(In a supervillain prison, new inmate Sonic (not that one) has just announced he'll kill the others for fun.)
Martial artist inmate: "You seem pretty !@#$ing confident. If you wanna rise up in rank in this prison full of monsters, you'll have to beat me first."
Martial artist inmate: "Let me tell you this in advance. I'm a kenpo practitioner. I'm probably the first and last guy to ever rob a bank unarmed."
Sonic: "Doesn't mean $#!@ if you got caught though."
--One-Punch man Vol 4 extra
How did Harry move the wires through the air with partial transfiguration alone? He doesn't have bugs to carry it like Skitter does. How does he prevent air currents from messing it up?
I imagined what rational me would do a couple of hours ago, and he'd have gotten a head start on next week's workload until he was tired and then started tomorrow off on much better footing (I'm not talking about being a workaholic -- I'm lazy and have kind of fallen behind -- I could stand to work a bit more)
Instead, I read about why the great filter probably doesn't lie between the evolution of a nervous system and dolphin-level intelligence, learned about 'biological dark matter', dismissed it as viruses, undismissed it, learned that it was probably just material from unsequenced portions of microbe genomes, learned things I never knew about the... (read more)
How late will the meetup run until?
Coffee doesn't seem to really help me aside from keeping me from falling asleep for a short time (~40-60 minutes maybe). I used it most heavily (2-4 small or medium cups a week) when I was suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, but even now I occasionally have some when I feel I must be extra sure not to get sleepy, and it doesn't really seem to help me focus and wears off quickly. Does coffee not work on certain people or is there some factor I'm not aware of?
Gaming the system is, at least, in the spirit of munchkinry!
Does the Boston group ever meet on a day other than Sunday?
Faith is holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
-- C.S. Lewis
Sleep apnea seems like something regular doctors should be able to figure out, and I know gout has at least been known for a long time. Are these meant to be examples of what the reports look like more than examples of how Metamed can find obscure treatments? $5000 seems a bit much for someone to be told 'get checked for sleep apnea and lose weight'.
For over a year now I have been visiting this site, reading and learning about rationality, and meeting other rationalists sounds like a wonderfully positive experience. Sadly, there are no meetups in my area -- I looked at the RI skeptics society website, but their news page seemed focused on religious-people-bashing to a point that seemed mean and spiteful to me (at least at the time, it was awhile ago. Yes, we know people do dumb things because of religious beliefs; how about focusing on improving ourselves instead of pointing at them?).
Maybe there are a lot of others in the area like me who have been lurking on the site, longing for... (read more)
What's wrong with it? Too vulgar? Too vague?
Struck me as an example of failing to update after testing beliefs -- the criminal martial artist believed he was so strong, but he still was defeated -- and yet now he assumes he is unbeatable.
Or perhaps a sort of villainous mirror of heroic responsibility -- All the excuses in the world don't matter if you failed to actually get away with your villainous plan.