Asanti Sana

Welcome to nonsense. Here's your host, Sana. That's Sana. Look at her. Fear her. Have a pastry. They're probably not poisoned.

[bisonrimant]

Ancient Wisdom III

Woodcarving

Last sculpture of 2025

[bisonrimant]

[stoportotouch]

sorry i was researching the author of a victorian book about raising children and now i'm fascinated by her. clear my schedule we're talking about lydia maria child.

[stoportotouch]

"show a baby nice things" got it

[stoportotouch]

wuh. hbuh.

[xanaxfarts]

A tiny insect clinging to the head of a horned viper

[chujellys]

there's a family of local sandhill cranes that adopted an abandoned goose last summer and they're STILL together today even after migration.... i love them + they're local celebrities + nature is beautiful

[chujellys]

yesterday’s update… 📸 everyone is paparazzi when ur this famous…

[intosnarkness]

A picture entitled “next time don’t leave the story sitting for a year and you won’t have to study the text because you forgot what you wrote”

The goal is Chapter 7 of OWE by the end of this month. You can be very slightly rude to me if I don’t deliver.

[intosnarkness]

Bad news: you can be very slightly rude to me.

[parkayquarts]

little girl in the checkout line was freaking the FUCK out reaching for a shelf and screaming "GIMMEEEE GIMMEEEEE" at the top of her lungs and the mom kept saying "no 🫩" and I look at the shelf expecting there to be candy or something and it was full of batteries

[parkchanwoohoo]

I subscribed to UNNAMED STREAMING SERVICE a few days ago and gave the login info to all my friends, as one does, but one of them went in and turned on 2-factor authentication and set the phone number to her own cell phone, locking me out of the account

It was an accident and we got it fixed but for a brief moment the betrayal and fury was so great I blacked out and was possessed by the spirit of like a 19th century naval officer, I was pacing around my room like "TO THINK THAT JUDAS HIMSELF NUMBERS HIMSELF AMONG MY COMPATRIOTS"

[heaveninawildflower]

Design for a Stained Glass Window (19th century) by John Gregory Crace (British, 1809–1889) and Son.

Pen and black and brown ink, with watercolour, graphite.

Image and text information courtesy The Met.

[somethingsgottasaveyou]

What If It All Works Out // AS IT IS

[charliebowater]

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

A little doodle for one the most beautiful lines from any poem, The Old Astronomer.

[primalheart]

This is not a little doodle. This. THIS. This is fucking MAGIC. You have captured pure wonder and whimsy and romance and bliss and that almost melancholy wholeness when you look up at the sky and just feel the smallness of your being and the grandness of the universe. All this captured with a lover’s eye. We cannot see her face but I feel the tender passionate ardour for this petite but mighty creature in the world. While at the same time I feel the bittersweet swoon of wanting to be gazed upon myself with such whole and overwhemling admiration and love. It is goddamn masterful.

I am fucking following your tumblr charliebowater you are amazing.

[charliebowater]

THAT’S THE NICEST COMMENT I’VE EVER READ.

[aropride]

"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level

[aropride]

what my atoms are doing is their fucking business man i'm busy trying to stop my dog from eating tissues directly out of the box

[duckbunny]

nuclei don't touch, but the nucleus is not the core of reality. reality is made of electrons dancing. reality is made of bonds.

you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.

electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.

you pet your dog and the electron-orbitals of your skin overlap with the electron-orbitals of his fur, and both are changed by the contact. you are not made of little motes floating alone in a void. you are a single unfathomable chord formed of a trillion vibrations, and so is he. and the note you play is changing at every moment by what you touch and how you breathe, and so is his. and atoms do not really have edges, and to touch is to interact, and when you put your hand on your dog the universe does not know that you are separate. the song expands to hold you both.

[laughingpokemon]

[phaeton-flier]

would you rather take, (tax-free)

$50,000

50% chance of $1,000,000

Voting ended onJul 26

[fluxion-fluent]

i don't think you can conclude that people picking the 50k are inumerate. the right choice would depend on the individuals utility function and current wealth, right?

[circumlocutive]

Yeah seems like a function of risk tolerance

[femmenietzsche]

[argumate]

that's absolutely the right idea, but we can formalise it with the Kelly criterion that suggests maximising the logarithm of your expected wealth, which will be either log(W + 50k) (where W is whatever you started with) or 1/2 * log(W) + 1/2 log(W + 1 million).

turns out the latter dominates when W > $2,777 which is pretty low! most people should take the million unless they're flat broke right now.

the reason is once you're not broke, losing the guaranteed $50k isn't catastrophic compared to the benefit of getting the optional $950k.

anyway that assumes logarithmic utility, if your utility was linear then you would always gamble on the million as it is higher expected value, while if you have isoelastic utility aka constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) (aka the Box-Cox transformation wtf??) or hyperbolic utility then you can tune your degree of risk aversion as needed.

but I think the intuition that the Kelly criterion provides is valuable as it suggests how to invest (and when to take out insurance!) such that it should hopefully grow your wealth over time with less chance of wiping you out entirely (call it the anti-SBF criterion).

of course the Kelly criterion attempts to maximise wealth growth over the long run, so it absolutely rules out negative expected value gambling no matter how high the jackpot because if you repeatedly make such bets you will not maximise your wealth; Kelly mandates that in a casino the optimal stake is zero -- unless you're running the casino! in which case you have the edge over customers and you can make sensibly sized positive expected value bets with them all day.

[argumate]

theevenprime said: There’s also a point below which you should take the gamble. If you’re $700,000 in debt to the Mafia or the government (but I repeat myself), then flipping the coin once again becomes optimal.

I think in some cases we can apply the Kelly criterion to situations like this, it just requires a bit of care to ensure that your "total wealth" doesn't only track the money in your pocket but all the other things you value too, like your reputation, life and health!

but when you have a hard cutoff for bankruptcy that transforms certain gain into loss then it changes the problem from maximising wealth growth to simply reducing the probability of doom, in which case even a negative expected value bet may be worth it, for example if you owe the mafia $100k and they're coming to collect your money or your legs tomorrow and someone else offers you a choice between:

a guaranteed $50k

a 10% chance of winning $400k

the gamble has lower expected value in monetary terms (only 40k), but the guaranteed $50k has zero chance of saving your legs while the 10% just might.

the problem with a hard cutoff (so to speak) like this is that it encourages risky behaviour! like if you're facing a significant loss, maybe not death but something you treat equivalently to death, like losing your job or your house or your reputation, you might make an unwise gamble to avoid it that is likely to leave you worse off.

the classic example of this is when a banker engages in a little fraud and it goes wrong and they're faced with the choice between coming clean and losing their job, or gambling to win back what they lost and potentially blowing up the bank + losing their job, the latter choice can sound more appealing even though it clearly has worse consequences for the bank and probably for society at large (see Barings etc.).

[indigobuntings]

I can't believe home depot literally produced a wildly successful science fiction musical and we all just pretend it didn't happen. on one hand yes it had a boring white guy main character but like.... home depot just... Made it? And it had shit ton of box office sales? and no one even talks about this. this is like avatar (2009) all over again

[indigobuntings]

OK so. After a lot of frantic googling I realized this was all a dream. home depot did not in fact produce a wildly successful science fiction musical. I was on allergy meds and took a nap and my brain simply prophesized this. slightly disappointed because I wanted to watch it.

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[claypigeonpottery]

I fell in love with this sentence and it circles my brain so it’s turning into pottery

[vocabulary-altering-posts]

PHRASE ADDED TO INVENTORY!

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dogpuppy]

[liquidpaperfoundation1]

My Very Punctual Wife Gets My Night Worm can also be used to remember the order of the planets in the solar system!

[cryptid-on-a-string]

Mercury Venus Pearth Wars Goopiter Maturn Nuranus Weptune

[fullmetalfisting]

I think being my friend might be exhausting