jonathansizz

I love weight training, but the number of zealots and narcissists in the community is definitely a big downside that surely discourages a lot of people.

Resistance training has innumerable benefits, but it's not a panacea nor is it a substitute for aerobic exercise; if done properly and sensibly, aerobic and resistance training complement one another. Here's a great summary comparing the two: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Adaptations-and-Health-B...

By all means emphasize one over the other as you prefer, but for health benefits both should be included. And, no, powerlifting exercises with a straight barbell are not irreplaceable. Resistance training is a far bigger world than that.

For cycling, I do a long warmup then ride as hard as I can (uninterrupted) for 30 minutes and take the average HR for the last 20 of the 30 minutes. There are online calculators you can plug this value into to give you the 5 zones.*

I do a test every 3 months, as the zones can shift as you get fitter.

Running might use a different protocol, but the same principle applies.

* These days I base my training on a 3-zone system: low intensity, below aerobic threshold; medium intensity, between aerobic and anaerobic (lactate) threshold, and high intensity, above lactate threshold. This is the system preferred by researchers, as it's based on real physiological markers.

Translating the 3 zone system into the 5 zone: low intensity equates to zones 1-2, medium is zone 3 and zone 4 up to your (lactate) threshold value, and high intensity is everything above this, i.e. the top part of zone 4 and all of zone 5.

So 'vigorous' per the Mayo Clinic would be medium intensity on the 3 zone system.

If you're just using a formula your heart rate zones could be quite far out.

For example, 220-age suggests my maximum HR is 178 and my threshold HR (85% of this) is 151, but in fact my max HR (determined empirically) is 188 and my threshold HR (based on an actual threshold test) is 162.

If you have somewhere you're comfortable cycling with them, stick them in a bike trailer and pull them around behind you.

My son just zones out for an hour or more when I do this with him. We're together of course, but I also have most of the feeling of freedom and solitude that cycling gives me, and he generally has a great time.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

CFR (the publishers of Foreign Affairs) have The World Next Week and The President's Inbox (and other more specialized ones)

Carnegie Endowment does The Carnegie Podcast

FT has World Weekly

BBC (e.g. Global News, Newshour, The Inquiry), NPR and PRI (e.g. America Abroad) all have a few to try out, and CSIS also have a good one. Universities like Oxford and Harvard have their own podcasts as well.

Try them all and pick your favourites. I just listen to CFR and Carnegie these days.

I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it's a constant source of anxiety leading to compulsive reloading of the feed. Other social networks are worse. Life's too short for this.

I've also cut down on the web sources I follow, as information overload is a real thing, and we rapidly run into diminishing returns.

For news, I now just peruse the FT, Guardian and Atlantic (+HN via http://hckrnews.com/ using the 'top 50%' setting) a couple of times a day, and Politico Magazine once per week. This covers a decent section of the political spectrum and if there's anything important going on I'll find it amongst those sources. I probably read half a dozen full articles each day.

For non-immediate information, I browse A&L Daily, and I have print subscriptions to the following: The Atlantic, Harper's, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Foreign Affairs, Philosophy Now, and The Philosophers' Magazine.

Additionally, I listen to a selection of podcasts when I'm in the car. These cover international relations and news analysis, history, philosophy and comedy.

That just about covers it; since I hit 40 and had a son my priorities changed, as did my outlook on life. Other than my family, I'm spending much more of my time on real hobbies and interests (in my case a bit of astronomy and photography, occasional writing, some cooking, and a lot of cycling and serious reading (books)), and less on time-wasting activities (social networks, web forums, television and video games).

It's amazing how much extra time you can find if you cut useless things out of your life.

Modern Android phones have a fingerprint scanner that also acts as a home button.

I just got a $130 Moto E4, and its fingerprint scanner can actually be set to mimic the back/home/recents on-screen softkeys, if you swipe left/tap/swipe right. A long press (until you feel a vibration) switches the phone on and off, and a double-long press (two vibrations) launches Google Assistant.

It works well and is very intuitive, allowing me to remove the traditional Android softkeys, making the 5" Moto E screen seem closer to a 5.5". I assume Moto's more expensive models also do this, and possibly other phones as well.

It made me wonder how I lived for so long with the old setup, so I'd be surprised if Apple goes the other way.

I assume you didn't realize you can install the Android Auto app directly on any Android phone running 5.0 or higher?

You don't need a built-in system, and in fact I find my phone [$130 Moto E4] coupled with a magnetic dash mount works far better.

Council on Foreign Relations: The World Next Week, The President's Inbox

Financial Times: World Weekly, The Money Show, Alphachat

BBC: The World This Week, Analysis, In Our Time, Infinite Monkey Cage, The Public Philosopher, A History of Ideas

Philosophy: The Partially Examined Life, Philosophy Bites, The Philosopher's Zone, The History of Philosophy Without any Gaps

Others:

The Carnegie Podcast

Radio Atlantic

Guardian Books

Guardian Science Weekly

serendipity.

A couple that haven't yet been mentioned:

American Scientist (distinct from Scientific American) [https://www.americanscientist.org/] for science, engineering and technology.

Foreign Affairs [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/] for international relations and politics.

although I actually switched back to reading these (and others) in ink-on-paper format, which I've found helps me focus much better.

EDIT: Also, Philosophy Now [https://philosophynow.org/] for more abstract ideas.

These are bimonthly publications, and all worth paying money for.

It doesn't exist now. That doesn't mean it couldn't be built; the article was lamenting America's loss of vision and technological leadership, and I was replying to your comment that implied that 12 hours between major cities would be too slow, which in the case of coast-to-coast I disagree with.

Does that six hours include travel to the airport, check-in, security clearance, boarding, deplaning, baggage collection, and travel from the destination airport back into the city?

If you factor in all this extra stuff, it looks more like 9-10 hours.

Even with the best available rail technology, trips between them would take over 12 hours by rail.

New York-San Francisco (for example) in 12 hours by train could be great: leave at 7pm, eat dinner, get a full night's sleep, wake up the next morning and you're there.

The night on the train shouldn't cost more than an extra night in a hotel room would've cost, and you've gone city center to city center and avoided the nightmare of air travel.

Sign me up.

The Financial Times largely avoids editorializing its news sections, and employs real journalists (maybe because executives need accurate information and are willing and able to pay for it).

Notice how even big stories often appear significantly later on the FT website compared to other outlets, but when they do appear they've generally got the facts straight.

Their subscription fees are substantial, but if we don't want everything reduced to ad-based sensationalism we're going to need to pay actual money.

As far as I can tell, conservative viewpoint on climate change is varied, from 'the effects of man made climate change will be mild and not catastrophic' to 'golabal warming is caused by increased solar activity'

Unfortunately, that range lies outside what mainstream climate science has been telling us for decades.

Looking at the statistics, I'm not sure that wind turbines are any worse than man-made structures generally (or other human-caused threats, including other types of power plants).

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds....

Journals are already under fire for privatizing publicly-funded research. They justify their existence by claiming to hold the research they publish to the highest standard, primarily through the peer-review process.

That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.

For KDE you might want to go with KDE Neon

https://neon.kde.org/

Metabolism First and RNA World are two competing hypotheses that have both been around for a long time.

Here's a nice recent review of the field:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-016-0012

A core problem is that it's much easier to break things than to build or maintain things, so huge amounts of work can be eliminated very easily, whether through neglect or design.

It makes me sad when I think of the sacrifices made by previous generations for the greater good, to consider that in our time we're happy to gamble with the future just to make things more comfortable for us in the present.

In the 1940s, millions of people made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat tyranny, then in the 60s huge amounts were invested into technology, transforming society, but we can't even agree on a carbon tax to start to pay for the mess we're making, never mind trying to come up with ways to reverse the damage.

A green economy should be our generation's Moon landing. Massive investment in basic research and into renewables, energy storage and transport, and improved materials could again transform the world, and benefit all of us, but I guess if you can't physically see your enemy then there's just not enough urgency.

The problem arises with those people who read The Selfish Gene and assume they now understand all there is to know about how evolution works.

I'm sure you're not one of them, but nevertheless they are quite common, well-educated and intelligent though they often are.

It greatly oversimplifies a complex process, ignoring modern developments in the field of evolutionary biology (including the entirety of population genetics), and makes many unfounded assumptions.

The Spandrels paper I referenced above explains in detail, and is a good starting point:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/205/1161/581

Here's a more modern critique, which I posted here a few weeks ago:

http://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016...

But please continue by reading more rigorous work on evolution, or you run the risk of being badly misinformed. I suggest, at a minimum, a decent textbook. Here I'd recommend Douglas Futuyma's Evolution.

Follow this up with some key works in the field, such as Gould's early critique of naive adaptationism, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.

Also consider different perspectives such as the those described in following books, which take, respectively, drift- and mutation-first approaches to evolution:

The Origins of Genome Architecture, M Lynch; and Mutation-Driven Evolution, M Nei.

Above all, know that evolution is far more complex, subtle (and interesting) than The Selfish Gene would have you believe.

The Moto Z Play, with its combination of 3510 mAh battery, Snapdragon 625 processor and 1080p screen has great battery life. Add in a power pack Moto Mod if you need even more. It's a mid-range phone for a mid-range price (and so comes with tradeoffs), but it's a solid phone and for battery life it's excellent. Mine just got the Android 7 upgrade too.

I think neverminder meant that, amongst countries that separate, the larger of the new countries will generally be better off than their smaller neighbour. Your list doesn't address this point.

Examples would include Pakistan-Bangladesh; Czech Republic-Slovakia; and Sudan-South Sudan.

I know a few keen amateur astronomers who make extra cash by producing astronomical equipment for other amateurs. Some of them are very skilled, and could probably start a fully-fledged business if they wanted to, but they prefer to keep it as a hobby.

I paid one guy $400 to build me an equatorial platform for my 12-inch Dob. The value it provides me is way higher than the financial cost, and he could probably charge more for his work, but I think his main motivation comes from the satisfaction of building things he's proud of and that others can enjoy. Certainly, when I occasionally donate my time and knowledge at public astronomy outreach events, I find it very rewarding, especially if I can inspire children's interest.

N.B. By far the biggest weakness of Dobsonian (or any alt-azimuth mounted) telescopes is the lack of tracking, and thus having continuously to nudge the tube to keep objects centred. An equatorial platform eliminates this weakness, and I strongly recommend one to anyone who's frustrated with their alt-az scope.

They don't get electrocuted, but they still die from collisions with the lines.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...