Throwing is hard. In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone.

To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the 10th story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.

However big you think supernovae are, they’re bigger than that.

Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.

There are lots of ways to predict weather, some better than others. The best modern weather prediction involves sophisticated computer models, but let’s start with a basic, time-honored technique: guessing at random.

You can’t win at tag; you can only stop playing.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it wrong to hit a drone with a tennis ball?

I decided to ask an expert. I contacted Dr. Kate Darling, robot ethicist at the MIT Media Lab, and asked her if it’s wrong to hit tennis balls at a drone for fun.

She said: “The drone won’t care, but other people might”. She pointed out that while our robots obviously don’t have feelings, we humans do. “We tend to treat robots like they’re alive, even though we know they’re just machines. So you might want to think twice about violence towards robots as their design gets more lifelike; it could start to make people uncomfortable.”

That made sense, but on the other hand, should we really be making ourselves so vulnerable?

“If you’re trying to punish the robot,” she said, “you’re barking up the wrong tree”.

She has a point. It’s not the robots we need to worry about, it’s the people controlling them.

If you want to bring down a drone, perhaps you should consider a different target.

Plants are made of air. The carbon in wood comes from CO₂ collected from the air, which is combined with water through photosynthesis. This book is made from air, water, and sunlight. If the pages are incinerated, the carbon turns back into CO₂ and water, releasing the captured sunlight. When wood, oil, or paper burns, the heat of the fire is the heat from sunlight.

There’s a giant, weird world out there. Ideas that sound good can have terrible consequences, and ideas that sound ridiculous can turn out to be revolutionary. Sometimes you can figure out which ones work ahead of time, and sometimes you just have to try them and see what happens.