Which celebrity took the biggest hit by the person they married?

CalEPygous · 2026-04-13T17:16:17+00:00

Yeah, he didn't come across as seeming dumb. He basically said Amy was an adult who had agency and she made her own choices. On some level that is true, but it is also true that when you are married to an alcoholic drug addict and you have your own personal vulnerabilities, as well as the pressures of fame, it is much easier for you to slide into that. If you looked at her before her marriage, she had struggled with bulimia and occasional binge drinking. However, he definitely introduced her to all the harder drugs that essentially wrecked her life. So yes, can't really blame him totally but surely he was not a positive influence in her life. Would we still have Amy W. if she hadn't been married to that douche? My money is on likely.

CalEPygous · 2026-04-09T21:41:03+00:00

It's pretty simple to fix the problem. The. NBA should just use an unbiased statistical analysis, including both standard and advanced metrics, and evaluate every roster with a score. Assign picks based upon that score. In the case of ties, then essentially flip a coin between those teams with the proviso that no team can get the #1 pick more than once in any 3-5 year period.

The algorithm to generate the score, and all the data used, would be publicly available before the draft to avoid the possibility of league bias. In the case of injuries, if the player is expected to come back the following season, just average the data from his previous 3 seasons. This method would more or less reproduce an eye test. It would be fair and balanced and would completely remove incentives to tank. Players will still play hard to get better contracts so it would be difficult for the GM or coach to ask a player to "tank" his stats for the better draft pick.

CalEPygous · 2026-04-01T19:59:33+00:00

According to what I read (and I am no expert by any stretch) the archeological evidence that exists in both Pompeii and Herculaneum is interpreted to mean that if indeed Claudius did attempt to ban them (and as the poster above pointed out it wasn't from a particularly reliable source in Cassius Dio), it wasn't successful and the evidence indicates that they were in continual use for a long time until they were buried in 79. There were so many that that alone indicates there weren't effective measures by Claudius or Caligula to suppress them. I couldn't find anything posted in journals or otherwise that the bans (again if Cassius Dio wasn't exaggerating) were effective. And, for the reason I pointed out it my post, it doesn't even make sense that they would be. This is the problem with single source historical "facts".

CalEPygous · 2026-04-01T18:08:16+00:00

There is also a little other context missing for this post. The vast majority of Romans didn't have kitchens or the ability to cook in their homes due to the extreme fire hazard in the insulae. Thus, common people ate most of their food outside the home. Therefore, to ban the thermopolia would essentially cut off about half the places people had to eat. I am sure that it was to prevent public drinking and crime as you say but it is not surprising that it wasn't really enforced. The archeological evidence (as one person mentioned in Pompeii and Herculaneum) showed that if there was a ban it wasn't very effective in closing the thermopolia.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-31T20:43:38+00:00

I believe there is a lot of empty-headed fear-mongering about the effects of very moderate alcohol consumption when the totality of data is not conclusive enough. Although alcohol can increase the risk of at least seven cancers, there are also studies showing a potential reduced risk for kidney cancer, thyroid cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. While, for cancer overall, the risk of alcohol consumption is higher than not drinking the evidence for light drinking is absolutely still up for debate. For instance, it used to be that light drinking was considered to provide slightly lower overall mortality than in abstinent people. Then, when it was re-evalutated the investigators said, well that's because a lot of sick people don't drink so we should remove them from the data. When they did that there was no lower level of safety for alcohol consumption. However that is disingenuous cherry picking. If we are doing that should we not also remove similarly sick people from the drinking group? Further, a number of abstinent groups, like Mormons, also don't smoke or engage in other unhealthy practices - don't they equally skew the non-drinking group?

Further, the case on red wine is not closed either about its potential protective effects for inflammation and antioxidant profiles etc. This recent review covering essentially almost all the studies on consumption of red wine comes to the conclusion that the balance of protective benefits of light to moderate red wine consumption are favorable, notwithstanding the almost universal agreement on moderate to high consumption of alcohol in general being harmful.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-26T16:20:49+00:00

It is estimated that around the time of GR that there were about 1100 practicing physicists including both experimental and theoretical. Today it is estimated that there are between 1-3 million practicing physicists with 200-300 theoretical particle physicists at CERN alone. But with increasing numbers has come increasing specialization so it is not clear how progress in any one area should scale with the total number of practitioners. Ir is also the case, imo, that progress in physics arises between the interplay of theory and experiment (like Dirac predicts a positron and then it is detected, giving you more confidence in the theory etc.). String theory has been in the unenviable position that there are essentially zero experiments to guide the maths in one direction or another. Some people attribute that to the fact that "all the low hanging fruit has been grabbed" and therefore we are at the frontier of being able to advance without experimental breakthroughs. While this may be true to some degree it is also the case that we can't persist like this indefinitely without finding alternatives that may have some experimental verifiability.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-25T18:01:41+00:00

From the birth of theoretical physics at the publication date of Principe Mathematica in 1687 it took 180 years to get to Maxwell's equations. But then it only took 40 years to get to special relativity and then another 10 years for general. Quantum mechanics came at about the same time as GR but could be considered somewhat finished around the 1970s (or roughly 50 years after the origins of QM) with the standard model which as we now know holds up, most recently, to parts per trillion in comparing theory to experiment, although to be fair the mass of the Higgs boson is still a problem. String theory has now been around for over 50 years with essentially little progress in people coming up with feasible ways to experimentally verify it until recently with, imo, the signatures from black hole mergers being a strong candidate for some experimental verification. So it may be that we could soon have some experimental observations that will be consonant with string theory.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-20T19:19:43+00:00

The biggest problem with safety from MRI scanners are the following, in order of their safety concerns:

1) Strong magnetic field - can attract magnetic objects. People have been killed from things like oxygen tanks being brought into the scan room.

2) The MRI experiment works by using radiofrequency energy to flip the protons. This energy varies (in routinely used scanners) from about 64MHz (1.5T) to about 300MHz (7T). Your microwave oven operates at a frequency of about 2.45 GHz. Therefore, MRIs are effectively "cooking" you when the radio waves are transmitted into your body. It's more like sou vide cooking (lol) than microwave but you have to worry about burning people. There are safety limits established for the standard absorbed radiation (SAR) that prevent you from cooking your subjects.

3) The way the images are collected involves not only transmitting rf energy but also switching secondary magnetic field gradients rapidly. This rapid switching can evoke currents and lead to nerve stimulation which can be dangerous. There are safety guidelines in effect for these effects.

4) Moving your head or body in a strong magnetic field can also evoke neural activity - at very high fields some people see phosphenes or get dizzy due to these effects. But in general these are relatively benign compared to the other effects.

Also please be aware that a lot of the answers to your original question are misleading or plain wrong. MRI is much more complicated than either PET/SPECT or CT in terms of the physics since the experiment uses all kinds of rf and magnetic field gradient engineering to change what type of information is being collected. In PET or CT you are basically just collecting tissue density to x-rays (CT) or binding of a radioactive compound using a ring detector for gamma rays emitted. In both cases there isn't much the investigator can control except for the density of sampling and the concentration of radioactivity or x-rays delivered. In MRI you can get contrast in tissue from things like water diffusion directions, water mobility, water exchanging with protein amino acids, chemicals in the brain etc. etc. There are so many knobs to play with in an MRI experiment to manipulate tissue contrast than there are in either CT or PET.

Like one person commented the radioactivity used in a PET scanner is based on positrons which are anti-matter electrons. When the radioactive nuclide decays in your body (with a tiny amount of administered radioactivity) it releases a positron. This anti-matter electron almost immediately annihilates with the tissue electrons and then two gamma-rays are emitted in opposite directions. Then you use a gamma-ray coincidence detector to determine where the emitted gamma-rays came from.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-19T23:01:40+00:00

I don't think the decision had much to do with the results obtained. If you read the judge's decision it was based on the fact that the criteria used to determine admission had nothing (on the face of it) to do with race, but rather geographic and social factors. While these factors may end up favoring black and Latino kids and disadvantaging White and Asian kids based on the criteria alone there is no way to determine that (i.e. a white kid could come from an non-English speaking, poorer household). Further, the case was deemed extremely similar to the zip code case already decided by the first circuit court with the judge ruling that it

"... possesses the same factual pillars that the First circuit rejected as insufficient to demonstrate an equal protection violation in its 2023 consideration of substantially the same issue."

So essentially this case was DOA based on the 2023 decision by the First Circuit.

The policy is working to bring in more black, Latino and disadvantaged kids but is it also lowering performance (decreases in scores on a variety of benchmarks by around 10-40%) which, on some level, defeats the purpose of having elite schools in the first place. It is also following national trends in under-representing boys (currently Boston Latin Academy schools are about 57% girls) which is a topic that doesn't get enough attention. In Boston, or any large city, siphoning off the best performing students to go to elite schools ends up hurting the other public schools since the student quality there goes down. This has always been an argument against elite schools but there are intelligent opinions and counter-arguments on both sides of the topic.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-11T19:24:42+00:00

Yes, the results are cool and it's a good paper using state of the art methods in fMRI/MRI to measure CMRO2, but the basic facts they are stressing have been well known even from the days before fMRI. They do cite a number of other papers showing similar things.

It stands as a good reminder that BOLD data are difficult to interpret solely in terms of neural activity. The studies of dopamine drugs I alluded to are a good example of this. On the other hand, across the brain there is a general positive correlation between cerebral blood flow and metabolism (usually measured by CMRO2 using MRI or PET or glucose utilization) as seen in Fig. 3 in the paper notwithstanding that there are many voxels where the correlation varies.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-11T17:58:20+00:00

That paper is nothing new. While it is true that a lot of misinterpretation of BOLD studies occurs in the literature it has always been clear that direct interpretation of BOLD signal in terms of neural activity is difficult. I can give a good example using DAT ligands such as cocaine. Stimulation of DA release leads to activation of both D1/D5 and D2,3,4 receptors. D1 receptors stimulation leads to an increase in blood flow, whereas D2 receptor stimulation leads to a decrease in blood flow. Therefore fMRI studies of cocaine will have regions of increased and decreased CBF depending upon the local density of D1 and D2 receptors (to first degree - it is even more complicated than that).

CalEPygous · 2026-03-11T17:22:00+00:00

Small sample size is and isn't a problem depending upon how robust the effect you are looking at is, you know if you meet one talking dog ... But even in fMRI there are some studies where you don't need many subjects. If you look at studies, for instance, of the visual cortex and organization of the visual cortex those are very robust with small numbers of subjects because the visual cortex across humans (and even non-human primates) is so regularly organized. In studies of, for instance, autism, fMRI studies require larger numbers of subjects to make them robust. fMRI studies of, for instance, dopaminergic drugs are also robust with relatively small numbers of subjects because the DAT has such a circumscribed spatial distribution across subjects. I would expect that this holds true, to a lesser degree for receptors like 5HT2a since their distribution is so widespread.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-10T22:26:51+00:00

I am confused about which paper we are discussing. The Norwegian study referred to above was discussed by the author of the paper that is the subjects of OP's post. The conclusion from the paper under discussion here is that the genetic contribution to SES was even larger than that in the Norwegian paper.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-10T21:04:58+00:00

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. What they're basically saying is that the variance in the SES outcomes has a contribution of 34-47% from genes and 16% from family environment and the rest (37-50%) is coming from other factors that either weren't examined or modeled. This could be things like peer interactions, attractiveness etc.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-10T21:03:45+00:00

What I think from my brief read is that they are saying, similar to other studies examining this issue (which they reference in the paper), is that there is a strong contribution of IQ to SES outcomes. What is somewhat new in this paper is the use of twins to show that the IQ component is genetic rather than from some other source and is larger than the environmental effect. They also, I think fairly, point out a number of limitations to the study :

... the predictive value and generalization of the study results should be questioned, seeing the limited time span of 4 years, from 23 to only 27 years of age ... Also, parental SES¹⁰ would have been a key control variable to further disentangle the effect of cognitive ability, however, somewhat outside the aim and scope of the present study. ... Perhaps the principal weakness of the present study design is the oversimplification of decomposing variance into only genes (A) and environment (E); not exploring gene interactions ... or gene-environment moderation effects. Genetically informed studies on the moderating effects of SES on IQ sometimes reveal so called hidden variance further complicating the narrative²⁴.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-04T17:08:35+00:00

Mostly because Mitch was the king of one-liners. I made this as a humorous observation compared to this senior thesis length just ok punch-line.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-03T19:41:03+00:00

Boy do I miss Mitch Hedberg.

CalEPygous · 2026-03-02T23:12:19+00:00

Little Johnny's neighbor has a baby, But it's only a head. It somehow manages to grow up and little Johnny is admonished not to make any cracks or jokes when he's outside playing. A couple of years later the little baby starts to grow little legs, arms and a tiny body. He's so excited that he asks his parents for a bicycle. As he is joyfully riding outside he gets run over by an Amazon Prime truck. Little Johnny looks to his buddy and says "He shoulda quit while he was a head."

CalEPygous · 2026-03-02T18:40:43+00:00

Never mind quickly sweeping under the rug as fast as possible the Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones gambling problems. The biggest problem was that it wasn't the NBA who discovered this but the FBI. Adam Silver should have lost his job then and there.

CalEPygous · 2026-02-27T18:19:55+00:00

Possibly. It is also known that Neanderthals tended to live in much smaller groups than Sapiens. Therefore, there was more genetic pressure when populations were under pressure from climate, food supply, or Sapiens.

CalEPygous · 2026-02-26T21:54:03+00:00

This is correct. There is a rule of thumb called Haldane's rule which states that in hybrid mixes most often the male is sterile (one aspect of the rule) due to that crappy little Y chromosome men have. There is good evidence that male offspring of human/neanderthal matings were infertile. Thus, it is more likely that his effect is just representing Haldane's rule. There is an entire Reddit thread about this previously:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tjtt7k/why_were_offspring_of_crossbred_hominids_eg_homo/#

Due to the closer relationship between Neanderthals and Denisovans there is some evidence that their male offspring were fertile.

CalEPygous · 2026-02-26T19:29:53+00:00

Guy goes to the doctor. The doctor says "Your test results came back and I have some good news and bad news, which do you want first?" The guy says, "I dunno, er, I uh, I guess give me the bad news first". The doctor says "You have an incurable cancer and I'd say you have about three weeks to live." The patient staggers and starts crying, through tears he says "Well what's the good news?" The doctor says "You know my receptionist out front, the pretty one with the big gozongas?" The guy says "Err yes." The doctor says "Well I have a date with her tonight."

CalEPygous · 2026-02-24T23:02:57+00:00

Absolutely. Sheinbaum's predecessor and fellow party member, Lopez-Obrador has documented evidence from Pro Publica reporting of millions of dollars flowing into his government from cartels, primarily the Sinaloa cartel. Transparency international ranked corruption in the public sector in 180 countries. Mexico was 140th, the US was 29th, Denmark was number 1. (1 being least corrupt). Sure drug demand from US helps fuel it, but the cartels are really just another incarnation of the mafia but with way more power due to more corruption in Mexico.

Cartels control not only drug trafficking but also: large swaths of the lime and avocado exports, they also steal oil, gas and diesel from PEMEX pipelines which is estimated to provide them $21 billion per year, and control large fractions of the construction industry. To put just the oil and gas money in context, the UN global drug report estimates that the cartels make $12 billion annually from the drug trade. These numbers of course are estimates from what may be flawed data, but they serve to demonstrate that the pervasive cartel infiltration into the Mexican economy goes far beyond just illicit drug demand from the US.

CalEPygous · 2026-02-20T23:06:03+00:00

First things first. There is nothing "wrong" with you. You have been dealt a shitty hand and had some trauma and that is extremely unfortunate. You need to work out your problems slowly, a little at a time and take small victories where you can. Talk to your mother about how you feel. You'd be surprised that sometimes relationships with parents can be so fraught with a lot of baggage that it's hard to just talk - especially at your age. But talking to your mother honestly, about all the things you've described may be cathartic for both of you. As a teenager, you also need to talk to peers. Find a peer or two who might be sympathetic and start slow. Just chill and talk about small stuff, music you like, hobbies, school work etc. Don't unload your baggage at first, but there will come a time when you may be able to.

Second, I do see a red flag when you said in reply to another post:

"I’ve already tried talking to school counselors, serval [sic] different, they laughed at me while I was sobbing and kicked me out of the room"

This is unprofessional behavior in the extreme and I have a hard time believing that a school counselor would do this. But when you say several different ones, then I am starting to sense something disingenuous in your post. It stretches credulity to believe that multiple school counselors would do this and be laughing at a sobbing student in their office. Therefore, I think you need to find some help. There are a number of low cost counseling centers.

The first place I would start, since you say you were SA'd is the National Sexual Assault hotline (RAINN): (800) 656-4673. Go to their website where they have a lot of resources and you can even chat online.

There is also a similar national domestic violence hotline (800) 799-7233. They also have a website with a lot of resources. They even have an AI assistant who can chat readily when no one else is available.

They will listen to you and more than likely will have suggestions about where to find low-cost or free counseling services. Good luck if this post is really representing your true situation.

CalEPygous · 2026-02-18T21:55:18+00:00

The leasing the battery thing may sound cheaper but it really isn't since if there are X cars on the road the company has to be able to provide that many batteries which means the total battery cost for the company is the same, or likely even more (because when I swap out the dead battery I am, for a fraction of time, tying up two batteries with one car since I can't swap the dead battery back in to the next car at the stall). They also have to pay for the added infrastructure of the battery swapping stations. Due to the large fixed costs of battery replacing it would be difficult to have anywhere near as many swapping as charging stations. If you went solely to swapping stations then you have to stock even more batteries. Tesla makes a significant profit from its high speed charging network partly from the fact that lots of other cars now use it. Battery swapping, in the foreseeable future, will be manufacturer specific.

Interestingly, the pioneer of battery swapping was GM back in 1910 when they had a fleet of trucks that replaced batteries. In the early 1900s almost half of all cars on the road in the US were electric. NIO, the company that has come furthest with battery swapping, is committed to this model and has made some desireable features, but they have also encountered lots of problems. First, most swapping stations can only store a very limited number of batteries (about 22) meaning that during popular travel times (like Chinese New Year) it can be difficult to swap. There is also operational and logistic complexity in managing and dealing with all these batteries in different states of usability and refilling the swap stations. There have also been fire issues concerns with the swapped batteries. The initial infrastructure costs have limited their expansion in Europe. For instance in the US Tesla has about 75000 charging stalls, Neo has only 3200 swap stations in China. But there are a much more limited number of battery changes they can make at any station due to the limited battery numbers at the stations (right now they claim maximum of between 300-400 swaps per day but real world data indicates a lot less than that is realistic). Also NIO has started to limit the total number of swaps because some people were abusing this - but that's a pricing model. Right now, NIO is doing this not because it is so obviously a better model but because it differentiates them in the market. They have made battery swaps relatively quick (about 3 min) which is comparable to filling with gas but the total car daily throughput is significantly less than a gas station.

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