodie countless times. I wonder if teens will make it fashionable to wear self-harm bandages to take the stigma off of those who wear them out of necessity.

Follow-up.

(Also, I love the "As predicted", as though it were the scientist equivalent of "as per my previous email".)

"The President’s budget request for NASA in fiscal year 2026 totals $18.8B. This represents a significant shift from the $24.8B enacted in 2025..."

In 2024, NASA got 0.37%.
In 2025, NASA got 0.34%
In 2026, NASA is slated to be further reduced to 0.27%.

www.planetary.org/space-policy...

I like how each category notes approximately which "geomagnetic latitude" is likely to experience aurora overhead. This is different from "regular" latitude because the earth's rotational axis isn't aligned with the magnetic field's axis. Because magnet fields cause auroras, we use its lats instead!

At this link can be found a description of the categories in the space weather scales. It's the same idea as the category scale we have for hurricanes, or the EF scale for tornadoes, or the magnitude scale for earthquakes. I like the rightmost column the most. (www.spaceweather.gov/noaa-scales-...)

I think this would go over their heads, and not just because it took place on a starship.

But for real: this is a moment in pop culture for adults to connect with teenagers about something cataclysmic happening in that space. Consider starting the year off with a bid for cross-cultural connection?

..., then counted the third column as five again, and then subtracted one to correct for how the third column wasn't a full five.

I feel really, really gross at Brain right now.

I counted the leftmost column of five first upwards, then scanned the two downwards. Then the rightside almost looked like one block of 10. I scanned the rightmost column to verify that it had five in it (it felt more like, "I matched it to the length of the five that I had already measured"?)...

All to say: @acollierastro.bsky.social is one of my favourite YouTubers. She recently did a video on Vibe Physics which contained a chapter on vibe coding that left me considering what I've written in these posts. I don't know how I feel about it all yet. She influences me. It's fine. (9/9)

When calculators hit classrooms, did we not have the same argument about how they'll affect students' abilities to do arithmetic? It's mechanical advantage for human creativity. We can do more to get our creativity out, faster. Standards and use cases will develop. Best practices will exist. (8/n)

I think generative AI and LLMs are the next-gen high-level programming lang. "Prompt engineering" is a thing on which univ classes are focused. The syntax of the vibe code is in the structure of the English words chosen to trigger the generative AI to create the code-- GIGO is still a thing. (7/n)

Sure, the increased ubiquity of AI, LLM, and the democratisation of programming is going to have a hugely negative impact on the ability for programmers to be hire-able. But this is a flaw of capitalism that privatizes profit and socialises losses that is not being sufficiently addressed. (6/n)

"You're basically doing what anyone could do with an LLM, which seems bad for your career prospects. You are specifically and intentionally refusing to learn anything which seems problematic."

I see this as a democratisation of programming? As learning code in a high-level language? (5/n)

"An important component of vibe coding is that you don't know, nor wish to know, what the code does. It isn't "vibes" to go back through the code and read it line by line to try to understand the code." I cut my teeth on C, and I've no idea what the machine language is doing in the background. (4/n)