supertofu

15 minutes of Pilates a day and your posture will be as good as a ballerina's. You don't even need weights.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Re: the black visit buttons. Save black for the top 3 featured, and make the rest a milder color. It's cognitively fatiguing to have a giant list of primary buttons.

The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.

The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.

Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.

"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.

I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.

I don't think "dorky" is the right word for these glasses. Anachronistic is better. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on one's perspective.

This reminds me of the year I really got into reading (5th - 6th grade), and I remember reading: Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Julie of the Wolves, the Babysitter's Club, The Giver, Holes, and Captain Underpants. I honestly could go on and on.

These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.

It took me years to figure out what my reading preferences were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I was a reader of exclusively Children's Lit.

Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic that I prefer.

I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got. That there is the real magic of Children's lit.

I will never get over the fact that they used a now-convicted pedophile as their spokesperson for fifteen years. I literally cannot even see the Subway logo without thinking of despicable Subway Jared. No way I will ever eat their food again.

It seems that there is a generational divide between glasses acceptance. When I was a kid in the 90s, having glasses was seen as cool and desirable. I remember being puzzled by all the 80s movies which mocked characters with glasses, when having glasses was seen as a positive trait among my peers.

Anecdote: I have reactive arthritis comorbid with ulcerative colitis. I was getting debilitating arthritis flares once a month until I stopped eating gluten, peanuts, and added sugar. I haven't had an arthritis flare since eliminating these foods.

My rheumatologist wanted to put me on methotrexate but I declined out of fear if the side effects. He never mentioned anything about diet, but clearly a dietary intervention worked for me.

Healing from any addiction has to be self-motivated.

A consumer report not too long ago found cadmium at unsafe levels in many dark chocolate brands: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

The cacao was contaminated with cadmium from the soil during harvest.

What this sounds like to me as someone from LA: pay $50 per hour to park in a lot and take a shuttle from there, because of course no one will consider pedestrian infrastructure between the venues and the parking lots.

There is a totally nonalcoholic kava bar where I live.

Kava is a nonintoxicating plant with alkaloids that improve mood and enhance sociability.

The kava bar a fantastic place to sit by yourself and easily fall into a conversation with other people at the bar or the kava-tender.

I do think kava is illegal in some countries, which is unfortunate, and being that it grows on pacific islands, it's probably rather hard to import for most places. But a wonderful plant and wonderful concept.

I can only answer anecdotally from my personal experience but: frequent coughing while not vaping, chest pain, very obviously reduced cardiovascular capacity and increased fatigue during my workouts.

I'm a religious person reading the comments here with great fascination and a lot of sympathy.

What is there to be afraid of about death, exactly? If you don't believe in any afterlife or continuation, then there will be no consciousness to perceive the other side of death.

If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll have spent your life preparing accordingly.

For someone with bone loss, isn't the long half life a good thing?

You don't even have to go that far back. Remember Juul in the 2010s?

This is an interesting comment. I think part of the mystique of Joan Didion's persona and her autobiographical writing is the fact that she is a wildly, and fascinatingly, unrelatable person, regardless of the reader's gender.

The point of her writing generally isn't to reflect to reader. And what makes her autobiographical writing so compelling is the the way she dissects her own supremely unrelatable life and emotional landscape.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion, in which she grieves the death of her forty-something daughter, just a few years after her abusive husband died suddenly from a heart attack.

The contrast between her gorgeous but also coldly precise writing, the grieving mother vs the lauded writer, the tension of watching her muse (very delicately, very distantly) on the nature of being an adoptive mother and wondering as a reader: what sort of wounds did Joan Didion pass on to her daughter and what wounds did her daughter inherit from her biological family, the contrast between the vibrant streets of New York and the cold hospital where her daughter was dying in a coma, knowing as a reader that this writer had just gone through the grief of losing her husband a few years earlier...

It was haunting, beautiful, and, naturally, a little voyeuristic by its very nature. I still think about it to this day.

It seems odd that a country with a temperate climate like Croatia would be importing produce from the Netherlands. Is this common?

Pure Math is often incredibly relevant to society about 300 years down the line.

This product looks really slick.

But what I don't like is the implication that learning isn't already fun. Learning is inherently fun!

It's not gamification that make learning fun. What makes learning fun the satisfaction that comes from completing tasks successfully and the sense of focus that comes from a course that has a well-organized roadmap.

Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle.

I really don't like the author's argument. We should force ourselves to do things in person because it's uncomfortable?

Life is already uncomfortable enough! The world is melting down, societies are unhappy and restless, economies are failing, the climate is worsening, people are hateful and full of extremist thought. Life is hard enough.

Let me do as much as I can from home (which I rent, btw, because owning a home is an impossible dream for many), the single respite I have from the painful world!

Learning math from a textbook is no easy feat.

- A math major

Without office hours and lectures, I would be completely lost. Math texts are a great starting point, but if you are of average or even above-average intelligence, you still need a qualified guide to navigate the textbook.

S,T,M isn't actually a path to a stable or lucrative career.

Engineering and Computer Science are, though.

We're in need of a new acronym.

I used to be you. Then I started developing reactive arthritis from peanuts. Switched to tahini. :)

I have colitis and helminth therapy is on my Last Resort list. There are a limited number of drugs to treat the condition, and insurance doesn't cover many of them.

The facebook group for DIY helminth therapy is a fascinating place, let me tell you. But there are several possible species of helminths to try. It's all a bit overwhelming.

Peanuts are uncommon on domestic flights in the US for the exact same reason they are banned in most elementary schools here.

The only time in my life I've ever had hay fever was when I was 15 taking a summer program in Oxford. I'm from California. Never had hay fever again. I think I'm just allergic to England.

How fascinating. This reminds me that my autoimmune condition went into a brief and mysterious remission two summers ago, when I spent most weekends swimming in creeks. I will have to see if increased creek swimming this summer will help my autoimmune symptoms...