espoire

I was surprised to hear animal skins called a poor protein source, though on reflection I guess it fits my priors that you wouldn’t want to eat all your protein as skin.

The reason this surprised me is that, in my area and social circles, a lot of folks eat ~zero skin and noticeably benefit from adding some to their diet, e.g. as one cut of chicken a week, eaten along with the skin that would be on that if not removed. I’ve been going around informing people “hey, you should eat more skin”, when what I meant was “you should eat more [than zero] skin”.

Aside: I misunderstood “accessible“ above for quite a while. I thought “this platform is not accessible” meant “there’s been a road closure or a structural collapse or something, which is preventing anybody from getting in or out”.

At the risk of sounding gauche, I really do think general purpose communication ought to spell out “handicap accessible”.

I would and have totally wrote essays pushing boundaries on what an essay is

When I was a youthful hellion, I handed in “Stupidity is Flammable: On the Use of Excerpts, Artful Verbiage, and Rhetoric to Disguise a Lack of Content”, a whole-assed high-effort essay about how to refuse to do the research and then submit a bogus essay.

I remember it getting a ‘C’ with no specific feedback, and being offended at the time.

ignores things like how quickly different materials are shed from the body

Seems like a reasonable thing to do, given which substances we’re discussing. Lead‘s half-life for leaving the body is several decades — it’s a fair approximation to say that it does not leave the body.

I notice in the data above that, where multiple chocolates from the same brand are available, the darker (higher percentage) variant tends to have less of both lead and cadmium, and they’re different by a fairly large amount.

Going only off that observation: not the cocoa solids. Further suspicion: milk chocolate might be on average worse?

I’ve had really surprising success with this method in past. Admittedly many issues have stumped me, but in three cases I managed to trace the causes back to worse-than-useless dietary advice, causing the person to give themselves a nutrient deficiency by avoiding some important class of food, which then caused a whole host of symptoms. Telling them to eat the necessary food brought immediate and unprecedented relief — at least during weeks where they actually ate any. As it turns out, changing one’s dietary habits is very difficult, and not just for weigh... (read more)

I agree with the suggestion for use of plainer language. Make the case for the astonishing significance within the text, but be as plain as possible in the terminology, else I fear you’ll lose the vast majority of your potential future audience.

I consider myself fairly erudite, and a connoisseur of etymology, and yet the phrase “effective chrono-lucropia” is very nearly opaque to me. I still don’t understand what the ‘effective’ part is meant to signify, and my best guess at dissecting “chrono-lucropia” is: chrono=time, lucre=wealth or money, opia=seeing. ... (read more)

I think it was intended as a caution against a common bit of anti-epistemology that maybe you neither have done nor have yet encountered from others.

Namely: constructing a contrived definition for some purpose, and then when people complain about the problems your strange definition is causing for them, the one defends their choices with “it’s just a definition bro, chill”, essentially.

Often this happens when some really deeply technical definition collides with the same word having escaped into common usage. …or as often prompts vitriol in social media: s... (read more)

Random thought: I think we humans named “negative“ and “positive“ curvature backwards. Positive curvature decreases the distance between objects as they seem to move apart. Negative curvature increases the distance between objects as they seem to move apart. I feel like a hypothetical world where the names “negative“ and “positive“ had been swapped at inception would be more human-intuitive.

I’ve noticed I can only concretely work at recursion layer 3 on a good day, and even when it works, it gives me a nasty headache and brain fog following.

Best example I can remember: I was doing a character voice (like, all day, for everything). Call this character-1. On that day, I read a story book aloud.

Yeesh, I’m getting a mild headache just composing this text.

When reading story books, I create, remember, and do voices for the characters who speak. Since I was in-character all day, I was doing those character voices as if character-1 was doing them. C... (read more)

I figured the lich might’ve been Harry JPEV, what with how he carries a phylactery with the soul of an immortal dark wizard in it. (His ring containing the transfigured Voldemort.)

Wait, what? I write JS daily and I still thought an arrow function was just syntactic sugar for a regular function, and behaviorally identical. Wild.

I guess my habit of basically-never passing ’this’ into nested functions (and explicitly using .bind or .call every time when I need to control ‘this’) has been more beneficial than I knew.

A self-described witch once taught me a spell for “freeing oneself from [the ongoing bad vibes left behind by] someone who has hurt you“.

Write out a big long letter addressed to that person, listing the major ways they wronged you, and how you feel/felt, and how that has affected your life since that time. Fold the pages of the letter all up, and seal with wax. Go to a natural scene. Arrange and light a ring of five candles. Place the letter within the ring. Burn the letter. Extinguish the candles one-by-one. Bury or scatter the ashes once cool.

And like, t... (read more)

I’d imagine one form of death involves more suffering, but I have no idea which one.

This is a thing my brain does sometimes. It’s very counterproductive when it happens.

In my case, I believe it was caused by childhood violence. When I was ~six plus or minus a few years, I lived in an environment where being blamed for ~anything could result in being beaten bloody, so my hindbrain learned to drop everything and deflect blame, if blame is pointed at me.

I’m not in an environment like that anymore. Yet I can’t unlearn the response. It sucks. The part of me that can see “drop everything, deflect blame, escape as soon as blame is shifted” as hu... (read more)

I think you’re being overly charitable. I don’t think anyone knows anything about nhPredict. I think they just have a strong “CEO = guilty-by-default” prior. The closest thing to an argument I’ve seen undergirding the “eat the rich” meme soup is “X, Y, and Z billionaires are actively getting people killed” completely skipping the question of whether that’s representative of all wealthy folks, skipping to: therefore “kill all billionaires”.

I’ve definitely encountered situations where it was important to prefix the numeric info when working with humans, specifically. (Though my original remark was facetious; I only say “dollars sign after the numerals” as a matter of taste, not as implied because it’s instrumental in any way.)

When leading World of Warcraft raids, calling “Use Bloodlust in 20 seconds” gets VERY different results from calling “In 20 seconds, use Bloodlust”. Indeed, the timing information in the former cannot usually be heard over the Bloodlust sound effect itself.

Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.

At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.

…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downg... (read more)

Chiming in with another causal mechanism: hot soup lets off steam. Humid air in general plays nicer with our lungs, and can noticeably help when people are having a cough, or having trouble breathing. I sometimes use “just have them sit over a canteen of steaming-hot water” as a palliative for both issues.

I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.

Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans ... (read more)