occasionally, but it doesn’t scratch the same itch for me. I’ve enjoyed as ANW moved away from the climbing-type obstacles and towards the gymnast/acrobat type obstacles. The climbing ones never look effortless.
Elizabeth
Karma: 20,879
I like Ninja Warrior, a sport that is functionally an obstacle course for insane gymnasts. Every time I watch, I notice how much easier it is to be good at things. It’s not just that good technique needs less strength for a given move. It’s that arm strength gets you off obstacles faster, which conserves precious finger strength.. Ninjas that are good at linking moves conserve momentum instead of needing to rebuild it, further saving upper body and finger strength.
E.g. Max vs. Taylor in the finals (start at 12:48). Keep in mind that Taylor is the top contender for best female ninja, so she’s not suffering from technique issues.
Or take Hades, a beat-em-up in which you receive power-ups throughout the game. Some of the powerups make you better at hurting enemies, some give you more hit points. Sometimes you get a choice of power-up. If you’re constantly being hit, you want the hit points. But if you’re good enough at dodging you don’t need them and can get an offensive power instead, which will let you kill enemies faster and get hit even less.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness in creating a separate feed
If you have a bad reaction to mRNA covid vaccines, consider getting the Novavax vaccine, which is a traditional subunit vaccine. Moderna knocks me out for a day and triggers some autoimmune symptoms, but Novavax just gives me a slightly sore arm.
Some people think drugs like retatrutide have an effect on motivation [...]
Is there a reason you frame this as motivation and not energy? There’s a solid mechanistic reason to expect more energy.
I mix cricket, whey, or liver powder into smoothies. You don’t need a lot to 80⁄20 the benefits.
Your own screenshot shows that pescatarians do better than vegans (not statistically significant, but neither is the difference between vegans and omnivores). And if you break it down by sex (and continue to ignore statistical significance), veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism
More of my opinion of this study here.
“Rocks for jocks” isn’t a stereotype because geology is easy. It’s a stereotype because rocks are heavy and field sites are far away.
My sense is that for almost all funders, money is viewed as an input with which to save souls, rather than a terminal goal like it is for VCs. Which isn’t to say there aren’t financial abuses, but they genuinely feel like a departure from form, rather than especially obvious cases of something everyone is doing.
With non-denominational churches, funders can’t sack the planter, they can just decline future funding. It’s not impossible they could fund a hostile takeover, but early church plants are such cults of personality with so little in assets that it wouldn’t really make sense to do so- you’d rather just found another planter who can start his own cult of personality (who might buy the sound system off a failed plant). As churches get bigger there will generally be a board who might have the power to fire the pastor, and denominational churches are either subject to control by the denomination or have a board with firing power from the beginning.
what are you noticing that smells like LLM? I only skimmed, but I didn’t see anything that tripped my radar, and lawyer talk can sound a lot like LLM talk.
sure, but the fact that that’s a really reasonable algorithm would not have saved the co-workers from the consequences of merging with the probably-predatory company, in the world where the company didn’t happen to have an employee with the perfect anecdote.
Listening to people demand more specifics from If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies gives me a similar feeling to when a friend’s start-up was considering a merger.
Friend got a bad feeling about this because the other company clearly had different goals, was more sophisticated than them, and had an opportunistic vibe. Friend didn’t know how specifically other company would screw them, but that was part of the point- their company wasn’t sophisticated enough to defend themselves from the other one.
Friend fought a miserable battle with their coworkers over this. They were called chicken little because they couldn’t explain their threat model, until another employee stepped in with a story of how they’d been outmaneuvered at a previous company in exactly the way friend feared but couldn’t describe. Suddenly, co-workers came around on the issue. They ultimately decided against the merger.
“They’ll be so much smarter I can’t describe how they’ll beat us” can feel like a shitty argument because it’s hard to disprove, but sometimes it’s true. The debate has to be about whether a specific They will actually be that smart.
It will help get early dates, but it also sets a tone for what they should expect in the future.
if the problem is with the receptor, taking more won’t make a difference
In this video essay, Patrick Willems talks about George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Both of them took a huge risk in the early 80s to self-finance their own films (Empire Strikes Back and One From The Heart). Their goal was to make enough money to gain independence from the studio system and make the movies they wanted to make.
In the short term, George Lucas was the obvious winner here, in that Empire Strikes back is one of the most popular movies of all time and it indeed granted him complete independence from the studio system. He used that freedom to make three movies nobody over the age of 8 liked, and otherwise spent his career managing a toy line. When you see him in interviews, he seems sad.
In contrast, Coppola’s movie was an utter failure. But he’s at 86 is still making successful, artistically meaningful, and varied movies that he’s proud of. Since that essay was posted he self-funded another movie (Megalopolis), which also bombed.
For extra poignancy, this essay is made by an aspiring film-maker who fell into criticism by accident and seems to be in a bit of a financial trap. Criticism pays well enough he can’t quit, but keeping it viable requires basically all of his time.[1]. Worse, I heartily recommend his work up to 2022 or so, but it’s been downhill since then.
- ^
He has eked out time for two movies, and I have to imagine being a popular youtuber was better than starting from zero.
- ^
The default is that people overencourage, so here’s a comment to upvote if you’re not that interested in this post (including, like, a little bit interested). I’m doing this rather than agree/disgree voting because it retains more information about how many people are interested.
This is a trial balloon for a longer post. Please let me know which parts you’re interested in, if any.
The standard (North American) story of plate tectonics is of accidental discovery: continental drift was rejected for lack of evidence or a mechanism. 50 years the US Navy discovered an anomaly on the sea floor that eventually led to the discovery of plate tectonics. But before that accidental discovery, geologists were very close to codifying plate tectonics on purpose.
Some definitions:
continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. He believed that the continents moved through the ocean floor like ships moving through ice.
Plate tectonics is the theory that the earth has a gooey center, covered in large large plates (the ocean/continental floor) with water/more rock on top of them. Like an M&M with a candy shell several times thicker than the chocolate.
Wegener proposed Continental Drift in 1912. The past is a different country, but when I look at the evidence, it sure looks plausible to me. He didn’t just point to the jigsaw puzzle shorelines between Africa and South America, but to fossil evidence that made no sense without adjoining land, geological features that were continuous between South America, Africa, and India and evidence of glaciers where glaciers should not be.
Continental drift was laughed out of the US, Canada, and parts of Europe, but it did establish a toe-hold in the latter. It also received widespread support in South America, Africa, and India- the plates that once made up Gondawanaland (except for Australia).
Those scientists rapidly narrowed in the details of drift. The theory that Earth had a gooey center on which continents floated (isostasy) was already around by 1912, although far from proven. Drifters (aka mobilists) experimented to figure out what the “unit” of flotation was, and had proven it was fairly large (i.e. plates).
Drift was often accused of having no mechanism. This was false from the beginning- Wegener suggested mecahnisms, they were just wrong. But by the 1920s, geologists were experimenting with convection currents in the Earth’s core as a potential explanation- the same as plate tectonics.
Jump to America in the 1940s. WW2 and the Cold War pique the Navy’s interest in mapping the sea floor to support submarine warfare. Embedded earth scientists discover magnetic stripes on the sea floor- long, thin, alternating zones of positive and negative polarity
Sea floor striping triggers a series of investigations that eventually lead to the discovery and universal acceptance of plate tectonics in the late 60s/early 70s (this is also how we learned the Earth’s magnetic field occasionally flips).
If continental drifters were so close to codifying plate tectonics via purposeful investigation, why do Americans only hear about the accidental discovery? Naomi Oreskes blames differences in philosophy of science. I dug into her sources, and this does not check out. Henry Frankel blames regionalism and differences in local geology, which is much more plausible but not quite as proven as he implies.
Lord grant me the strength to persevere when things are hard
The courage to quit when things are impossible
And the wisdom to know the difference
(original post)
Why ketamine is always used with an adjunct when anesthetizing animals, but often without in humans:
Ketamine is cheap, both as a substance and because it doesn’t require an anesthesiologist to administer. In some jurisdictions it doesn’t even require a doctor. Animal work is more cost-conscious and less outcome conscious, so it’s tilted towards the cheaper anesthetic.
New anesthetics for humans are often not tested in animals, so veterinarians have fewer options.
Doctors are very concerned that patients
hate their experiencenot get addicted to medications, and ketamine can be enjoyable (although not physically addictive). Veterinarians are secure that even if your cat trips balls and spends the next six months desperate for ketamine, she will not have the power to do anything about it.Pictured: a cat whose dealer won’t return her texts
ketamine is rare in that it acts as an anesthetic but not a muscle relaxant. For most surgeries, you want relaxed muscles, so you either combine the ketamine with a muscle relaxant or use another drug entirely. However there are some patients where relaxing muscles is dangerous (generally those with impaired breathing or blood pressure), in which case ketamine is your best option.
Ketamine is unusually well suited for emergency use, because it acts quickly, doesn’t require an anesthesiologist, and can be delivered via intramuscular injection as well as IV. In those emergencies, you’re not worried about what it can’t do.
Because it’s the body’s natural reaction to calorie deficits.