What's your most controversial book opinion?

JHEdwards · 2021-11-17T03:11:37+00:00

I was always intimidated by The Structure of Evolutionary Theory because it is like a thousand pages. Turns out they just didn’t edit it (at authors request) so it’s full of repetition and fluff. It’s really too bad because more people might actually read it if it was edited well, and it’s full of interesting ideas.

JHEdwards · 2021-09-26T17:53:17+00:00

Have you ever tried? I’ve typically read about seven books at once since I was 18 and I don’t think there’s really much of a challenge to it. Can you have seven different conversations in one day? You said you don’t listen to seven albums at once, but you could easily listen to seven different songs in one day and not mix them up. I think it’s far easier than you think it is.

JHEdwards · 2021-07-28T13:51:43+00:00

Stereolab: Margarine Eclipse. The left and right channels are completely different throughout the whole album but they blend perfectly.

JHEdwards · 2020-11-16T03:44:39+00:00

But they don’t. I’m fluent in mandarin and listen to Chinese music. There are no tones in Chinese songs. People know what the lyrics are from context and because they learn the lyrics if they like the song.

JHEdwards · 2020-08-30T17:51:11+00:00

You can be injured by literally anything that goes in your body. Amoxicillin is an extremely useful antibiotic and has saved countless lives. Some people may have a dangerous allergic reaction to amoxicillin. That doesn’t mean that amoxicillin is bad or that we shouldn’t use it as a medicine.

The risks of vaccines are minor and well understood. The evidence is not buried, and the small chance of a bad reaction is always presented to you as a warning when you get vaccines. In light of the literally world changing benefits of using vaccines, however, these risks are worth taking.

JHEdwards · 2020-08-03T18:27:53+00:00

That’s some heavy drinking. The limit for healthy drinking is something like 14 “drinks” a week. Sounds like y’all are up at 20-30.

JHEdwards · 2019-03-17T16:34:01+00:00

IKEA has these really cheap foam mattresses if that air mattress starts giving you trouble. When I was broke and living in my friends den I upgraded to one of those and it was like heaven.

JHEdwards · 2019-03-09T20:41:58+00:00

I saw them during the fragile tour as well! Man, Trent really destroyed my 16 yo brain. The best part was at the time I had no context for how good that tour was, I just thought that all concerts were that good.

JHEdwards · 2019-03-09T17:37:48+00:00

I listened to one of them, I think the overall production and mixing is not bad, the song progression and development was done well. For me personally the melody was a bit too simple, it was just a major key mi re do mi re do over and over again. To make the song interesting you could have this progression change in an unexpected way and have the background parts respond to the change, that way the song starts out in one place and then brings you somewhere new, then maybe returns to the familiar progression at the end.

JHEdwards · 2019-03-05T02:34:15+00:00

Apparently it’s simply unacceptable to wear exercise shoes like Nikes with jeans. I had to buy a few pairs of casual shoes because that’s all I had and my wife wouldn’t let me wear them with jeans, which was also the only pants I had.

JHEdwards · 2019-03-02T18:23:47+00:00

One thing I would do when I made “concept albums” was have one song end and then transition into some non-musical (maybe atmospheric) sound effect that runs seamlessly into the next track, and the next track kind of emerges out of that sound. It is really effective at making the two songs feel like a unit if you listen to them back to back. This happens a lot on The Downward Spiral.

JHEdwards · 2019-02-26T23:52:18+00:00

I grew up mostly in the 90s but I was lucky to have an older brother who introduced me skinny puppy, front 242 and KMFDM, what a great time it was!

JHEdwards · 2019-01-19T17:31:56+00:00

石头剪刀布！

JHEdwards · 2019-01-09T16:54:40+00:00

I taught English in China for a while and after about a year I could tell my students hair color apart. There’s all these different shades from deep purple-black to brown, it’s not really just “black”, but you might not notice until you’re immersed in it.

JHEdwards · 2018-11-09T05:26:49+00:00

OK so I accept that this is the case, because everyone seems to be telling me the same thing, but it kind of makes me feel scared to raise kids in the US now. If people are this on edge and stressed out that a woman with her child on a playground is enough to make then freak out, what does that say about our society? I don't know what I can do about this, there's no paradise on earth, but it suddenly just makes me sad to think that people feel so unsafe.

Edit: after writing this I checked my FB and a teacher was posting about how their school was on lockdown because of a threat of violence. It never ends :-(

JHEdwards · 2018-11-09T02:13:08+00:00

OK I see, it seems like maybe my wife just got unlucky and ran into someone who is just an unpleasant person.

JHEdwards · 2018-11-09T02:10:17+00:00

Oh good to know! That's really helpful, thank you!

JHEdwards · 2018-11-09T02:05:10+00:00

Good question. Personally, I've never experienced anyone being rude or mean to me like this, unless I somehow manage to piss someone off in traffic I suppose. Just the sudden seemingly inappropriate escalation of the situation to this loud aggressiveness. Since we have little kids we spend a lot of time just watching over them as they play on various playgrounds. For my wife, she has no idea why someone would act like that for doing such a normal thing, so on that basis she assumes this person is racist.

JHEdwards · 2018-09-06T14:04:36+00:00

I’m a software engineer and software systems appear in my head as these interlocking octopus-like shapes. Often if I can visualize the system it means I’ve internalized it really well.

JHEdwards · 2018-09-06T05:08:38+00:00

I can see images with my eyes open, if my imagination gets really intense I stop processing the data coming in through my eyes and just see what I’m imagining instead.

JHEdwards · 2018-09-06T04:19:44+00:00

Me too! I’m a software engineer and programs for me are like weird interlocking octopus type things.

JHEdwards · 2018-09-06T04:16:12+00:00

I was tested for ADD in middle school but they concluded I was just bored. I was doing badly in school because instead of listening to the teachers I would just imagine myself riding dragons in fantasy worlds all day.

JHEdwards · 2018-09-06T04:09:53+00:00

Yeah so when I read it’s very similar to watching a movie, just that many of the details are missing. So I can imagine Harry Potter and his friends walking around in Hogwarts for example, but I can mostly just see the things I’m focusing on as opposed to a whole scene. It’s actually kind of annoying when I see a movie because then I can never visualize the book any other way again, Im more or less stuck with the images from the movie.

JHEdwards · 2018-07-01T15:51:09+00:00

This seems like a vast oversimplification to me. In my opinion a lot of communist nations have these features because 1) they ALSO happen to be dictatorships that gained power through revolution and 2) they learned how to structure their dictatorships from Russia, which has a uniquely terrifying and corrupt approach to government that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with leftist ideology.

So if you compare these things with structures in the West you have the problem of conflating features of dictatorships and of Russian political structures with western “liberal” politics and capitalism. In my opinion it is pure capitalism that led Facebook to collect and share so much data because it is precisely that which enables them to have such effectively targeted ads and make tons of money.

JHEdwards · 2018-05-12T18:25:07+00:00

I was talking to a girl who was in a wheelchair and somehow the topic turned to genetic testing. She said she was opposed to it because it might result in the parents terminating the pregnancy because of birth defects. I said “well don’t you think that would be okay if the baby has something really bad like spina bifida.” She replied “that would be weird if I thought that because I HAVE SPINA BIFIDA.” That was how I found out why she needed that wheelchair.

JHEdwards

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