My own update to this xkcd comic from 2011:

(Originally posted on twitter):

Tweet of ikding/1347591168608006144

If you live in US west coast, you have undoubtedly came across the dystopian footage of the smoke-induced orange sky. People have compare it to "nuclear winter". Well, what we're experiencing is actually 20x worse.

I came across this article through my network, Nano-diamond self-charging batteries could disrupt energy as we know it, which included some eye-opening claims:

California company NDB says its nano-diamond batteries will absolutely upend the energy equation, acting like tiny nuclear generators. They will blow any energy density comparison out of …

Reading about Chicxulub crater (aka. "dinosaur killer") on wikipedia (as one does), I was surprised that connecting the crater to K–Pg boundary happened much more recent than I thought. Crater was discovered in 1981; linking it to K–Pg boundary happened in 1991.

Other things that happened in 1991 …

PyVista is a Python package for 3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). I learned how to use the package in the past few weeks, and decided to build something fun to explore Python-based 3D visualization on the web.

I had so much …

One thing that's somewhat under-appreciated in my mind about COVID19 is that it has disproportionately higher fatality rate for older adults. And many of our political leaders are old. It's not inconceivable that the virus could claim lives of high-profile politicians.

When my US friends and colleagues asked me about my home country, Taiwan, I often found it helpful to map Taiwan's high-level metrics into US states, which my colleague can better relate to.

Taiwan is closest to the following US states in metrics:

• Area: Maryland (MD: 32,131 km^2 …