The Antipodes
summary
Ancient Greeks conjecture the existence of antipodes using symmetry and a four‑zone climate model, but that model wrongly predicts an impassable equatorial desert — the equator actually crosses the lush Congo. A South African MeerKAT radio array images the galactic center and an old Python library maintained by the speaker helps produce a NASA Picture of the Day, showing the toolchain works. Practical habits get built too: reply‑first emails, a pandoc shell script to paste Markdown into Gmail, and those practices reduce wait time and confusion.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Start
- 2:33Wikipedia "Antipodes" diagram (Citynoise)
- 6:58Would there be plants and animals?
- 8:15You never meet antipodeans at dinner parties
- 9:45I ran across an image at the Washington Post
- 12:58What if you wanted to start in Cairo and cross the desert?
- 13:24Spoiler alert: there's no desert at the equator
- 14:37Debates with "theory of common descent"
- 17:16Clean Architecture
- 18:12I also sometimes write Python modules upside down
- 20:01Personal communication
- 20:44How do I make a decision?
- 24:25I don't like people to know my opinion until I've surrounded it with a fortress of rationale
- 25:12In putting the decision first, I was deciding to be vulnerable
- 26:24Side note: I never composed conference email in Gmail
- 26:34Never compose a high stakes email in an application with a Send button!
- 30:20The galactic core is hidden by dust, but is visible to radio telescopes
- 32:23Here are 8 improvements that I made to the draft
- 33:052. Make modest claims
- 33:41Expand into a narrative
- 34:27Offer credit to the email's author
- 35:39Bring in the audience
- 36:40Q: How does the tweet look?
- 38:10A neat rule about being human: Anything you do will be interpreted as judging everyone who does something else!
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