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Cake day: November 25th, 2025

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  • the simple forms of conservation you probably learned in school are not entirely accurate. you probably learned that neither energy not matter can be created or destroyed; whatever you do, the mass you begin with will be the same as the mass you end with, and the same is true, separately, for energy. that’s not actually true; mass can be converted into energy, and vice versa. the correct form of conservation is that the combined mass-energy is constant. mass can be destroyed, but only if a proportional amount of energy is created. the coefficient of that proportionality is the square of the speed of light. that’s what E=mc² means. that’s how nuclear weapons work, and why they’re so powerful. c² is obviously a pretty big value, so when a small amount of matter is destroyed, it creates a large amount of energy

    similarly, energy can be converted into mass, but doing so makes it much “smaller.” c² units of energy will become 1 unit of mass. and mass, of course, interacts with space-time













  • do I have data on whether different species have different genes, and thus are affected differently by genetic conditions? I mean, it’s just sort of inherent to the concept of species, no? I guess as a specific example, I could say that the rate of melanism in humans is none, and the rate of melanism in some other species is not none, as evidenced by the fact that the concept of melanism exists, therefore melanism doesn’t occur in all species at the same rate