erisinger

In Japan, houses and apartments usually have at most one transparent window. The rest are heavily frosted. It took a while to adjust to that model but once I did I wished we did this more in the US. You get more light during the day, since clear windows don’t actually let in that much light unless the sun is shining directly in, then it’s usually too much light. You have absolute privacy — you can walk around buck naked without having to draw a curtain anywhere. And, unless you happen to be in the minority and have a killer view, frosted glass makes it less distracting to be indoors. Random stuff going on outside doesn’t steal your focus at all. The fact is that for most people there really is t much to look at out their windows — a crumbling street, the neighbor’s fence, the wall of the apartment building next door, a parking lot. But of course if you do happen to have a killer view, you can always have a clear window in that direction.

Touché...

Not a personal attack. These posters are smarter than I am, just ribbing them about misusing the terminology.

"Maxima" is plural, "maximum" is singular. So you would say "a local maximum," or "several local maxima." Not "a local maxima" or, the one that really got me, "getting trapped in local maxima's."

As for the rest of it, carry on. Good discussion.

Not a single one of you bigbrains used the word "maxima" correctly and it's driving me crazy.

I used to use plumbum for Pythonic(ish) shell scripting. It was great for a specific use case.

Found this comment while trying to figure out if this is a joke.

What an amazing sport.

Lindy effect.

Came here to see if anyone else had a problem with that timeline.

Huh. I wish I had encountered this way of thinking sooner.

Is this this the Mitchell translation?

This is the truth. A Fuji apple in Japan is life-changing. A Fuji apple in Minnesota is flavorless and either hard as a rock or mushy and granular. It’s all about the source.

That was not anticlimactic.

Interesting. Do you have a source for that?

I had hypothesized that the antibiotics were either giving my immune system a boost which was tamping down some underlying inflammation somewhere, or were helping fight some intestinal flora that normally cause some subtle mood effects that I wouldn’t normally notice until it was absent. But I was never able to find anything online to pin it down one way or the other.

Almost nothing stated here is accurate…

If they put you on probiotics at the same time, it might have been that. Took me weeks to figure out that it wasn’t the meds making me sick, it was the probiotics they recommended to keep the meds from damaging my gut. I just didn’t tolerate them well for some reason.

Can you elaborate on affect changes? I had a similar regimen and experienced a weird sense of mental clarity and sociability for a couple of weeks after. Never have figured out what the mechanism was.

I can back up the magnesium theory. Started pounding the stuff (100% chelated) a few years ago after reading about how many processes it's involved in and how little of it we actually get in our diets, and it was a game-changer. B12 also made a huge difference, even though I'm not vegetarian.

Would disagree that it's enough to eat a healthy diet. Our bodies evolved to eat an absurdly broad diet that provided countless nutrients that are hard to get today, even if you eat a local, organic, plant-based diet (which I do not).

Since you're willing to try some out-there stuff, here are the two things that turned my life around: a shamanic healing ceremony (literally saved my life) and EFT/tapping (allowed me to work through what was left).

I was in the same boat you seem to be -- crushing, horrific depression that hadn't responded to anything medical and counselors and therapists had no idea what to do with the sense of dread and self-loathing I was experiencing. They kept telling me to try meditating or do breathing exercises, which I did to no effect.

Then a single 20-minute encounter with a shamanic practitioner changed everything. This was over 10 years ago and to this day I have no cogent explanation for the experience.

As an aside, I later learned that I was hurting for quite a few nutrients -- most notably B12, magnesium and lithium. When you get nutritional insufficiencies sorted out, you start feeling a lot better.

I was the exact same way in college. I remember saying to a professor one time that whenever I was inside studying hard I would look out the window and say, "What am I doing? I should be outside in nature, enjoying the beauty of the world for the short time I have here." But when I would go outside, I would immediately say, "What am I doing? I should be inside studying so I can make something of myself and contribute to the world!"

No matter what choice I made, some other choice always seemed like the mature decision, and I was perpetually stuck in either a childish pursuit of good grades on paper, or a childish avoidance of work while I frolicked outside. I just couldn't win.

Came to the comments to see if I was losing my mind trying to understand that sentence.

In the US this is precisely the traditional approach. The country was built by immigrants who would arrive in an area -- San Francisco or New York for example -- decide that if they didn't want to work in a sweat shop they would have to start a business, then look around to see what their neighborhood needed, and build it. Laundromat, restaurant, feed store, etc.

They didn't need to be intrigued by a problem or have a background that set them up to solve one. They decided to start a business and began by figuring out in what way their region was underserved, then built something to fill the gap. Voila.

There's no obvious reason this approach couldn't work in tech as well.

Came here to say a variation of this.

Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.

I hear Tufts is looking for researchers like you.

96% true positive, 0% false positive.

Agreed that this seems like a measurement of something other than vocabulary.