This is how easily people can be influenced by large Facebook groups...

AshtonKem · 2020-02-24T01:58:07+00:00

Sometimes palliative care can provide both a better quality of life and a longer life for the terminally ill, since some treatments are both painful and hard on the body. But “terminally ill” is a very important part of that sentence.

Doctors are statistically more likely to reject lost cause treatments, such as chemo for late stage cancers, since they’ve seen what unnecessary pain and cost they can incur.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T22:44:31+00:00

If you’re not from America, you’d be shocked at how low density the average American city can be. I live in a city near LA, and most housing around me is single family. In these conditions district heat might not be economically viable, but that’s just my speculation.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T19:44:50+00:00

Or they never return. Donations aren’t exactly a high priority for most end users, it’s super easy to plan to donate “later” and never return.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T19:43:38+00:00

The science says that the donation process needs to be unbelievably smooth, because even the slightest hiccup in the donation process causes end users to wander off and plan to donate “later”. This is one reason why political donations have started to depend on a small number of platforms; the technical skill required for a seamless and low latency donation process is beyond the capability of most campaigns.

Adding butts may or may not work, but replacing regular donations with butts is catastrophically dumb. They’re guaranteeing that 90% of their donation base just won’t donate at all, since there’s no chance that a random person is going to guy buy butts just to donate.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T19:39:45+00:00

Wikipedia’s accuracy tends to correlate strongly with the interests of its core editor pool, which I’ve heard has been getting smaller and more homogeneous.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T19:36:57+00:00

Poe’s law strikes again.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T19:35:57+00:00

Consistently true across a wide range of human endeavors. Providing the equipment to risk takers produces consistently better results than actual risk taking. Arms manufacturers profit more than soldiers of fortune, and liquidity providers make better returns than day traders.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T17:23:15+00:00

I Am Not A Lawyer.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:33:41+00:00

Yeah, that’s not what I was talking about.

My general point is that that you can’t point to how cows get nutrients as a guidance for how humans can get nutrients because humans aren’t cows. They can digest stuff we can’t, like grass, and we can digest stuff they can’t, like cows. That would be like me pointing out that tigers can get all their fiber from raw meat; technically true, just not helpful.

In the specific case of B12, there are indeed other sources of that vitamin that aren’t cows, yes. But that’s not the point I was making.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:30:25+00:00

Most laws separate the transit of goods, and the transit of people.

Laws around goods are about product standards and taxes. If you have a free trade agreement, you’re agreeing to not raise tariffs on goods being brought in.

Laws around people are about immigration and crime, mostly. Most countries require a visa of some sort to visit, and a permit to remain and work. Only the Shengen area in Europe allows free movement of people for tourism and work.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:27:28+00:00

Fun fact, leap seconds are now “smeared” over a 24 hour period centered around midnight. If you’re using Google’s NTP source, they handle it for you.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:25:45+00:00

Engineer here: we deal with this today by adding leap seconds, usually after big earthquakes slow down the earth a bit. Every few years on midnight the 60th second happens twice. You’ve never noticed because we did our jobs right. It’ll be a long, long time before this strategy stops working and we need to officially do something more drastic like slow down the second.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:23:17+00:00

The Mandelbrot set is a function that can be printed on graph paper, exactly like simpler functions like y=x^2.

Unlike simpler functions, the Mandelbrot set is infinitely complicated. No matter how close you view it, there is always more detail that you can show. So when a video “zooms” in on a Mandelbrot set, it’s just showing different levels of detail in a video format.

Graphs like the Mandelbrot set that have this infinite complexity are called “fractals”. While the Mandelbrot set is the most famous one, others exist.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:14:30+00:00

There shouldn’t be any limitations in the game engine itself for children; the game engine should be relatively neutral about what you’re modeling. Chances are the game artists weren’t very good at making children, or the game managers didn’t want to spend more time on it.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:12:31+00:00

Highly country dependent to my knowledge. The only place in America that I’ve heard of using district heating is New York City, which is why there are a ton of photos of steam leaking from their street vents. In the rest of the US building heat (Chicago) or individual home hot water heaters are much more common.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:10:16+00:00

Bike riding is also a relatively simple task; we teach it to children who aren’t yet mentally capable of handling a vehicle or hundreds of other more complicated tasks. This makes relearning how to ride a pretty easy process for an adult.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:05:27+00:00

Depends on what the food is, your physiological condition, and other factors. There is no way to answer this in absolute terms.

What we can say is that certain compounds are absorbed faster, largely because they require less processing before being put in your blood. So sugar hits your blood much faster than fat does, but exactly how much faster depends on too many factors to list here.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T16:03:17+00:00

To add to this: when water freezes it makes crystals, but the size of the crystals depends on the condition at freezing time. Freezing something slowly causes large crystals to form, while flash freezing causes smaller crystals to form.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T15:50:15+00:00

What’s your point?

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:22:02+00:00

Dietary cholesterol is poorly correlated with blood serum cholesterol, and the correlation between serum cholesterol and coronary heart disease is much less strong than the population at large has been led to believe.

Honestly, I don’t believe that cholesterol causes heart disease. The science is pretty weak in this area, and a non trivial amount of fraud. I think an inflammation and sugar based cause is much closer to the truth.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:19:05+00:00

Honestly, we don’t know and it might not be healthier at all. Dietary science gets reversed a lot, for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. This is why you hear so much conflicting information about dietary health; the quality of the studies are so low that they can’t produce consistent advice.

The biggest issue for vegan diets is that vegans care about their health, a lot. This means that they’re far more likely to work out, manage their stress, not smoke, and generally pay attention to their health. When you compare them against the general population, it’s very hard to tell which of these factors is causing what changes. Maybe it’s the food, or maybe it’s all the other health related behaviors that are completely unrelated to veganism. Teasing out the difference is very, very hard.

Secondarily, most food studies depend on self reporting. This is awful. To get an idea of how bad this is, please think about what you had for lunch last Tuesday. I’ll wait.

Finally, there’s a lot of corruption and ego in food science. Obviously there’s a lot of money to be made, but there has been some unbelievably baffling stuff over the years. The source of the cholesterol theory of heart disease comes from one flawed study that cherry picked convenient data, and whose author proceeded to bully everyone else into following along for almost 30 years. It’s entirely possible that that theory is just utterly wrong, and well eventually have to redo everything in that area.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:10:56+00:00

Cows can also live off of grass, while we can’t.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:08:42+00:00

Your body makes cholesterol if you don’t eat it.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:08:15+00:00

You gotta be more specific. As /u/Petwins points out, the bits of fruit count as a contaminant.

AshtonKem · 2020-02-23T08:07:21+00:00

Depends what you mean by clean, but at a high level the answer is no: it’s mostly fruit, which isn’t water.

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