I think parent was making an (apt) reference to Old School RuneScape, where level 92 represent half of the total XP needed to reach the max level of 99.
Same, I can even feel which general areas don't feel rinsed enough when I don't get enough sleep, although I can't be sure if it's the accurate location or merely the position the sensor data gets reported to.
This has been commonly known by magicians for decades. I doubt that any single magician had conducted 350k flips, but I know I personally did ~2,500 to test the effect when I was a kid.
And I'm sure if you got 30 magicians together to pool data we'd have a meta-analysis of about this size but with experiments a century ago
I'm not an Orson Scott Card fan generally, but I LOVED his Shadow Series (the world of Ender's Game from the perspective of Bean).
In one of the books in the Shadow Series Bean explains his leadership style as:
"I will always explain why something is important, and why we're doing it this particular way... The reason for this is that if we ever find ourselves in a situation where I CAN'T give orders you know what I prioritize and how I might think of something... furthermore, if we're in a situation where I CAN give orders but DON'T explain you will understand that it's simply because I do not have time, but presumably have good reasons, and will proceed to immediately execute said orders"
It appears this emergency room operated in a similar capacity
Ich weiß von alters her, daß man entfernten Freunden gar nicht schreibt, wenn man darauf warten will, bis man ihnen etwas zu schreiben hat.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
i know for a long time that you don't ever write to distant friends if you want to wait until you have something worth writing about.
i found this in a collection of quotes. i don't know if it is verified as genuine, but that doesn't matter. the sentiment expressed makes sense either way.
i sent that quote to a friend that i haven't talked to in a while, followed by "how are you?" which then led to a nice conversation catching up.
the thing is that doing this is a lot easier than suddenly talking to someone because you actually want something from them.
compare for example the discussions here on HN on how we need to build a network to help us find jobs. the part that i am struggling with is that i don't usually keep in touch often enough with the people in my network so that asking anyone to help me find a job feels rather awkward. i'd rather just message people out of the blue for no reason at all instead of waiting until i seriously need their help.
Not only is it nearly impossible to use anywhere... but a huge component of BTC's mythology is making fun of someone who ACTUALLY spent it as money (Bitcoin Pizza)
To borrow terms from RFC 2119, "having a child makes people more responsible" is a SHOULD, but statistically, turns out to be a MAY. (#survivorBias: people are likely to acknowledge this, if they did turn out to actually be more responsible - "turned out GREAT for ME", emphasis added. The other case, not so much.)
However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure - but it's not an overwhelming factor...
It's also psychologically easier to manage. People have an easier time building a schedule where they do or don't eat and holding it (say, by skipping breakfast) than they do managing counting calories around things like "I went out to dinner and probably ate too much".
Binary choices (should I eat right now?) take much less cognitive overhead than spectral choices (What should I eat? How much of it? If I eat X and Y now will I have the capacity to eat Z later?)
The incredible thing is you don't really need to count calories, you just have to avoid complete garbage.
As Michael Pollan says "Eat food, mostly greens, not too much".
Don't eat anything processed, don't eat anything with more than one ingredient and only eat meat with at most one meal, and ideally quite a small portion.
Completely and utterly ignore things like icecream, chocolate, soda, candy, chips, anything deep friend and other "non food items". Treat them like Arsenic - i.e. you should never eat them.
There, you are now restricting calorie intake and you didn't have to count anything.
Out of all the advice in these comments, this contradicts the scientific evidence on fitness and nutrition the most. Everyone should do the thing that makes it the easiest for them to attain their health and fitness goals. Living an an acetic life because an internet comment and Michael Pollan said so will work sustainably for very few people.
Adherence/consistency is the single most important factor to consider when building a fitness plan. Evidence shows users of systematic plans like weight watchers points are less likely to lapse in the long term. A very gradual improvement that works for a long time is much better than a deep “improvement” you practice for 1.5 months before giving up.
I’d much rather count calories and eat ice cream every day than treat ice cream as arsenic. For me a little bit of a treat every day makes self control around my diet easier overall - I never buy snacks or overeat at meals because I think “hrrng if I spend this calorie now, I cant spend it on ice cream tonight”. Might not work for everyone - there’s a lot of commenters here who prefer TRE because it’s easier for them; if works well that’s what they should do.
If living an acetic life without treats works the best for you, then do that - but don’t tell other people they should do it too.
There’s no reason to fear treats if you can manage them; if time restricted eating or calorie counting enables someone to eat the food they like, and so life is more enjoyable and it’s easier to adhere to a good diet, they should do that.
> you just have to avoid complete garbage. As Michael Pollan says
That reminds me of something I saw a long time ago:
> Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law: Never waste calories. [...] Don't eat soggy potato chips. Or cheap candy. Or an inferior hot fudge sundae. Or a cold soggy pizza.
What humans consider food has changed more in the last 100 years than it did in the preceding 10,000. Eat what your great-great grandmother would consider food, not what a scientist in a lab is trying to sell you as food.
Cake, donuts, ice cream, etc derive their extreme calorie density and negative satiety from cream, sugar, and frying, not some recent invention by a "scientist in a lab".
It's not hard in the sense that solving complicated math problems is hard, but hard in that it adds a non-trivial amount of effort to an activity you do multiple times a day, every day, in perpetuity.
Even the small effort of measuring your creamer with a teaspoon instead of just pouring it in the cup just takes more time and effort than simply checking what time it is.
This is not really true. Generally speaking, at the grossest level of averaging, regularly eating 2 meals instead of 3 or 1 meal instead of 2 results in a long term net reduction of calories.
Additionally your stomach shrinks under this regime - that one meal will definitely make you feel full and satiated.
All this goes into ease of adherence - I just don't have to think about it. I eat as much as I want for dinner each day and have dropped a steady 10lb/year for the last 5 years.
And the actual title of the study is 'Effect of Time-Restricted Eating on Weight Loss' which describes a concept that is basically the colloquial definition of intermittent fasting.
The popular term 'intermittent fasting' usually describes time restricted eating, with a fasting period usually between 16-20 hours.
Sorry, no. Whether it was always the definition or not, having a daily window to eat that is generally much shorter than normal is called intermittent fasting.
Except for those people who wake up and have a midnight snack.
Cutting out the snacking is probably also a major factor in the effectiveness of intermittent fasting, especially given that snack foods are often more processed, calorie-dense, and less nutritionally balanced than what we typically eat at meals.
I think a lot of people could lose significant weight by simply eating three meals a day at the usual times, but just cutting out snacking between meals entirely and changing nothing else. Just fasting between meals, if you will.
Good observation! Fasting in general is usually at minimum 8 hours, which is also around the time we sleep. There seems to be some evidence that the longer one fasts, the better the benefits. You would be surprised how many people in the US eat right up until they go to bed, and then eat breakfast right after waking up. So for some, extending the fast 2-5 hours is no small feat.
A founder friend confided in me years ago, "It is MUCH easier to raise more money than it is to fire someone... I just keep raising and hiring and eventually everything will get done"
No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"
Legally perhaps, but firing people particularly en mass is hard to do right, unless you don't care and you are just prepping for a fire sale.
You can lose people who might be key contributors. You can destroy morale in the rest of the company. Everyone else knows they might be next, so they will leave first chance they get. Finally, it signals to the market you are in trouble (hence why a lot of companies are doing it now: better to be just one more company doing layoffs when everyone else is doing it).
I've always interpreted the Eden myth as a memory of the development of agriculture.
Before agriculture, people lived as hunters and (mainly) gatherers. The life of a Hunter-gatherer is, surprisingly, mostly leisure, because of the abundance of food and the low population density. Even Kalahari Bushmen, who had been forced to live in the dessert, were found to average only about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours of productive labor a day in a study [1].
In the bible, God's punishment is [2]:
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
Which seems very clearly to indicate that being cast out of Eden means that people now must work in the fields and do agriculture. Agriculture ends up requiring much more labor for worse quality food, but it generates more calories. This enables classes to develop and enforces an end to nomadic life, because the fields must be tended and the harvest stored and protected.
I've always thought that being cast out of Eden was not so much a punishment, as merely an unavoidable consequence: having eaten from the tree of knowledge, we now also have the ability to appreciate suffering, and thus no longer experience paradise. That would make paradise a state of mind, rather than a place.
After eating the fruit God lists a number of consequences, which sounds somewhat like a punishment, but that could just as easily be interpreted as "well, I didn't want this to happen to you, but now that you got to this point, you'll have to deal with the following". That includes increased pain in giving birth (a consequence of having larger brains), and the rise of agriculture. Eve is also only named after eating the fruit, not before.
The snake gets cursed for what it did, and so does the ground, but not Man. God even goes so far to provide them with clothes, and acknowledges their growth.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is basically just the spark of consciousness. Humans are unique in our ability to consciously foresee and plan for the future.
On the one hand, that's a blessing because we've made tons of progress towards alleviating objective suffering and scarcity.
On the other hand, it's a curse, because we always have to be aware of the impending inevitability of our death. We can't ever completely live in peace and paradise ever again, because we have become conscious of our existence and the context our life experience exists within.
Would it be better to not have gained that spark of consciousness and live the paradise of ignorance as animals in the wildreness? Lives at peace except for occasional bursts of pain and terror.
The snake always seemed to me to be a Promethean figure in this story. It brought us knowledge, like Prometheus brought us fire, and got punished for it by a god.
Think it was a different green area - the Fertile Crescent, not the Sahara. Eden would have been where modern day Kuwait is. As for ancient towns in Sahara, for a long time people wondered how the desert people lived in such a harsh area - but it turns out they've just been there since it was lush. They didn't move to the desert and learn how to survive there, they're just what's left of those populations from the Sahara, and adapted to the changing conditions.
I dunno, I mean the myth doesn't say "Then The Lord Smote the Garden Unto Sand", it says that Eden (and the plants) persisted in the same spot as before... Humans were just being actively blocked by an angel with a flaming sword.
I do not struggle to see echoes of an oral tradition recalling receding greenery. I can quite imagine a cult feeling expelled from Eden as the productive grasslands walked away.
> Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.
