So for black bodies with identical shape and linear dimensions R1 and R2, with identical power production per unit volume, both in thermal equilibrium with whatever is outside them, you would expect:

R1/R2 = (T1/T2)^4

(because setting power produced equal to power radiated gives R proportional to T^4).

Pretending humans are spheres with radius 1m and the sun is a sphere with radius 7*10^8m, you would expect the sun to have ~160 times the temperature of a human at equilibrium in vacuum. It's going to be lower because not all of the sun is power-producing, of course. But higher because a human is not 1m in radius. And again higher because humans are not spheres and lose heat more than a sphere would for the same volume (more surface area).

The sun is about 6000K on the surface. That would give us ~40K for the equilibrium temperature of a human in vacuum, which at least seems truthy.

TL;DR: the sun is big, with a small surface area compared to its volume, because it's big.

For both the sun and a human on earth there are two processes going on:

1. Heat production per unit volume.

2. Heat loss per unit surface area.

The volume to surface area ratio for the sun is much larger than for the human, for a minor reason (the sun is a sphere) and a major reason (the sun's linear size is much bigger). So the equilibrium temperature of the sun in the same ambient outside environment is higher than the human's.

Your thought experiment about placing a human inside the sun would in fact work as you say, if a human body continued to produce heat once it had achieved thermal equilibrium with the surrounding plasma.

Which is fine if you're comparing equivalent "headline" numbers. But for other purposes the ratio of take-home pay to what the employer has to pay out (so including all the employer-side taxes) might be more relevant in terms of determining your likelihood of receiving a certain level of take-home pay.

For comparison, Germany is at 51%, UK at 50%, Netherlands at 47%.

Belgium is close to France at about 61%...

The US (not in Europe, obviously) is at 46%.

And Switzerland at 36%; this is the European outlier in the opposite direction from France.

But a priori, just from this data I would expect French taxes to be about 1.4x US taxes and Dutch taxes to be similar to US ones...

I should make a habit of loading things in a private browsing tab as a test.

You should be able to see the whole Times article at https://web.archive.org/web/20220616003939/https://www.nytim... if you are interested in a less-pro-ACLU take.

Note that the shift has been quite recent (more or less since 2017) and not uniform; the ACLU does still take up free speech cases, while avoiding others, depending on various things.

Related, but not mentioned in the above articles, are tweets from prominent ACLU lawyers calling for banning certain books (see https://reclaimthenet.org/strangio-shrier-free-speech-suppre... for a reference, but this was quite widely reported). On the one hand, said lawyers have a right to their own opinions on their own personal twitter accounts. On the other hand, the ACLU never bothered to say that this opinion does not represent the ACLU organizational position....

That is, per Popper, tolerating people who will physically harm you as part of the discussion means a discussion cannot be meaningfully held at all.

But people really like to stretch this to whatever edge-case meaning of "intolerant" would be convenient to them at the time...

The operative word being "had". It hasn't had one in a while.

> Population grows exponentially

It really depends. It does if you assume TFR is a constant, but it tends to not be constant.

> I don’t think we should look at it in decades but rather as through lenses that capture time in centuries.

In the "centuries" timeframe, technological change (much reduced infant mortality, availability of contraception, career opportunities, etc) pretty much dominates the TFR situation.

"Asia" is pretty broad, but India was at 2.2 in 2020 and dropping pretty rapidly; as of earlier this spring it hit 2.0. Note that the Statista numbers are moving 5-year averages, so the "spot" number for India is lower than the number you see on that graph.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-w... puts "Asia" as a whole at 2.15, which is indeed "healthy", but the slope is very much down.

Africa does have higher fertility, but from what I can tell the main reason is lack of access to birth control, not "community" or "big homes"...

    gzip -c /dev/sda > img.gz

    gunzip -c img.gz > /dev/sda

There were also somewhere on the order of 350-400 thousand Soviet soldiers killed in the battles around Leningrad.

It's pretty hard to "take" a multi-million person city if the residents are willing to accept double-digit-percentage fatality rates to prevent it... The big unknown is always whether they will be willing to accept it.

Basically, if a privately owned space is promoted as a "commons" and acts as one, some of the rules about speech start changing.

My understanding of the research in this area is that the 30 point gain is if you compare people who take a prep course to people who put in an equivalent amount of time preparing on their own with the widely available (e.g. can check them out of the local public library in many cases) preparation materials.

The 200 point gain is if you compare people who did the prep to people who have not done any prep.

The set of people who can't make themselves put in the time without the structure of a course would benefit by a lot more than 30 points from the course, and would pay for it. And do.

What the courses do offer, of course, is the structure to force indifferent students to sit through the preparation.

There's a lot of bad statistics, whether by accident or with an agenda, being done around the SAT....

But more important than all that, as the MIT post says, pretty much all the other measures elite colleges use for admitting students correlate even _more_ with income than the SAT does.

As far as I can tell, the thing the SAT really correlates with most is the thing it's actually designed to predict: ability to succeed in college, as measured by college GPA. (In particular, the correlation between college GPA and SAT score is higher than between college GPA and high school GPA.)

I don't think that's true in his post-Spain days, depending I guess on how you define "devout communist". I would say he was a devout socialist and an ardent anti-communist after Spain.

I am having no luck finding it, but one quote that has stuck with me is where he talks about how if the anti-Fascist forces in Spain won they would obviously establish a totalitarian state which would only be "good" by comparison with the Fascist alternative and would be terrible in any sort of objective sense.