Mercator Projection All the Way Down

Map facts: The Mercator projection is technically infinitely tall, and more warped as it goes down, so it must always be cropped somewhere. Below is a cropping somewhat lower than normal, so you can see: (1) Antarctica, (2) buildings at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, and finally (3) individual snowflakes.

Hat tip: Geoawesomeness.

No, we probably don’t live in a computer simulation

A lovely rant by Sabine Hossenfelder:

All this talk about how we might be living in a computer simulation pisses me off not because I’m afraid people will actually believe it. No, I think most people are much smarter than many self-declared intellectuals like to admit. Most readers will instead correctly conclude that today’s intelligencia is full of shit. And I can’t even blame them for it. 

At Backreaction