Ok, I think I finally figured out my eclipse plan. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself. So we're about 5-10 miles from totality if you head directly west, but due to some bending in I-35, heading north or south will also get you in totality. Most of San Antonio and all of Austin are in totality. Traffic predictions range from "You're going to sit still for 8 hours in every direction!!" to "The vast majority of people in the I-35 corridor already live in totality, why would it be bad?!"

HOWEVER! Amtrak stops in Heebieville once in the morning and once in the evening, and heads up to Austin. It drops you off in downtown Austin. Then me and the kids can bum around the public library and Ladybird Lake all day, and then take the train home. It sounds like a totally lovely day!

(Also I grew up reading YA books where the characters take day trips to the city, which was generally NYC or Chicago, and so I feel like I'm doing something charming and old-fashioned when I take the kids to the city for a day. Or at least a city.)

Finally: Sometimes during eclipses, the moon has a little coronas around it, and sometimes the moon totally blots out the sun. I assume that this is because sometimes the moon is closer to the earth and sun farther away, and other times the moon is farther from the earth and the sun is closer.

But what I am wondering is: which is the more dominant cause? Is it variations in the moon's distance to earth, or variations in the sun's distance to the earth?

(I assume it would be a pain to find the answer online, because the internet would be full of elementary explanations of how eclipses work.)

Pokey is 13, and really into jokes lately. Would you like to hear a few of his favorites?

(Are net-nannies still a thing? Don't get yourself locked out.)

1. My friend keeps having sex with his father in an elevator. It's wrong on so many levels.

2. I was at the doctor's office, and he told me I'd have to quit masturbating so much.
"But why?" I asked.
"Because I'm trying to examine you!"

3. Why does the easter bunny hide eggs?
Because he doesn't want anyone to know he fucks chickens.

[SIGH. I mean yes, I laughed.]

I've got this romantic belief that multigenerational housing would be just amazing. I'm sure the reality is that it's often difficult, because one generation owns the house and sets the rules, and so it's not like a coop with egalitarian groundrules. BUT NEVERTHELESS, I PERSIST! in my romanticism.

If something happened to my dad, my mom would 100% move in with us. She does not want to live alone, nor go to any sort of elder housing. Having my mom live with us would be sufficiently complicated that you'd think would disabuse me of my romantic airs above. (At this point, my dad's health is significantly better than my mom's, though.)

I like the idea of living with one of the kids, when they raise their own kids. But I also like the idea of staying in my own house and everything being nice and quiet. I contain multitudes! Who knows.

(Here's a dumb article on the topic that spurred this idle thought.)

NickS writes: This is a remarkable story and a remarkable write-up (warning very long and slow to load because it includes a number of embedded videos).

To summarize: An Israeli multi-millionaire has spent years working on a set of tools based on Bayesian reasoning to improve public debate. As part of that he has offered a wager to anyone willing to debate some of the propositions they had put forward.

In this case a commenter on Scott Alexander's blog took the challenge to argue against the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID, betting a large portion of his net worth on the debate.

At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don't. He's not Internet famous. He describes himself as a "physics student, programmer, and mountaineer" who "obsessively researches random topics". After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up "90%+" convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis.

Peter ends up being a champion debater (no surprise, considering his willingness to accept the very high stakes). The post summarizes the debate, and I learned a great deal about the arguments for and against the idea that COVID started from a lab leak.

But I was also impressed by the author's comments at the end about the value of this sort of public debate under ideal conditions (which this more or less was).

It's good to assert the true fact that these kinds of challenges are often dumb/rigged/useless, and that "nobody has yet responded to my challenge" isn't a valid argument that someone's necessarily right. But I stop short of trying to set some kind of social norm that nobody may respond to anyone else's challenges, even if they think that person is being honest and has organized the challenge well (as Saar was and did). That almost seems like itself legitimizing the whole thing, in the sense of accepting that if someone loses a challenge then it means something important. I would rather place the illegitimacy where it belongs (a challenge really doesn't prove anything, separate from the arguments made in it) and let people do what they want.

I want to see more debates like this. I learned more watching the 15 hours of Rootclaim debate than I think I would have researching on my own for 15 hours. But a lot of things had to come together to make this work. Most of all, this debate worked out because the judges were two very smart scientists with relevant expertise. To get such good judges, lots of things had to fall into place.

First, the debate itself had to be expensive enough that neither side begrudged paying the extra $5,000 per judge to hire the best people.

And second, the debate had to be about a topic where lots of intelligent people haven't yet made up their minds. If the debate was about flat earth, I would despair of finding good judges. Either the judges would already be convinced the Earth was round (which the flat Earth side would understandably refuse to accept). Or they would be 50-50, which would mean they were extremely weird people whose reasoning couldn't be trusted. Flat Earth is an extreme example, but even a debate about COVID vaccines would be pushing it here.

...

[T]his was surely one of history's greatest erisological studies. Two very smart people spent fifteen hours hashing out every argument and counterargument in good faith, then quantified all of their beliefs in a way that lets us figure out exactly where they differed and by how much. This isn't entirely a victory - as a newly minted member of team zoonosis, I still can't trace exactly why Saar is so sure I'm wrong. But if the COVID origin story fascinates me as this peek deep into a pestiferous underworld of sinister laboratories and reeking wet markets, something about this debate felt like analogous peek into the creepy subconscious swamps where disagreements begin.

Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God's biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century's biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate stayed acrimonious for years to come.

But fifth, if the coronavirus' story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim's moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.

Heebie's take: It loaded just fine for me, but it is definitely really long.

Mossy Character sends in Five things to remember a decade after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which is really interesting.

Also ten years ago, Airedale and I flew to California to go to the Veronica Mars movie premier. That was an extremely fun trip.