Tim Urban

Writer, infant

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

My book What's Our Problem? is now available.

The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our chaotic political environment. With 303 drawings, it's a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds.

Get it here: https://t.co/BnPpcn0RYr

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

The explosion came from 2/3 of a gram of matter being converted to energy. About the mass of a paperclip.

[historical dems @Jesamobono]

Hiroshima
AUG - 1949

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Really helps you appreciate how many empty seats there are at Yankee stadium too

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I cannot emphasize enough how amazing this was. Videos like this do not do it justice. Truly feels like you're sitting on the field watching the game.

[Justin Ryan @justinryanio]

Live immersive MLB on Apple Vision Pro. It felt like I was at Yankee Stadium. The whole experience was incredible.

Shot through the lens with iPhone since it can’t be recorded on headset.

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

The Asahi Illusion. Nothing in the center is actually brighter, but your brain sees a burst of light. Primates and rats react similarly, hinting at shared visual perception across species

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I really wish the rise of LLMs didn't come along with catastrophic job loss, massive privacy invasions, and maybe also the apocalypse. Because when you put those side effects aside, it is the COOLEST MOST WILD TECHNOLOGY EVER.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I've recently been rewatching this whole series as cozy entertainment to fall asleep to

[brutes battaglia @brutesbattaglia]

I’ve seen this, no shit, 300 times. And I still can’t believe this happened

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

My three-year-old just asked me if our dog came from mommy's belly. Imagine being that level of disoriented.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

@david_perell Same phenomenon with cutting my book draft down. So painful and once I do I don’t miss the cut stuff one bit.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I’m gonna go ahead and say this is not good

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: ChatGPT launches Apple Messages integration on Mac, allowing it to access & analyze users’ entire message history & send texts on their behalf.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

No one:
Mathematicians:

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

This single expression matches the first 18,457,734,525,360,901,453,873,570 digits of e.

Euler’s number e is an irrational constant that begins 2.71828… and continues infinitely without repeating. In 2004, Richard Sabey constructed a special expression that uses each of the digits 1 through 9 exactly once. That expression is identical to the classic limit form (1 + 1/n)^n for an extraordinarily large value of n.

Because the difference between (1 + 1/n)^n and the true value of e shrinks roughly like 1/(2n), the result agrees with e for precisely as many decimal places as there are digits in that enormous n—exactly 18,457,734,525,360,901,453,873,570 places. The equality of the two power-tower representations of n is an algebraic identity, so the digit count is rigorous rather than approximate.

This remains one of the most extreme known pandigital approximations to e.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

This guy's gonna make me do a 180 and become woke

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

A lot of people aren't going to want to hear this but much of the "depression" that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake. The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it's going to be.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

I would have been so much more gripped by learning as a teen if I had been taught with videos like that instead of diagrams like this

[ilyas sahin, MD @ilyassahinMD]

The complexity inside a single human cell is almost impossible to comprehend…

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

My most conservative position, apparently, is that being forced to pretend belief in things that deeply violate your conscience and sense of truth as a condition of participating in society is an extremely big deal -- for reasons George Orwell explained better than I can

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Autonomous driving is amazing but the true dream will be when the car drops me off right where I’m going and goes off to deal with parking on its own, and then comes back and picks me up when I’m ready to leave

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Venera 7: The little probe that could

[Latest in space @latestinspace]

It's 2026, and these are still the only images we have from the surface of Venus

[Angélica @shaqt3]

Acabo de ver el montaje de Javier Castro "Los colores del eclipse" y me parece de una brutalidad...

[Cliff Pickover @pickover]

Mathematics.

I love this animation by Daniel Piker (@KangarooPhysics).

Each dot follows a path, and takes 3.5 hrs to return to its starting point. (You might think the dots are jittering or sparkling, but on closer inspection they're walking like ants.)

Used with permission.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

This video of me was filmed without my permission

[Physics & Astronomy Zone @zone_astronomy]

The transit of Earth and the Moon across the Sun's face, as viewed from Saturn.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Happy eclipse fomo day!