alecst

Yea, and place to start reading is Hamilton’s equations or Lagrangian mechanics.

To help me take this argument seriously, could you give a specific examples of when the shoe was on the first foot?

Like

a few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes

are you talking about the guy whose memes tricked thousands of people (of one political party) into thinking they could vote by texting a number?

AP is reporting that It's $100k/yr. So it wouldn't amortize like that.

I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2...

It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.

Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.

Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.

I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)

Well the point of wearing a mask is mostly to protect vulnerable people, and to slow the spread of a disease. These protests are also about protecting vulnerable people. And, I would argue, to slow the spread of a disease.

I’m thin but I agree with you, I don’t have to think or try to be this way, I just am. I do probably have healthier habits than average. But still, it comes naturally to me. I would feel awful and exhausted if it took willpower all the time just to maintain my weight.

For those who are curious, there's some anecdata online that extended fasting (days or weeks) can reverse this disease.

I can't find much published research on it to be fair, but I think the science in this field is lagging behind people's personal experiences.

If there's evidence to the contrary let me know, I'm not trying to spread misinformation. It's just one of the things I consistently recall reading over the years.

Edit since I'm being downvoted:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6893587/ (prolonged fasting, ~8 days)

The improvement of FLI correlated with the number of fasting days (r = −0.20, p < 0.0001)

https://eglj.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43066-021-00... (ADF rat model)

MSRDF rats showed cure of grade-1 NAFLD and significantly decreased LW than other groups and normalized HOMA-IR, HbA1C TC, LDL-C, ALT, and CRP.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(22)... (exercise + ADF, humans)

Look, in my neighborhood, in a single weekend, something like 5 people died due to car crashes. One of them was a kid who was killed by a driver who was texting. Some drivers were drinking. Last year, a driver drove into the lobby of a CityMD a few blocks from me and destroyed the entire corner of the building and possibly killed people, I don't know. Just yesterday a car was upside down in the middle of the road on Skillman Blvd.

Even having said that, I kind of agree that it's true that drivers in Manhattan tend to be pretty aware, considerate, and mindful compared to other cities, all the traffic lights notwithstanding. But they have to be -- even just a little bit of distraction and they will kill someone. I can't say the same for the Citi bikers as reckless as they may be. They're far more likely to hurt themselves than someone else, and I'd rather have the reckless amateurs be on bikes than driving cars.

Yea I switched my words around, thanks.

Yea I partly agree I guess. I am a cyclist in NYC and there are definitely "e-bikes" that present more like motorcycles and people drive them over the Queensboro Bridge bike path which is like 3 feet wide. It's crazy. I'm surprised I don't see more streaks of blood on the concrete there to be honest.

So I would like to see better e-bike laws that make it illegal to have a machine that's too heavy and/or fast, and to issue court summonses to people operating those machines in bike lanes. That seems fair. It's a clear hazard, it's a selfish use of resources, and if everyone did it they'd just close the bike path altogether because it'd become unusable.

Having said that, that's not what the city is doing. They're fixated on cyclists running red lights and stop signs, not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes. Bikes, and e-bikes, are safer than cars for everyone around them. We want to encourage people to bike more and drive less because they're so much safer. (Remember a bike isn't like a car -- if a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they're gonna get hurt too!) For this reason, many states allow bikes to treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yield signs. So NYC's sudden shift in policy, to me, feels backwards.

It sucks because if safety was really the major concern the mayor could have just built more and safer bike lines -- which was what he promised to do, made a plan to do, and then just didn't.

They are giving court dates to (regular) cyclists, they are harsher on bikes than cars, and they are stopping cyclists at a higher rate than they stop drivers of cars.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/18/exclusive-cops-writin...

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/05/02/policy-change-nypd-wi...

If the police don't care about the difference, why do you?

Love this. Anyone know of something similar in NYC? Casual, unpretentious math club?

It's around 900 pages. In NYC we have a study group to go over it -- we've covered just a handful of chapters. But most people can get a lot out of just reading the opening section.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-202...

You can understand, for example, most of their tactics about immigration by reading the section on Homeland Security, tariffs by reading the Economy section (by Peter Navarro), and so on. They are in fact hewing pretty closely to the plan.

Plausible, perhaps -- is there any evidence?

Was told the same thing, but my tap water works fine. If it’s true that it’s harmful I’d like to see some science (even citizen science.) Pretty sure it’s a myth.

Here's evidence to the contrary:

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-02-04/calorie-cou...

I'm not sure public trust really matters. A lot of times people distrust what they just don't like to hear.

I recently read a book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabloona) about a "modern" (1930s) man who sought out the Eskimos to check out their way of life.

They have nothing you describe -- no agriculture, no antibiotics, no farming, no electricity. (The fridge, however, they got covered.) They are quite happy that way. Certainly happier than the people around me in NYC.

Perhaps quality of life is about more than just material goods.

Regarding lesions, a recent pair of articles about Ibogaine.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39981248/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11303312/

This sounds logical enough but I think I remember reading that larger embeddings were only better for certain classes of words, because increasing the dimension size (in those cases) introduced noise. Will try to find the paper — it’s escaping me at the moment.

When I lived in Kampong Speu, Cambodia, they’d burn plastic trash as a means of disposing of it. It was the only time in my life I ever experienced black snow.

Thanks, I appreciate that. And by the way, I had the same thought as you. I’ve been doing monthly 5-day fasts just to see what would happen. So far not much to report, but I’ll wait until 6 months have passed to draw conclusions.

I had some electrolytes at first but ditched them on the third day. After that it was just plain water. If I had to do it again, I would take potassium and table salt throughout.

I did have friends and my girlfriend with me for a lot of it.

I didn’t do anything special to break the fast.

Yea, I'm in good shape. I commute by bike and was spending most of my free time at the gym.

Yea. Many of the comments hurt me to read. I'm trying to remind myself that they come from a place of curiosity and wanting to rule out confounding variables. But they do make a lot of assumptions about me and things I know and/or do.

To answer your question: I hesitate to use the word "cure", because 3-4 months on, I'm starting to wonder if certain things have begun to slide back, or if it's just been a challenging week. Time will tell.

A datapoint that I did not mention in my first post was that there was a negative, persistent, digestive side-effect that paralleled the positive mental changes. As that has faded, so have some of the noticeable mental changes. I'm still doing better, but maybe with less energy than a month or so after the fast. I hope not, but maybe this is something I'll have to repeat every now and then.

I'm no stranger to discomfort. I enjoy it. Like, my bed is a piece of plywood with a blanket on it.

The increase in energy and clarity of my thinking, the tingly feeling in my body, and the improved sleep quality -- just to give you a few examples -- are hard to attribute to the mechanism you're talking about. To add to that, I regularly fast for five days at a time and I have not yet experienced the same kind of mental difference. This time I pushed it to two weeks because my energy levels continued to fluctuate upward until the 12th or 13th day.

You do feel a lot of relief that the boredom of fasting is over. But that effect lasts maybe a day or two or three. Certainly not months.

I can’t go into too much detail here, but I interrupted a severe depression by fasting for two straight weeks. It’s hard to say why it worked — my friends assume that the microbiome is implicated because of the dietary change. Plausible, but hardly a proof. This gives me at least one direction to look in.

You're welcome. I read a lot about fasting and I have a lot of experience with it. It's helped me, personally, heal many things (but not all of them -- it's good to have low expectations.) In any case, it's a mind-expanding experience to go without food for a while, regardless of the outcome.

I'm really sorry to hear that. Since you're asking for moonshots and weird things to try, here's something they can ask their doctor about:

Case reports involving glioblastoma patients using water-only fasting regimens in conjunction with other forms of cancer treatment have reported favorable outcomes with respect to tumor growth https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2874558/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5884883/

From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6836141/