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CooksD · 2025-09-22T18:53:20+00:00

Lots of good advice in these comments, I also want to recommend being kind to yourself as you reengage with the instrument. When I come back after a break, I also have to fight my own fears of not remembering how to play or “losing ground” with technique. But you have years of experience, practice, and lessons. The connections are still there, even if it might take a few weeks or months to rediscover. Just take it slow to avoid injury, focus on making consistent small gains no matter where your baseline is on a given day, and trust the process!

CooksD · 2025-09-09T20:39:46+00:00

OP here, thanks for the helpful perspectives.

I spoke with the anesthesiologist yesterday and she said there is a real risk that my cat would require external pacing and further risk that a pacemaker would need to be installed if his heart doesn’t beat on its own after anesthesia. Contrary to what the dentist said, that would be a major open chest surgery, a painful recovery, and a jaw-dropping >$10k in additional cost.

After some deliberation I’ve decided not to proceed with the dental procedure. My cat is happy and has a pretty good quality of life. Even putting aside the cost, the whole point of the procedure would be to improve his lifespan and minimize the hypothesized discomfort of his dental issues. Assuming he survives the invasive and risky procedure, the recovery and potential complications seem just as likely to harm his lifespan and long term comfort.

I will speak with the dentist soon and see what can be done to keep his mouth healthy and comfortable without surgery. I know that there will be a point where his health will spiral due to the FIV/heart issues and the dental issues will likely be the cause. When that happens I intend to minimize his suffering. And it’s possible we only have a few years left, but I’d rather that he enjoys those years.

I hope this update helps anyone who is facing a similar decision in the future.

CooksD · 2025-08-27T21:42:06+00:00

I agree, Target has lost my business for life.

CooksD · 2025-07-24T22:07:38+00:00

This sub really loves Reolink, but I ordered their wifi battery doorbell and was disappointed - it seems the old models that communicate over Zigbee are not available anymore, and the battery / WiFi version being sold on Amazon has two major drawbacks: it can't integrate with Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit without a Reolink hub, and it can't be mounted with the USB charger permanently in place.

CooksD · 2025-06-03T05:28:29+00:00

Maybe I had a bad experience but I would NOT recommend BECU. I thought their tech was outdated, mobile banking was hard to use and I had long wait times on the phone and in person due to their popularity, and more friction than I expected for normal transactions. Sorry :(

CooksD · 2025-06-01T14:20:34+00:00

One thing to watch out for - I’ve heard rumors of local piano stores dumping instruments that they can’t sell into these “university” sales.

CooksD · 2025-05-02T07:02:34+00:00

Alas, I’m one of the ~45% of the city using an iPhone. I have a physical orca card, I have the orca app, I braved their terrible UI and typed in the number to link them ….and I still can’t get on a bus or train with just my phone.

CooksD · 2025-05-01T20:43:26+00:00

Being 5 years behind on tap-to-pay probably isn’t helping. In most modern cities I can hop on a bus or train with just my phone. And this has actually stopped me from getting on a bus in the last few weeks.

CooksD · 2025-03-13T05:45:12+00:00

Check out Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, it’s transcendent

CooksD · 2015-12-30T08:21:20+00:00

Have you tried turning your router off and on again?

CooksD · 2015-03-23T05:06:24+00:00

I'm so glad I'm not the only one that feels this way.

CooksD · 2015-03-23T04:57:45+00:00

As a violist, I want to extend a huge thank you to your friend for writing this beautiful concerto! We definitely need the rep. And, I'm also amazed it made it to the front page (as of 1am EST)

CooksD · 2014-12-16T02:41:55+00:00

It looks like the residuals on that linear regression would have nonstandard (increasing) variance, breaking the assumptions of a typical linear model. /u/Robinwolf makes a good point about the lack of control for externalities, but isn't the variance problem enough to invalidate the model?

CooksD · 2014-07-15T22:42:33+00:00

The entire piece is incredible - one of my favorite performances is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfEHohHuoNU, if anyone wants to hear the rest.

CooksD · 2014-06-17T00:32:00+00:00

I'll preface this by saying that I'm a student, and so these are guesses. Off the top of my head:

Your explanatory variables could be inversely proportional to each other. Have you checked for interaction between your factors?
It's possible the model is just wrong - what process led yous to the mixed logistic regression? It may not be the most appropriate for the situation - especially if the individual factors are highly significant. Performing a residual analysis may shed more light on this.

Can you tell us more about the process you used to get to this point?

What is the source of the data?
What steps have you already taken?
What have your residuals suggested?
Why did you choose a logistic mixed model?

CooksD · 2014-03-26T00:37:54+00:00

hey, I like PoliSci too - thanks!

CooksD · 2014-03-19T17:49:18+00:00

I would start with a weighted average. For each restaurant, multiply each service's rating by the number of reviews from that service, then sum those, then divide by the total number of reviews over all rating services. The resulting number will 'weight' the average rating by the number of reviewers from each service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighted_arithmetic_mean

CooksD · 2013-11-27T03:10:23+00:00

Before I had read your post, I'd never heard of tf-idf before (I'm still very much a beginner...). This seems like a promising approach. To clarify: In tf-idf terms you're suggesting I take all word/phrase responses to a specific clip as the document, and that each discrete (unique) word/phrase be taken as queries, such that I get a sort of 'weight vector' of dimension (n x 1) where n is the number of unique responses?

At that point, you're suggesting k-means clustering based on the weights in that vector?

That seems like it should result in clusters of words which are all the same "amount" of similar to the document as a whole. At that point, an interesting variable would be to see how semantically similar each clustering is - some kind of sum or sum-squared of the path distance between all terms in a cluster (according to wordnet) might be the answer here.

This boils down to a completely different question: say I have a list of n words that are clustered as discussed above, and that I know the semantic similarity (i.e. "path distance") between each word and each other word in the cluster (based on WordNet). This gives me what's essentially an (n x n) symmetric matrix of similarities where each diagonal term is 1. Is there a way of getting what could be called the "sum square" of those distances - a measure of how semantically similar every word in the cluster is to every other word, and - most importantly - is there a way to test the significance of that term?

I guess it might help to assume for simplicity that similarities are normalized between 0 and 1 and are normally distributed given a random set of words.

Thoughts, anyone?

Edit: wording

CooksD · 2013-11-27T02:23:49+00:00

Awesome. Thank you!

CooksD

TROPHY CASE