wrp

55 ms·

721.
by wrp 4y ago
To everyone whose response is, "I'm not a Christian, but...," why dump on other people's good wishes? If a holiday is about free time, good food, meeting friends, and general expressions of good will, who cares what the
722.
by wrp 4y ago
If you are well read in the US/UK science fiction traditions, the Strugatsky's offer a pleasantly novel perspective. It's been many years, but I think Roadside Picnic was my favorite.
723.
by wrp 4y ago
> At some point the buck stops. I'd like to think so, but I'm getting the sense that maybe not. I've been observing businesses having to be incredibly tolerant of the poor performance of new hires, I guess because they can
724.
by wrp 4y ago
"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me." - Cary Grant
725.
by wrp 4y ago
Rather than watch a video, you can read the article. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/video/russia-ukraine-buch... )
726.
by wrp 4y ago
Yeah, you must be doing it wrong. :-) The appetite-suppressant effect of nicotine is enhanced by caffeine ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15955118/ ) Conclusion: Caffeine added to nicotine chewing gum appears to ampli
727.
by wrp 4y ago
As we get into middle age, our hunger sensations grow more out of alignment with our body's caloric needs. I think the focus of most diet strategies is to find ways of minimizing hunger pains while keeping caloric input at or below mai
728.
by wrp 4y ago
Counting calories has a dramatic effect because it makes you aware of how much eating is habitual rather than because you need the input. People start eating less without consciously trying to. I've read that calorie counting is the mo
729.
by wrp 4y ago
Some one-liners just give me goosebumps. So much power with minimal complexity. (Looking at you, Perl.)
730.
by wrp 4y ago
I'm always on the lookout for films showing other than the US/UK/Japan fighting off the aliens. The furthest off-beat film I know has Inuit fighting the invaders, Slash/Back (2022). It's a very low budget producti
731.
by wrp 4y ago
Living in Japan years ago, I was surprised at the huge piles of boy-boy romance manga in the bookshops, given the notable lack of such coupling out and around. It was eventually explained to me that the market for these was mostly young wom
732.
by wrp 4y ago
Somebody beat me to it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33349736 ) From Beat The Devil (1953): Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus
733.
by wrp 4y ago
This public vs. private split goes back a ways. When the eastern regions split off in 2014, many Ukrainian political figures took the public stance of recovering those regions at all cost, while privately admitting they were glad to see the
734.
by wrp 4y ago
Yes, the throngs of Japanese tourists around the world ended in the 1990s with the downturn of their economy. It had nothing to do with health concerns. Strange that it is being talked about as a recent thing. The last decade or so has seen
735.
by wrp 4y ago
On the similarity of Germany to Oregon....30 years ago, I heard there was a quite large community of German retirees around Portland, who chose there because of the similarity to home. I grew up in Oregon and when I visited Germany I was ra
736.
by wrp 4y ago
I would like to think this article is deliberately making fun of the paranoia regarding the unvaccinated. > First responders may also consider taking precautions to protect themselves from COVID when responding to traffic crashes, the a
737.
by wrp 4y ago
Are you in the USA? UPS collaborates with the USPS. I don't know who does what, but it appears that when packages pass between them, they lose track of it. I've had this happen a couple times during holiday season. I tracked an UP
738.
by wrp 4y ago
Something I'm honestly curious about....I can understand the need for advertising, but why do DJs talk so much? I would much prefer radio to have only music and ads. Living in Japan in the 1990s, I completely gave up on radio because t
739.
by wrp 4y ago
This is why online teaching didn't take over college education the way administrators hoped it would 25 years ago. People like Hubert Dreyfus early on explained why it wasn't going to work ( On the Internet , 2001).
740.
by wrp 4y ago
Have we really acquired substantial new evidence on the relative effectiveness of N95 masks in the past two years? The most recent survey I read was: Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Part 1 -
741.
by wrp 4y ago
Club Dumas is worth mentioning because there are few really good novels involving the rare book trade. Most of that aspect of the book didn't make it into the movie, though. As in most cases, it's best to just regard the book an
742.
by wrp 4y ago
I think there is some confusion here about "automation". The benefits referred to involve providing greater access to information. The problems referred to involve putting more layers of abstraction between you and what you are co
743.
by wrp 4y ago
In the 1980s, I read that the GRU issued an injector they called "blissful death". The source was unreliable, but that's a starting point for research.
744.
by wrp 4y ago
If you are interested in how interwar conditions led to the twisted nature of Nazi society, one book I recommend is Lothrop Stoddard's Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (1940). An American historian took an extended tour around G
745.
by wrp 4y ago
Humans have been experimenting with the production of rhythmic sounds for aesthetic effect for millennia. Considering the extensive search through possibility space that this represents, I'm skeptical that a machine aided search could
746.
by wrp 4y ago
Sure, don't trust the mainstream media, but that applies to anyone . I see so often people who are rightly skeptical of the major news sources, but who uncritically accept claims from some random guy with a blog.
747.
by wrp 4y ago
For those of us old enough to remember when holiday sales really did start on the day after Thanksgiving, in my area, most of the shops started their Black Friday sales on Monday. If you waited until today, you missed out on a lot.
748.
by wrp 4y ago
Also, secretaries who recorded speeches in shorthand were a well established institution is ancient Greece and Rome. Since Socrates was a celebrity teacher, it's likely his every speech (after becoming famous) was taken down verbatim.
749.
by wrp 4y ago
I was carefully specific in saying that "our side had never successfully inserted agents into the USSR." I meant people from outside, during the Soviet period, and into the whole country, not just intelligence agencies. In the cur
750.
by wrp 4y ago
Throughout the Cold War, it was accepted common knowledge around American intelligence circles that our side had never successfully inserted agents into the USSR because their counterintelligence was so effective. I always wondered whether

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