Andrew Dalke's Comments

On the same Neatorama front page I read "in sports science, solid advice based on big scientific studies is quite rare. It makes sense when you think about it" as well as "This Study Shows The Effects Of Petting Animals On Your Stress Level". Is the pet study not solid, or is there something fundamentally different about the economics of petting vs. workouts?
It seems that in countries where the government pays for health fare there would be an interest in developing a study like this, yes?
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Pops, in Arcadia, OK sells far more than "the same sugary swill as any other roadside gas station-restaurant". We went there and bought a lot of different sodas we had never heard of. We've visited worse tourist place in the state.
My old boss was a young girl when Weeki Wachee was in it heyday. She said that she and other girls would practice holding their breath in the sink, because of dreams to be a mermaid there.
The Plumbing Museum sounds pretty interesting.
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The architecture professor argues that internet sales, socializing, etc. are more the final nail in the coffin, for a process which started in the 1990s. She thinks changes in shifts in jobs, wealth, demographic changes, and oversupply are bigger factors. For example, only half as many suburban households have kids now as in the heyday of malls.
She also points out that while they are a place to gather, "generally you have to be spending money to be able to hang out there." Since I didn't have much money as a kid, I rarely went to the mall, even to socialize. I went to the library instead. :)
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I keep hearing people say that, but I don't see how it's true. If we're really worried about extinction level events, shouldn't we prioritize self-sufficient habitats first? If we had 10,000 truly independent biomes around the world, then there are very few extinction level events which could destroy all of them, and not also destroy other human habitations in the solar system. At the very least, we know that humans can reproduce at 1g - we don't know if we can at 1/3rd g. And certainly people in the high latitudes, or dry cold deserts, would be willing to pay for the sorts of technology only a fraction of the way to what's needed for a self-sustaining Mars colony.
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I've fallen asleep while we were still at the gate, and woke up after we were in the air, so I don't find it that incredible.
It's not like reports like this are uncommon. Here's a 2010 event, also on Air Canada - https://consumerist.com/2010/04/dont-fall-asleep-on-a-plane-you-might-wake-up-in-the-hangar.html - "According to the passenger, a 31-year-old professor from the UK, he’d nodded off during his flight from Calgary to Vancouver and didn’t wake up until 90 minutes after the plane had landed. The passenger, who had begun the day in London before connecting to the Vancouver-bound flight in Calgary, says he’d been up for 24 hours when he finally fell asleep."
The crew is always supposed to check for someone onboard. There might be a child in need of assistance who was told to wait for the staff to help, or there might be someone who for fun wants to stay on the plan to see what happens, or there might be someone who took too a sedative or drank too much and cannot easily wake up.
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How does a counselor know if a student is in need? I don't think that getting good grades means students don't have other needs that might be helped by someone whose job it is to help students.
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"X is very useful if your name is Nixie Knox. It also comes in handy spelling ax and extra fox."
The 'give up altogether' approach is also used in The Sound of Music - 'la, a note to follow so.'
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So, don't visit the most populated countries because so many people die there, and don't use the biggest airlines because they have the most accidents? And don't use your time machine to fly on Pan Am, which went out of business 18 years ago.
That is, these all need to be scaled by population, or "passenger-miles" or something else to make them reasonably interpretable.
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Sweden too. Sweden used the "matbok" system in the first half of the 1900s. Alcohol purchases were rationed. A male passbook holder could only get up to 3 liters of hard liquor per month and an unmarried woman one liter. No wine. No beer. "In restaurants a customer was allowed one glass of schnapps - but only in combination with food. As the water brought in the dish, the guest would smile slyly and ask: 'Do I have to eat it?' More jokes have been told about the 'rubber sandwich' that was carried in and then back to the kitchen, awaiting the next customer's glassy stare." (Quoting Lorénzen's book 'Of Swedish Ways', 1964.)
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I remember reading James Michener's "Space" as a teen. One of the characters was from the state of .. Jefferson, I think. It threw me for a loop, as I had never heard of it. Neither did our encyclopedia. (This was the 1980s, so that was the best I could easily do.)
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"What happened" is automation. It's far cheaper (in money and human lives) to send space probes and robots to Mars and beyond, in terms of science learned. That wasn't mentioned, except hidden in the point about institutional priorities. As a similar example, look how it took decades after the Trieste until James Cameron, as a personal hobby, visited the Challenger Deep. While there were several non-crewed visits during that time, and with a longer ability to stay on the bottom.
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Profile for Andrew Dalke

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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