7 ms·

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)

240 points by signa11 2y ago

andrepd 2y ago
I'm patiently waiting for the translation of Misner Thorne and Wheeler to Toki Pona.
crooked-v 2y ago
People talk about the 'good old days' of the web, but boy, in a multi-tab environment it stucks to try and read something that doesn't put any effort at all into side margins.
- politelemon 2y ago
  Reader mode (FF) helps a lot here.
- hexo 2y ago
  And yet, it is 1000 times more readable than any "modern" website.
  - brettermeier 2y ago
    Hell no. Typograhy class Lesson 1, never put more than a certain number of words per column (in any case never the whole screen width, on desktops)...
    - Timwi 2y ago
      And yet, for some reason, most people want their tabs and toolbars on the top, and the taskbar on the bottom, taking away vertical space that is actually used, and leave swathes of space on the left and right completely unused. I will never understand the resistance against putting things on the side.
      - globular-toast 2y ago
        Probably because English is written left to right and doesn't work so well top to bottom. So vertical bits tend to not include text, which is quite limiting. I do remember older UIs that included text at 90 degrees on sidebars, but that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. The real problem is our screens are the wrong shape. 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you work mostly with text. Square is probably the best. Using floating windows (like classic Mac OSX) is an option, but for some reason people like full screen windows these days. A tiling window manager is another option to effectively divide the screen up into better shaped areas. I tend to have 6 columns across 2 screens which works well.
        creata 2y ago
        > 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you work mostly with text. Why? I also usually use it with three columns of text, and it works well at that aspect ratio.
        globular-toast 2y ago
        Right, so you essentially use mini 16:27 screens which is a better aspect ratio than 16:9. What you really have to ask yourself is why 16:9 is a better choice than anything else. It wasn't picked because 3 16:27 columns is ideal for text. The main reason we have them is because it's easier for the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to deal with. With 16:9 we're forced to have three columns per screen, but what if I only need two? What if I want more lines of text per screen? Square seems like a much more obvious middle ground.
        creata 2y ago
        That makes sense, thanks. I've seen people give similar praise to 4:3 and 3:2 laptops.
        zahlman 2y ago
        >The main reason we have them is because it's easier for the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to deal with. Not just that, but it was an average of aspect ratios considered for the aesthetic of video data. Not text presentation.
- nxpnsv 2y ago
  the lack of large video ads really is jarring too
  - baxtr 2y ago
    I was hyper confused that I didn’t need to hide ANY HTML element. Also, reader mode was not suppressed by some naughty trick. Unreal.
    - nxpnsv 2y ago
      And what is the deal with functional scrolling?
    - matusp 2y ago
      It also did not ask about my cookie policy, how am I supposed to tell the site my preferences? I just wrote them via email to make sure.
      - subscribed 2y ago
        It depends on the purpose of the cookies: https://www.blackboxdesign.co.uk/gdpr-do-i-need-a-cookie-warning-on-my-small-business-website/ https://www.blackboxdesign.co.uk/gdpr-do-i-need-a-cookie-war... for in-depth answer.
- dgoldstein0 2y ago
  Works great on mobile, fwiw
- globular-toast 2y ago
  What does multi-tab have to do with it? You are in control of your computer aren't you? Just make the window narrower.
  - drivers99 2y ago
    Or set the zoom to around 240-300%
- creata 2y ago
  It's annoying for sure, but at least you can resize the window. Side note: Dan Luu claims[0][1] that there's no readability advantage to narrow line width. I haven't really looked into it, but in my experience it feels like he's very wrong. [0]: https://danluu.com/slow-device/ https://danluu.com/slow-device/ [Appendix: this site vs. sites that don't work on slow devices or slow connections] [1]: https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1115707741102727168 https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1115707741102727168
  - orlp 2y ago
    I'd suggest you not take readability advice from a guy who uses a red-green color scheme for their tables.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    He makes that claim because he doesn't like the sources, not because the sources are wrong. Reading the wikipedia references show me that this is well studied and sourced. Academic sources for his argument either dont exist or are so rare even he can't find them. IOW, it's a post hoc rationalisation from him.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Open the "developer's tools", find the '<body>', inject a 'margin' CSS - customize the page locally.
- flysand7 2y ago
  Folks, just for these kinds of websites I made an extension that trims the body of the text to 80 characters. I don't have a way to pay to get it on google's or firefox's extension marketplace, so you'd have to install it from source. https://github.com/flysand7/breader https://github.com/flysand7/breader
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Well I can see why you can’t afford to put it on a marketplace.
  - schneehertz 2y ago
    Just a suggestion You can write this feature as a userscript and then publish it to greasyfork
- ghusto 2y ago
  We did have ways to create margins, you know :/ Aside from simple CSS, you could still do it with pure HTML.
- bslanej 2y ago
  Screens were much narrower then so constraining the width of text was not necessary.
- danadam 2y ago
  I have a bookmarklet, since forever, labelled "sane width", with the following code: javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px ! important; margin: auto !important } '; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })(); It forces the body width to 800px and centers it. Crude but it is enough for me.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  I haven't checked and I don't know how it would render. But it is worth noting that since this was designed against an earlier version of css, it might render differently in older browsers. For example, older monitors had less pixels, so it's likely that the wrapping was sensible in older monitor/browser configs. To say nothing of browser defaults being different, if this was pre-css, then the margins might have been baked into the default browser interpretation. In other words, pre-margin property, a webpage without margin didn't mean "this has no margin", in the sense that a modern webpage without margin specified would mean "DO NOT ADD MARGIN TO THIS!".
hkmaxpro 2y ago
Reminds me of Yasha Berchenko-Kogan’s excellent answer to the question “What do grad students in math do all day?” https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-math-do-all-day-Do-they-just-sit-at-their-desk-and-think https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-m... > a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter. > What can you say? > "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pavlov 2y ago
  Somehow the sequences of small words and ample syntax make this sentence quite difficult to parse. Maybe just go full pidgin: “Tool to suck dust, make tidy for walk in home.”
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Oh come on, this shit is easy. Why did they say "it is" and not "it's", by the way? To put it that way can't help. So yeah, it's a pipe that can suck, and you push it all over your room, to suck the dust and dirt up off the rugs and such, and in fact off of any low down flat part. One kind can even move on its own! But what I want to say here, in the main, is that you math guys have all lost your grip on how to say any idea in an easy form. You are not able to do it any more, 'cos too much math has made you sick in the head.
    - lgeorget 2y ago
      Nice one but "'cos" does not go by the rule, I feel. You can use "for" at the same spot but, well, it has a tone you did not go for in your text.
      - zahlman 2y ago
        One can also use "as" in that spot, no?
jaynetics 2y ago
Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter "e": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
- koiueo 2y ago
  I imagine LLMs would excel in this kind of writing these days. But really impressive for the time.
  - chillitom 2y ago
    They’d probably sucks at a challenge like that because they work on tokens and don’t really see individual letters. There was a post here a little while back asking AI models to count the number of Rs in the word raspberry and most failed.
  - lvncelot 2y ago
    I think it's the exact opposite, as they operate on a token-level, not a character level, which makes tasks like these harder for them. So they would generate a sentence with multiple es in it and just proclaim that they didn't. (Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 es.)
    - Timwi 2y ago
      You're assuming all you can do is prompt it. Surely you could also constrain its output to tokens that genuinely contain no e’s (or make only max 4 letters per word). LLMs actually output a probability distribution of next tokens; ChatGPT just always picks the top one, but you could totally just always filter that list by any constraint you want.
      - lelag 2y ago
        I was going to point that out. What I will add is that constrained generation is supported by the major inference engine like llama.cpp, vllm and the likes, so what you are describing is actually trivial on locally hosted models, you just have to provide a regex that prevent them to use the letter 'e' in the output.
amelius 2y ago
Reads like it could have been AI generated.
- Tepix 2y ago
  Not in 1999.
ahazred8ta 2y ago
For reference, Poul Anderson's 'Uncleftish Beholding' -- an essay on atomic theory written in modernized anglo-saxon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding Up Goer Five; rocket science explained using only the one thousand most common english words. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Five https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Fiv... https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Thing_Explainer https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Thing_Explainer
- rootbear 2y ago
  I love “Uncleftish Beholding”, which someone said is written in “Anders-Saxon”. I think it would be fun to do it live as a Power-Point presentation.
TobTobXX 2y ago
Reminds me also of the "Up Goer Five". An xkcd poster which roughly explains Saturn V with only the top 1000 used words in English[0]. Even better IMO is the collab video with MinutePhysics[1]. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_8gx-XHJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_8gx-XHJo
- erk__ 2y ago
  Randall Munroe (of xkcd) went on to write a full book in that style: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
ActorNightly 2y ago
The explanation still kinda sucks. I like this one: The easiest way to understand the relationship between time and space is repeat the thought experiment with the void, but assume that there is no consciousness there (i.e nothing running that can sense time passing). Now imagine the only action you can take is to fire particles (say photons) in a given direction. In a void, that action is meaningless - the particle fires and never comes back. No information exists. Now imagine there is a mirror somewhere in space. A particle fires, and then comes back. And maybe interacts with another particle. But still, this is generally meaningless and you cant derive any measurable thing from it, but you have a piece of information - particle comes back. Imagine there are 2 mirrors in different directions. What you do is you set up 2 identical devices. Each one fires a particle, and when the particle comes back, it triggers a certain color ball to fall down a common shared tube, and then the particle gets fired again. So with 2 mirrors, you get a sequence in the tube that looks something like blue, blue, blue, green, blue, blue, blue, green. Now you can make a measure of distance. You take the "blue" mirror as your unit, and say green mirror is 2 away. You have also in fact created a clock. The tube contains information on how many cycles have passed - i.e in order to say that mirror is x away, you need to have counted x blue balls before that respective ball shows up. So you can see how distance and time is intimately intertwined. To measure distance, you have to necessarily have something that measures time. Now lets say that the "green" mirror starts moving away from you, at a slow speed (i.e your particles are much faster. You start to see 3 balls in sequence, then 4, then 5, and so on. By comparing the difference in the subsequent position of the green balls, you can measure speed. What happens if the speed of the mirror is 99% of the particle speed? The particle takes its sweet time getting there, and sweet time coming back. Even if you fire the particle as the green mirror is close to the particle emitter, its going to result in a measurement of a very large distance. This is the relativistic effect where the space behind something moving fast increases. This whole experiment demonstrates that what we consider space is precisely defined by measurements, and relativistic effects alter these measurements, which alters our perception of space. You can do similar thought experiments to understand why space in front of you seems to shrink, why time dilation becomes a thing, and so on.
- arijun 2y ago
  That explanation seems like it would not line up with the mathematical reality of the situation. It seems like one of those handwave-y things that always confused me as a child. “Gravity is just massive objects deforming space like a weight deforming a sheet, and things fall into the well they make.” Ok but what would make something fall into the well, there is no gravity.
Tepix 2y ago
Needs a (1999) tag
janpmz 2y ago
I turned this into a little audio book: https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67fcc7f933aa6c3115b114da https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67fcc7f933aa6c3115b114da
- no_news_is 2y ago
  No, you didn't. This doesn't match the original text. 0:47 Added in text: "Okay, here's the text prepared for reading aloud." 0:58 Original: "Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea," Audio: "Okay, yes, it's a bit of a strange idea" 1:08 Original: "Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure." Audio: "Or do you drift off to the left a bit? The question is, can you figure it out? No, you can't. You can see that." --- It appears you are using "Variational Lossy Autoencoder (VLAE)" as the basis for your website[1], which might be good for simplifying more complex things but defeats the purpose here. It's using more than four letters in words, and censoring out "dumb" and "hell"? Why don't you try pointing that another explanation of the theory of relativity without this limitation? Seems like that'd be a more interesting exercise. [1a] https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6 https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6 [1b] https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/private/us-east-1%3A3419f547-1c27-c463-29bd-5be17d6a2b76/home/variational_lossy_autoencoder_9832ac35-6c4b-4691-bd24-45fa3e162a99.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIATIGPVI4OM4MINDRG%2F20250414%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20250414T132818Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-Signature=22b4e5a55410f23107b3a4e30b1d1fffb959ccf145faf04d5c41324093601ac0&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&x-amz-checksum-mode=ENABLED&x-id=GetObject https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-east...
  - janpmz 2y ago
    Ah, I just want to clarify that I'm very unhappy about the censoring of "dumb" and "hell". I allow the text to get slightly optimized for audio experiences, e.g. page numbers or mathematical notation gets replaced. But I have think about that again.
russellbeattie 2y ago
OK, I'll give it a go... "Any glow from an item will move in a void at the same rate. Each item has mass. Mass is the same as a glow. Mass will bend the area near it. Each item will move on a bent path in that area. If you move at a fast rate, time will seem to slow. An item will feel a pull down if the item goes up and does not stop." That's way more work than it seems! Not being able to use -s or -er words is a real problem.
stavros 2y ago
This essay is fantastic at demonstrating that putting a word length limit actually makes explaining things more complicated. I got lost at around chapter 5 because the author couldn't use words like "gravity" and "acceleration" and I got confused by which one is "new pull" and which one is "old pull". It's too bad, as it was interesting up to that point.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Of course you find it hard to distinguish the two! You don't have equipment for measuring tidal forces, and they are locally indistinguishable.
  - Alex-Programs 2y ago
    Of sure you find it hard to tell the two away! You lack the gear for tide pull test, and they feel the same here and local. I hate this.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      The new pull and the old pull both just feel like a pull, if you can only feel the pull at one spot. To see how the old pull is not like the new pull, you have to test the pull at a spot near you (but not the same spot), too. The new pull will be the same at each spot, but the old pull may not be the same (we call this the tide), and you test the sum of the new and old pull. (This is hard.)
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      It's fair that it's hard to keep the two from becoming the same in your head, you need fancy stuff to test for the force of the tide, and they are more or less the same from a close-up (any which is much closer than, say, the moon) view! (Verbosity is your friend)
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  > It's too bad I think that's the whole point. It was never meant as being easier to grok
freetonik 2y ago
It was interesting to notice that not all short words are necessarily simple. Words like "void", "iota", "mass", or "veer".
- patates 2y ago
  Thanks to Javascript, I know void. Thanks to Go, I know iota.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    The question is: Do you know the words or do you know the meaning in the context of the article?
    - adityaathalye 2y ago
      They demonstrate they know 'veer' (off topic) without saying 'veer'.
  - mjbrusso 2y ago
    Now I feel old. I know void from K&R C and iota from APL
  - moomin 2y ago
    Thanks to Java, I know pain.
robinhouston 2y ago
On the theme of difficult ideas explained using a limited vocabulary, I suppose one has to mention xkcd's Thing Explainer as well as George Boolos's classic _Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf
Der_Einzige 2y ago
I wrote the OG paper about making LLMs do this task (before chatGPT came out too!!!) https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blueaquilae 2y ago
This is kinda confusing at it's more for people who already know the meaning. Take the bus exemple, it's so short that it skip explaining why someone on a moving bus will see different timing for the asteroid landing. You can decipher it if you know it, you'll not gonna learn from the story line.
gcanyon 2y ago
Four letters is an interesting constraint, but it doesn't guarantee simplicity. I'd replace > no one can say who's held fast with "no one can what does move and what does not"
- gcanyon 2y ago
  ...and of course I missed a word. I meant to type: "no one can say what does move and what does not"
77pt77 2y ago
len("gravity") = 7 > 4
api 2y ago
I'm not sure if this is physically accurate, but the best description I've encountered for relativity is: You are always traveling at the same speed. That speed is 'c', the speed of light. If you are sitting still, you are 'falling' through the time dimension at 'c'. If you move in the X,Y,Z dimensions, you must move slower in the 't' dimension so that your velocity vector still sums to 'c'.
- quibono 2y ago
  An immediate follow-up is: why do we always travel at c?
  - api 2y ago
    Maybe it's just a cosmic constant, or a result of other parameters and how they interact (a second order constant). Why does the electron have the mass that it does? Why do protons have the charge that they do? Etc.
ck2 2y ago
I was thinking this morning how weird it is that everyone knows who Einstein was But much smaller percent Niels Bohr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates
andai 2y ago
I appreciate this, though the hard rule seems to be doing more harm than good. For example, one 5-letter word became 6 words, because 5-letter words aren't allowed! So while the vocabulary is kept low, the writing style becomes harder to process, at least for me. I wonder if there's a way to win on both fronts, to make it maximally comprehensible for all involved. I'd argue "use normal words that everyone knows" (even if they are 5 letters!) would be included in such a strategy. Edit: Okay now I made it further in and I'm being asked to keep several different perspectives in my head simultaneously, perceiving different events at different rates of time... I think I need a diagram... or a microdose...
- lgeorget 2y ago
  Several variants of simplified English have been designed for the purpose of being understood by learners or people with only basic command of English as a foreign language. Wikipedia has a version in Simple English for instance: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia.
TZubiri 2y ago
Fun fact, this is a great piece of art because it was written in 1999. If you were to write this in 2025, it would be indistinguishable from trash. So many doors are closing.
michaelsbradley 2y ago
Or, if you want to learn the core ideas and math involved, but in terms of computer programming, see: Functional Differential Geometry by Gerald Sussman, same author behind Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs https://archive.org/details/FunctionalDifferentialGeometry/ https://archive.org/details/FunctionalDifferentialGeometry/
FilosofumRex 2y ago
"It's tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Maslow 1966. The essay is about physics, but all comments are about formatting and LLMs. The conversationalist tone of the essay is misleading too. Hilbert, Minkowski, & Poincare, had done all the heavy lifting math and had held Einstein's hand all through 1915. As mathematicians they wouldn't qualify for Noble prize so made no claim to the discovery of GR.
nrds 2y ago
> [R]ays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or not. Izzy had no way to know that, back then, but it's true. Isn't this historically inaccurate? Wasn't Einstein looking for an explanation for why Maxwell's equations mysteriously assigned a constant velocity to electromagnetic phenomena, apparently contradicting Galilean relativity?
joboone 2y ago
[flagged]
joboone1622 2y ago
[flagged]

240 points by signa11 2y ago

I'm patiently waiting for the translation of Misner Thorne and Wheeler to Toki Pona.

People talk about the 'good old days' of the web, but boy, in a multi-tab environment it stucks to try and read something that doesn't put any effort at all into side margins.

politelemon 2y ago
Reader mode (FF) helps a lot here.
hexo 2y ago
And yet, it is 1000 times more readable than any "modern" website.
- brettermeier 2y ago
  Hell no. Typograhy class Lesson 1, never put more than a certain number of words per column (in any case never the whole screen width, on desktops)...
  - Timwi 2y ago
    And yet, for some reason, most people want their tabs and toolbars on the top, and the taskbar on the bottom, taking away vertical space that is actually used, and leave swathes of space on the left and right completely unused. I will never understand the resistance against putting things on the side.
    - globular-toast 2y ago
      Probably because English is written left to right and doesn't work so well top to bottom. So vertical bits tend to not include text, which is quite limiting. I do remember older UIs that included text at 90 degrees on sidebars, but that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. The real problem is our screens are the wrong shape. 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you work mostly with text. Square is probably the best. Using floating windows (like classic Mac OSX) is an option, but for some reason people like full screen windows these days. A tiling window manager is another option to effectively divide the screen up into better shaped areas. I tend to have 6 columns across 2 screens which works well.
      - creata 2y ago
        > 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you work mostly with text. Why? I also usually use it with three columns of text, and it works well at that aspect ratio.
        globular-toast 2y ago
        Right, so you essentially use mini 16:27 screens which is a better aspect ratio than 16:9. What you really have to ask yourself is why 16:9 is a better choice than anything else. It wasn't picked because 3 16:27 columns is ideal for text. The main reason we have them is because it's easier for the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to deal with. With 16:9 we're forced to have three columns per screen, but what if I only need two? What if I want more lines of text per screen? Square seems like a much more obvious middle ground.
        creata 2y ago
        That makes sense, thanks. I've seen people give similar praise to 4:3 and 3:2 laptops.
        zahlman 2y ago
        >The main reason we have them is because it's easier for the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to deal with. Not just that, but it was an average of aspect ratios considered for the aesthetic of video data. Not text presentation.
nxpnsv 2y ago
the lack of large video ads really is jarring too
- baxtr 2y ago
  I was hyper confused that I didn’t need to hide ANY HTML element. Also, reader mode was not suppressed by some naughty trick. Unreal.
  - nxpnsv 2y ago
    And what is the deal with functional scrolling?
  - matusp 2y ago
    It also did not ask about my cookie policy, how am I supposed to tell the site my preferences? I just wrote them via email to make sure.
    - subscribed 2y ago
      It depends on the purpose of the cookies: https://www.blackboxdesign.co.uk/gdpr-do-i-need-a-cookie-warning-on-my-small-business-website/ https://www.blackboxdesign.co.uk/gdpr-do-i-need-a-cookie-war... for in-depth answer.
dgoldstein0 2y ago
Works great on mobile, fwiw
globular-toast 2y ago
What does multi-tab have to do with it? You are in control of your computer aren't you? Just make the window narrower.
- drivers99 2y ago
  Or set the zoom to around 240-300%
creata 2y ago
It's annoying for sure, but at least you can resize the window. Side note: Dan Luu claims[0][1] that there's no readability advantage to narrow line width. I haven't really looked into it, but in my experience it feels like he's very wrong. [0]: https://danluu.com/slow-device/ https://danluu.com/slow-device/ [Appendix: this site vs. sites that don't work on slow devices or slow connections] [1]: https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1115707741102727168 https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1115707741102727168
- orlp 2y ago
  I'd suggest you not take readability advice from a guy who uses a red-green color scheme for their tables.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  He makes that claim because he doesn't like the sources, not because the sources are wrong. Reading the wikipedia references show me that this is well studied and sourced. Academic sources for his argument either dont exist or are so rare even he can't find them. IOW, it's a post hoc rationalisation from him.
mdp2021 2y ago
Open the "developer's tools", find the '<body>', inject a 'margin' CSS - customize the page locally.
flysand7 2y ago
Folks, just for these kinds of websites I made an extension that trims the body of the text to 80 characters. I don't have a way to pay to get it on google's or firefox's extension marketplace, so you'd have to install it from source. https://github.com/flysand7/breader https://github.com/flysand7/breader
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Well I can see why you can’t afford to put it on a marketplace.
- schneehertz 2y ago
  Just a suggestion You can write this feature as a userscript and then publish it to greasyfork
ghusto 2y ago
We did have ways to create margins, you know :/ Aside from simple CSS, you could still do it with pure HTML.
bslanej 2y ago
Screens were much narrower then so constraining the width of text was not necessary.
danadam 2y ago
I have a bookmarklet, since forever, labelled "sane width", with the following code: javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px ! important; margin: auto !important } '; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })(); It forces the body width to 800px and centers it. Crude but it is enough for me.
TZubiri 2y ago
I haven't checked and I don't know how it would render. But it is worth noting that since this was designed against an earlier version of css, it might render differently in older browsers. For example, older monitors had less pixels, so it's likely that the wrapping was sensible in older monitor/browser configs. To say nothing of browser defaults being different, if this was pre-css, then the margins might have been baked into the default browser interpretation. In other words, pre-margin property, a webpage without margin didn't mean "this has no margin", in the sense that a modern webpage without margin specified would mean "DO NOT ADD MARGIN TO THIS!".

hkmaxpro 2y ago

Reminds me of Yasha Berchenko-Kogan’s excellent answer to the question “What do grad students in math do all day?” https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-math-do-all-day-Do-they-just-sit-at-their-desk-and-think https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-m... > a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter. > What can you say? > "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."

deleted 2y ago
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pavlov 2y ago
Somehow the sequences of small words and ample syntax make this sentence quite difficult to parse. Maybe just go full pidgin: “Tool to suck dust, make tidy for walk in home.”
- card_zero 2y ago
  Oh come on, this shit is easy. Why did they say "it is" and not "it's", by the way? To put it that way can't help. So yeah, it's a pipe that can suck, and you push it all over your room, to suck the dust and dirt up off the rugs and such, and in fact off of any low down flat part. One kind can even move on its own! But what I want to say here, in the main, is that you math guys have all lost your grip on how to say any idea in an easy form. You are not able to do it any more, 'cos too much math has made you sick in the head.
  - lgeorget 2y ago
    Nice one but "'cos" does not go by the rule, I feel. You can use "for" at the same spot but, well, it has a tone you did not go for in your text.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      One can also use "as" in that spot, no?

jaynetics 2y ago

Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter "e": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

koiueo 2y ago
I imagine LLMs would excel in this kind of writing these days. But really impressive for the time.
- chillitom 2y ago
  They’d probably sucks at a challenge like that because they work on tokens and don’t really see individual letters. There was a post here a little while back asking AI models to count the number of Rs in the word raspberry and most failed.
- lvncelot 2y ago
  I think it's the exact opposite, as they operate on a token-level, not a character level, which makes tasks like these harder for them. So they would generate a sentence with multiple es in it and just proclaim that they didn't. (Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 es.)
  - Timwi 2y ago
    You're assuming all you can do is prompt it. Surely you could also constrain its output to tokens that genuinely contain no e’s (or make only max 4 letters per word). LLMs actually output a probability distribution of next tokens; ChatGPT just always picks the top one, but you could totally just always filter that list by any constraint you want.
    - lelag 2y ago
      I was going to point that out. What I will add is that constrained generation is supported by the major inference engine like llama.cpp, vllm and the likes, so what you are describing is actually trivial on locally hosted models, you just have to provide a regex that prevent them to use the letter 'e' in the output.

amelius 2y ago

Reads like it could have been AI generated.

Tepix 2y ago
Not in 1999.

ahazred8ta 2y ago

For reference, Poul Anderson's 'Uncleftish Beholding' -- an essay on atomic theory written in modernized anglo-saxon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding Up Goer Five; rocket science explained using only the one thousand most common english words. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Five https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Fiv... https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Thing_Explainer https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Thing_Explainer

rootbear 2y ago
I love “Uncleftish Beholding”, which someone said is written in “Anders-Saxon”. I think it would be fun to do it live as a Power-Point presentation.

TobTobXX 2y ago

Reminds me also of the "Up Goer Five". An xkcd poster which roughly explains Saturn V with only the top 1000 used words in English[0]. Even better IMO is the collab video with MinutePhysics[1]. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_8gx-XHJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_8gx-XHJo

erk__ 2y ago
Randall Munroe (of xkcd) went on to write a full book in that style: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

ActorNightly 2y ago

The explanation still kinda sucks. I like this one: The easiest way to understand the relationship between time and space is repeat the thought experiment with the void, but assume that there is no consciousness there (i.e nothing running that can sense time passing). Now imagine the only action you can take is to fire particles (say photons) in a given direction. In a void, that action is meaningless - the particle fires and never comes back. No information exists. Now imagine there is a mirror somewhere in space. A particle fires, and then comes back. And maybe interacts with another particle. But still, this is generally meaningless and you cant derive any measurable thing from it, but you have a piece of information - particle comes back. Imagine there are 2 mirrors in different directions. What you do is you set up 2 identical devices. Each one fires a particle, and when the particle comes back, it triggers a certain color ball to fall down a common shared tube, and then the particle gets fired again. So with 2 mirrors, you get a sequence in the tube that looks something like blue, blue, blue, green, blue, blue, blue, green. Now you can make a measure of distance. You take the "blue" mirror as your unit, and say green mirror is 2 away. You have also in fact created a clock. The tube contains information on how many cycles have passed - i.e in order to say that mirror is x away, you need to have counted x blue balls before that respective ball shows up. So you can see how distance and time is intimately intertwined. To measure distance, you have to necessarily have something that measures time. Now lets say that the "green" mirror starts moving away from you, at a slow speed (i.e your particles are much faster. You start to see 3 balls in sequence, then 4, then 5, and so on. By comparing the difference in the subsequent position of the green balls, you can measure speed. What happens if the speed of the mirror is 99% of the particle speed? The particle takes its sweet time getting there, and sweet time coming back. Even if you fire the particle as the green mirror is close to the particle emitter, its going to result in a measurement of a very large distance. This is the relativistic effect where the space behind something moving fast increases. This whole experiment demonstrates that what we consider space is precisely defined by measurements, and relativistic effects alter these measurements, which alters our perception of space. You can do similar thought experiments to understand why space in front of you seems to shrink, why time dilation becomes a thing, and so on.

arijun 2y ago
That explanation seems like it would not line up with the mathematical reality of the situation. It seems like one of those handwave-y things that always confused me as a child. “Gravity is just massive objects deforming space like a weight deforming a sheet, and things fall into the well they make.” Ok but what would make something fall into the well, there is no gravity.

Tepix 2y ago

Needs a (1999) tag

janpmz 2y ago

I turned this into a little audio book: https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67fcc7f933aa6c3115b114da https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67fcc7f933aa6c3115b114da

no_news_is 2y ago
No, you didn't. This doesn't match the original text. 0:47 Added in text: "Okay, here's the text prepared for reading aloud." 0:58 Original: "Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea," Audio: "Okay, yes, it's a bit of a strange idea" 1:08 Original: "Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure." Audio: "Or do you drift off to the left a bit? The question is, can you figure it out? No, you can't. You can see that." --- It appears you are using "Variational Lossy Autoencoder (VLAE)" as the basis for your website[1], which might be good for simplifying more complex things but defeats the purpose here. It's using more than four letters in words, and censoring out "dumb" and "hell"? Why don't you try pointing that another explanation of the theory of relativity without this limitation? Seems like that'd be a more interesting exercise. [1a] https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6 https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6 [1b] https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/private/us-east-1%3A3419f547-1c27-c463-29bd-5be17d6a2b76/home/variational_lossy_autoencoder_9832ac35-6c4b-4691-bd24-45fa3e162a99.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIATIGPVI4OM4MINDRG%2F20250414%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20250414T132818Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-Signature=22b4e5a55410f23107b3a4e30b1d1fffb959ccf145faf04d5c41324093601ac0&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&x-amz-checksum-mode=ENABLED&x-id=GetObject https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-east...
- janpmz 2y ago
  Ah, I just want to clarify that I'm very unhappy about the censoring of "dumb" and "hell". I allow the text to get slightly optimized for audio experiences, e.g. page numbers or mathematical notation gets replaced. But I have think about that again.

russellbeattie 2y ago

OK, I'll give it a go... "Any glow from an item will move in a void at the same rate. Each item has mass. Mass is the same as a glow. Mass will bend the area near it. Each item will move on a bent path in that area. If you move at a fast rate, time will seem to slow. An item will feel a pull down if the item goes up and does not stop." That's way more work than it seems! Not being able to use -s or -er words is a real problem.

stavros 2y ago

This essay is fantastic at demonstrating that putting a word length limit actually makes explaining things more complicated. I got lost at around chapter 5 because the author couldn't use words like "gravity" and "acceleration" and I got confused by which one is "new pull" and which one is "old pull". It's too bad, as it was interesting up to that point.

wizzwizz4 2y ago
Of course you find it hard to distinguish the two! You don't have equipment for measuring tidal forces, and they are locally indistinguishable.
- Alex-Programs 2y ago
  Of sure you find it hard to tell the two away! You lack the gear for tide pull test, and they feel the same here and local. I hate this.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    The new pull and the old pull both just feel like a pull, if you can only feel the pull at one spot. To see how the old pull is not like the new pull, you have to test the pull at a spot near you (but not the same spot), too. The new pull will be the same at each spot, but the old pull may not be the same (we call this the tide), and you test the sum of the new and old pull. (This is hard.)
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    It's fair that it's hard to keep the two from becoming the same in your head, you need fancy stuff to test for the force of the tide, and they are more or less the same from a close-up (any which is much closer than, say, the moon) view! (Verbosity is your friend)
4gotunameagain 2y ago
> It's too bad I think that's the whole point. It was never meant as being easier to grok

freetonik 2y ago

It was interesting to notice that not all short words are necessarily simple. Words like "void", "iota", "mass", or "veer".

patates 2y ago
Thanks to Javascript, I know void. Thanks to Go, I know iota.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  The question is: Do you know the words or do you know the meaning in the context of the article?
  - adityaathalye 2y ago
    They demonstrate they know 'veer' (off topic) without saying 'veer'.
- mjbrusso 2y ago
  Now I feel old. I know void from K&R C and iota from APL
- moomin 2y ago
  Thanks to Java, I know pain.

robinhouston 2y ago

On the theme of difficult ideas explained using a limited vocabulary, I suppose one has to mention xkcd's Thing Explainer as well as George Boolos's classic _Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf

Der_Einzige 2y ago

I wrote the OG paper about making LLMs do this task (before chatGPT came out too!!!) https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926

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blueaquilae 2y ago

This is kinda confusing at it's more for people who already know the meaning. Take the bus exemple, it's so short that it skip explaining why someone on a moving bus will see different timing for the asteroid landing. You can decipher it if you know it, you'll not gonna learn from the story line.

gcanyon 2y ago

Four letters is an interesting constraint, but it doesn't guarantee simplicity. I'd replace > no one can say who's held fast with "no one can what does move and what does not"

gcanyon 2y ago
...and of course I missed a word. I meant to type: "no one can say what does move and what does not"

77pt77 2y ago

len("gravity") = 7 > 4

api 2y ago

I'm not sure if this is physically accurate, but the best description I've encountered for relativity is: You are always traveling at the same speed. That speed is 'c', the speed of light. If you are sitting still, you are 'falling' through the time dimension at 'c'. If you move in the X,Y,Z dimensions, you must move slower in the 't' dimension so that your velocity vector still sums to 'c'.

quibono 2y ago
An immediate follow-up is: why do we always travel at c?
- api 2y ago
  Maybe it's just a cosmic constant, or a result of other parameters and how they interact (a second order constant). Why does the electron have the mass that it does? Why do protons have the charge that they do? Etc.

ck2 2y ago

I was thinking this morning how weird it is that everyone knows who Einstein was But much smaller percent Niels Bohr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates

andai 2y ago

I appreciate this, though the hard rule seems to be doing more harm than good. For example, one 5-letter word became 6 words, because 5-letter words aren't allowed! So while the vocabulary is kept low, the writing style becomes harder to process, at least for me. I wonder if there's a way to win on both fronts, to make it maximally comprehensible for all involved. I'd argue "use normal words that everyone knows" (even if they are 5 letters!) would be included in such a strategy. Edit: Okay now I made it further in and I'm being asked to keep several different perspectives in my head simultaneously, perceiving different events at different rates of time... I think I need a diagram... or a microdose...

lgeorget 2y ago
Several variants of simplified English have been designed for the purpose of being understood by learners or people with only basic command of English as a foreign language. Wikipedia has a version in Simple English for instance: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia.

TZubiri 2y ago

Fun fact, this is a great piece of art because it was written in 1999. If you were to write this in 2025, it would be indistinguishable from trash. So many doors are closing.

michaelsbradley 2y ago

Or, if you want to learn the core ideas and math involved, but in terms of computer programming, see: Functional Differential Geometry by Gerald Sussman, same author behind Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs https://archive.org/details/FunctionalDifferentialGeometry/ https://archive.org/details/FunctionalDifferentialGeometry/

FilosofumRex 2y ago

"It's tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Maslow 1966. The essay is about physics, but all comments are about formatting and LLMs. The conversationalist tone of the essay is misleading too. Hilbert, Minkowski, & Poincare, had done all the heavy lifting math and had held Einstein's hand all through 1915. As mathematicians they wouldn't qualify for Noble prize so made no claim to the discovery of GR.

nrds 2y ago

> [R]ays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or not. Izzy had no way to know that, back then, but it's true. Isn't this historically inaccurate? Wasn't Einstein looking for an explanation for why Maxwell's equations mysteriously assigned a constant velocity to electromagnetic phenomena, apparently contradicting Galilean relativity?

joboone 2y ago

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joboone1622 2y ago

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