alecst

16 ms·

151.
by alecst 4y ago
I wrote a short story about this: https://www.spacelove.xyz/writing/wake-up-in-the-sky/
152.
by alecst 4y ago
People see me as friendly and confident, so I’m kind of starting on 3rd base here, but even for me making friends requires a lot of effort. I put myself in situations every day that force me to meet people, often the same people, over and o
153.
by alecst 4y ago
This is something I hear repeated without hard evidence. Plenty of people do 10+ day fasts and don’t get refeeding syndrome. I have never heard of it happening. While I can’t prove it doesn’t happen to some sensitive people in rare cases, m
154.
by alecst 4y ago
I feel most awkward in video calls for what it’s worth. I find audio really natural.
155.
by alecst 4y ago
The idea that farmers already know this and manage it through tilling is contradicted by the abstract: > We demonstrate that modern vehicles induce high soil stresses that now exceed critical mechanical thresholds for many arable soils,
156.
by alecst 4y ago
Ugh, I hate to say this but this article feels like GPT-3. I realize you can’t really defend against this accusation which makes it a logical fallacy of some kind (ad robotinem?) but I think as the technology develops we do have to become m
157.
by alecst 4y ago
I mean, the Silk Road, like it or not, was a pretty wild innovation enabled by crypto.
158.
by alecst 4y ago
U, the internal energy is objective. The free energy F = U - TS is the maximum amount of work you can extract from the system. This depends on how much you know about the system. S does indeed depend on what you know about the system. See t
159.
by alecst 4y ago
I think it depends on your goals, but finding a hobby that you like that works you out as a side effect is probably better for you than straight weight lifting. Like, say, rock climbing. Then eventually you can start doing other exercises (
160.
by alecst 5y ago
When has the population of females ever been 4x the population of males?
161.
by alecst 5y ago
> It's showing promising results, however, the details re: dosing and adverse effects are still being worked out. I'm gonna let out a galaxy-level eye roll when the FDA comes out with a "prescription" psilocybin x mg&
162.
by alecst 5y ago
Super fun! I love it. Just the right kind of clever. 1. How do you move the shaded lines without clicking? 2. I had to figure out the arrow keys myself. A tooltip would be helpful 3. Your solve time accumulates after retries
163.
by alecst 5y ago
Something worth knowing if you're going to take part in this conversation is the "serotonin hypothesis." Ignoring the conversation about whether antidepressants work* or not, depressed people don't have depleted serotoni
164.
by alecst 5y ago
I’ve heard this argument before but it’s always felt like a non-sequitur. Why would it be pointless to reason out if free will exists? Case A: no free will really exists. We reason about whether free will exists. We conclude it does not. Ca
165.
by alecst 5y ago
In undergrad physics we had a saying: "the only thing we know for sure is that all of our equations are wrong."
166.
by alecst 5y ago
I was using and loved mataroa. It was the fairest, most painless option I had found for blogging (as of 2020.) I eventually switched away from it because the default font was small and I couldn’t change it. I wonder if this has been updated
167.
by alecst 5y ago
This one: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/An-Epidemic-of-Absenc... An Epidemic of Absence , by Moises Velasquez Manoff.
168.
by alecst 5y ago
Would be interested in knowing why this was downvoted —- is this wrong?
169.
by alecst 5y ago
Autism has a few biological sequelae so I don’t think this is gonna be the case. For example their brains grow faster than normal for the first few years of life but slower thereafter. And you can see differences in their brains under a mic
170.
by alecst 5y ago
The submitted article is poached from https://www.newswise.com/articles/chronic-low-back-pain-link... . (This page also links to the study in question.) The current link is sketchy, full of ads, and doesn’t link to the
171.
by alecst 5y ago
For an ideal gas in a 3d box, the "equation of state" that relates P(ressure), T(emperature), and V(olume) is PV = nRT, where R is a constant and n is the number of particles. You can rewrite this as: P = nRT/V Compressing th
172.
by alecst 5y ago
Hey so I was replying to this part: > I'm not sure how far you could take math if you treat equality as meaning "exactly the same"; it seems even middle-school math requires understanding that that's not the case. I h
173.
by alecst 5y ago
In both of your examples equality holds for x in some specified domain. The first equation is not valid (outside of, say, analytical continuation) for x >= 1. I thought the article was cool. From this comment, you are coming across as so
174.
by alecst 5y ago
You don't understand why the price you pay makes a difference in whether someone is exploited or not? Do you think a shirt could be profitably sold for $1, and have everyone along the supply chain be paid a fair wage? Also it's tr
175.
by alecst 5y ago
I worked at an NGO in Cambodia. One thing I remember clearly was having lunch with this French guy who was in the fashion industry. He told me: “if you’re buying a T-shirt for $10 or less, there’s no way around it: someone, somewhere is get
176.
by alecst 5y ago
I do not consider the search for dark matter a waste of time. But when you are working with a team of WIMP-detector-building specialists, it is (unsurprisingly) hard to have a conversation about whether we should continue building WIMP dete
177.
by alecst 5y ago
That's exactly the kind of question a curious physics student would ask. This might be what you're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_field > In physics, a tachyonic field, or simply tach
178.
by alecst 5y ago
There are many theories of dark matter given at conferences like this. Around that time (2013-2014) I remember hearing about axion theories too. I don't know anything about this person's presentation so I can't say how it dis
179.
by alecst 5y ago
As a grad student in High-Energy Physics I worked at the XENON1T dark matter detector in Italy. I left feeling disenchanted about the search for dark matter, and I felt like a lot of us were just doing the best we could at the time, which w
180.
by alecst 5y ago
Yea you're exactly right, and I think you've taken a stronger interpretation from that quoted part than what I intended. My point was that it's too early to jump to conclusions about parasites making Covid-19 more severe. But

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