getpost

I was a "mentally gifted minor" as of the 5th grade in California. This seemed mainly to be about the schools receiving additional funding for each such student.

The high school I attended let us vote on how the funds were spent, and we voted to purchase musical instruments (which anyone in the school could use). We also hired a Mandarin tutor for one quarter, which was decades ahead. I don't remember any Mandarin except for one phrase, which translated to 'I am reading a book.'

You were free to install whatever you wanted after you paid for a copy Windows (even if you didn’t want Windows).

Tangentially, I'm reminded of something a high school teacher mentioned to me. The context was military service, but of course this applies in any organization.

'The way to get rid of an undesireable superior is to do only what you are ordered to do.'

The supervisor's task will fail in some way, and new leadership will be needed.

I've kept this in mind, not as a way to undermine leadership, but as a lesson in what good leaders need to know — that getting things done requires everyone to be be empowered and act in some degree at their own inititive.

There is a way to avoid the login requirement, if you want to enlarge a photo or video, or read its accompanying text. I'm not an Instagram user, and I never will be. But, sometimes I want to read a post by a friend or a business.

While viewing the gallery page for an Instagram user, right click on the post you want to access and select "Copy link location," or whatever your browser calls it, then paste the link into a new tab.

I still have a website that uses server-side includes fro the navbar and other common page elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

Google puts the museum hours at the bottom of the museum landing pages. These hours are unlikely to be valid for the time being, with so many museums being closed. How often are the hours scraped and reposted? Or were these entered manually? It’s a nitpick, of course, but much of good design is attention to details like this. I would have left this section out; it’s unlikely this info would ever be maintained correctly.

Not Zen! Go Kant!

Yes! Exceptions make your code faster and smaller. And by isolating exception handling to many fewer cases, it's more likely your exception handling will be correct.

It’s on Amazon, in the US at least, free with Prime.

Update: Around 2 dozen people showed. ICANN received the petition. “Chairman Maarten Botterman said ICANN is looking at the impact of the sale and what guarantees they could obtain for dot-org registrants, though he made no promises.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-s...

There is a SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN on Friday in Los Angeles.

Date: Friday, January 24, 2020 Time: 9 am – 11 am Location: ICANN, 12025 Waterfront Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90094

https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann...

Yes! I like to think my life (relationships, work performance, hiring, firing, well-being) would have been completely different had I known about and understood attachment theory. (I have only learned about it in the last few years.) For me, it explains nearly everything in psychology that has been unclear or mysterious.

My go-to reference is

Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair by Daniel P. Brown PhD & David S. Elliott PhD. [0]

It's a dry academic text intended for therpists that details the development of therapeutic approaches based on attachment theory, as well as specific treatment protocols for various insecure attachment styles.

Change is possible, as is working with people who have attachment difficulties.

George Haas, a meditation teacher in LA, has developed a way of using Vipassana meditation as a method of self-therapy.[1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatm...

[1] https://www.mettagroup.org/classes#intensives

>I think there is a high chance that is 100% bullshit.

I haven't read the paper this article is based on, so I can't comment on the study or the reliability of the results.

However, epigentic effects related to the degree of maternal touch have been convincingly demonstrated in naked mole rats in crossover studies. I posted about this research previously. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749285)

>2. Noise: No way around it.

"The Low-boom Flight Demonstration mission has two goals: 1) design and build a piloted, large-scale supersonic X-plane with technology that reduces the loudness of a sonic boom to that of a gentle thump; and 2) fly the X-plane over select U.S. communities to gather data on human responses to the low-boom flights and deliver that data set to U.S. and international regulators."

https://www.nasa.gov/X59

I was inspired by the goals and design approach of OLPC. I participated in the G1G1 program and received an XO-1. The machine worked well enough, but I was shocked by the poor quality of the software. Even though I had no connection to the product, except as a customer, it made me embarrassed to be a member of the computer industry. Sorry, it was too long ago for me to remember specifics. But in retrospect, it was a perfect example of MIT Media Lab arrogance, wherein the demo is all that matters.

At a Marshall Rosenberg event I attended, he was asked about the unnatural speaking style. His reponse was that it was like "training wheels" for learning the process and, like you say, it doesn't sound like that once you learn to practice NVC natually.

And that may be, but my experience with various NVC teachers and practitioners is that they don't know the training wheel analogy and they do speak in an unnatural way for the most part.

Got a link for that YouTube lecture? (There are many.)

Here's the first part of Peter Attia's three part interview with Matthew Walker (6+ hrs total listening time!). Most of the content of the book is covered; it's very motivating insofar as prioritizing sleep quality. https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/

Matthew Walker's main site: https://www.humansleepscience.com/

>..."might increase the risk of gallstone disease"...

I do 18:6 intermittent fasting and I did have a gallstone episode. My intuition is that fasting precipitated the expulsion of stones that had formed prior to the onset of my fasting regimen. Also, while practicing intermittent fasting, I think I have a tendency to overeat during my main meal of the day, maybe as a subconscious attempt to avoid feeling hungry later on. To avoid overeating, I need to be mindful to stop eating while I still feel slightly hungry.

The following blog post is consistent with my experience: https://gallstonesdiet.net/can-intermittent-fasting-cause-ga...

I think a personal CRM should include knowledge of Dunbar's number.[0][1]

Like,

"You are spending too much time with C people. Is C person Andrew now a B? B people like Joe and Jane need more attention."

"You could use another A relationship. The following B people might be good candidates based on your contact frequency."

This is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it is often true that people don't attend to relationships with apprppriate priority. And, knowing your situation with regard to various relationship levels provides insight for growth.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-med...

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2004...

Moreover, the steps should be in a table, with just one function to process the contents of the table.

I think this would be excellent material for a medical statistics course. Fortunately, the raw data is available.

Do the data support the TCC's conclusions?

Are Denise Minger's critiques valid?

Denise Minger thoroughly critiques T. Colin Campbell's (seemingly incompetent) interpretation of the data in this study.

https://deniseminger.com/the-china-study/

EDIT: TCC's reply: http://www.vegsource.com/news/2010/07/china-study-author-col...

...Namely, an interpreter for lisp written in lisp. William Byrd learned about it from Daniel P. Friedman (The Little Lisper, The Little Schemer, ....)

I started out anti-labor due to my own experience in a minimum wage job. I was forced to join the union and pay union dues, yet I still received only the minimum wage, so being a union member resulted in a sub-minimum wage!

Another objection I had to unions is, they tend to promote an "us vs them" mentality, when instead, everyone should be working together.

The destruction of the middle class shows that the balance of power is too extreme on the side of the employer, and something has to be done.

Dark retreat is a traditional practice in Tibetan Buddhism and Bön[0]. The usual guidance is that a dark retreat should be done only when the meditator has attained stability in the Natural State. Not many Westerners are in this zone, but seem able to benefit nonetheless [1],[2]. There are mental health risks[3], as in any other meditation practice. One claim is that sustained darkness stimulates the production of endogenous DMT.[4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_retreat

[1] 3-week Darkness Retreat in Guatemala. https://imcb.dharmaseed.org/teacher/424/talk/51886/

[2] Dawning of Clear Light: A Western Approach to Tibetan Dark Retreat Meditation (2003) https://www.amazon.com/Dawning-Clear-Light-Approach-Meditati...

[3] https://www.mindful.org/willoughby-britton-the-messy-truth-a...

[4] https://www.universal-tao.com/dark_room/enlightenment.html

I don't know anything about what's actually going on, but it seems to me that any contribution by Ive has been seriously diluted. How much time did he spend on Apple Park? That's years of non-focus on products, right? Lately, he's working on diamond rings[0]. I'm happy for him doing whatever he wants to do; he's earned that. But Apple does seem to have lost design mojo, and it looks like a lack of leadership is part of the problem.

[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/16/jony-ive-diamond-ring-marc...

The article mentions Mosche Szyf at McGill. Michael Meaney[0], also at McGill, is one of the main investigators in this area. IIRC, mice studies are convincing, in as much as the exact molecular mechanism for epigenetic transmission was tested in crossover studies. “Environmental conditions during early development shape brain development. The Meaney lab idenfitied phenotypic variations in rodent models that derive from variations in maternal care. Maternal care stably modifies the epigenetic state and expression of genes implicated in behavioural and endocrine responses to stress and learning. These studies were the first to describe the influence of the social environment on genomic structure and function.”

[0] https://douglas.research.mcgill.ca/michael-meaney

Agreed. Moreover, smart people do stupid things every day; intelligence is not an absolute.

Huh? Social Security, for example, is definitely a Ponzi scheme in the sense benefits paid out far exceed amounts previously collected, saved, and invested. Numerous government programs rely on this logic, which only works if the population of working age people is expanding.

Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme in the sense that there was fraudulent intent. Nevertheless, a lack of political will to finance current benefits does burden future generations. "Adjusting benefits downwards" won't sit too well with people who worked 30 or 40 years and expect to enjoy a certain standard of living.

Why Was Social Security Designed Like A Ponzi Scheme? https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2015/08/13/why-was-...

Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme? "Social Security has a funding gap equal to 0.7 percent of GDP over the next 75 years. We could wipe that gap out by lifting the payroll tax cap (right now, payroll taxes only apply to the first $107,000 of income) or by adjusting benefits downwards." https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/is-soci...