#first principles

Things I know: the sun and moon occupy roughly the same angular size from the surface of the earth (that's why eclipses work the way they do) at about half a degree, the sun is 8 light minutes away, light travels at ~300 million meters per second, and I *think* the moon is about 1 light second away.

Based on those facts, I ought to be able to get pretty damn close for the sun, and if I'm right about the moon, I should be relatively close (at least within an order of magnitude).

First, let's figure out the distance of the sun and moon. The sun is 8 light minutes away, so we take 8 * 60 seconds * 300Mm/s and we get a distance of 144 billion meters away. For the moon, it's just 1 light second, so that's 300 million meters.

Now that we have our distances and their apparent angular diameter, we can set up a right triangle. I like to imagine the base (or adjacent side, technically) is a line from our eye to the center of the object, the opposite side draws a line to the right side of the object, and then the angle of the adjacent and hypotenuse is one half of the angular diameter (since we're only looking at one half of the object).

With that, we can figure out the diameter of the object by taking distance * tan(0.25 degrees) * 2! Thank fuck for trigonometry.

So, how big is the sun? If we plug in 144 billion meters distance we get a diameter of 1,256,645 km. Doing the same for the moon, we get a diameter of 2,618 km.

Those seem to me like they should be ... Roughly on the right order of magnitude at least, even if I have no idea how close they are! So that's cool. Let's see just how close I got.

According to Wikipedia, the sun's diameter is 1,391,400 km -- about 10% off from our estimate. Not half bad! But I'm much less confident about the moon; 1 light second just seems too neat a number to be right.

Wikipedia says the moon's diameter is 3,474 km, which means I was right to be wary of that estimate. That's considerably worse than the sun -- we cut a third off the moon's diameter!

I also keep thinking that it's so great Hannibal got his own show under his name and now so does Clarice, and kind of ironic neither of them get mentioned in each other's shows.

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

I did spend the back half of my first watch through CQL yelling Xichen!!!! Xichen NO at my TV (because I am a woman of grace and poise), but I've softened on him a lot and kind of arrived at the conclusion that Xichen was trying his best and had his reasons even when they make me personally scream Xichen No. The reason why I went for disagree rather than neutral is that I don't think the problem is actually one of weakness; I think Xichen legitimately feels that compromise is a moral good he as a duty to fulfill.

He's often right! There is value in compromise and peacekeeping! But also he's often just (in my not terribly relevant opinion) straight up right and in those instances I do think his desire to compromise leads him to co-signing some pretty terrible things he knows are terrible and turning a blind eye to some things I wish he'd looked harder at.

Xichen being flawed does not exactly set him apart from the rest of the cast. I don't think there's a single character besides the juniors who hasn't done some stuff that I think can fairly be interpreted as questionable. One of the things I like best about CQL is that while it's mostly a love story with shades of family drama it occasionally detours to address like, the problem of how to wield power ethically, private love vs. public duty, how much you can actually expect another person to know your innermost heart, the private self vs. the public performance of self, ethics in feudalism, Vengeance! What is it good for? etc etc etc and the conclusions it reaches are often that it's difficult and complicated and easy to fuck up even when you're trying very hard. There are also some very bad special effects and very broad acting. Something for everyone! Truly a very fun and often delightfully silly story.

I’d like to think that I’m always extracting human behaviour into first principles.

First principles are boiling a medical problem down to it’s simplest, most basic components. You might not know how to treat every possible condition in every species, because there are a huge amount of different species, but you do have that knowledge in other species and so you can boil things down and extrapolate back.

I’ve discussed using first principles before here, but I don’t think there is a hard and fast list of what they are.

Classic examples would be seeing a condition in a species of bird that you don’t normally treat, but you’ve seen the condition in other species. You can extrapolate because the two species are close enough, but you can’t ever be certain, and with many exotic species there just isn’t huge amounts of drug data to draw from.

So if you want to go back to very basic first principles, you might ask yourself:

Is the patient alive?

What species is it most similar to?

Has it got trauma?

Is it vomiting?

Is it under conditioned?

What does it eat? Is it eating?