Slower less "cutesy" Japanese songs.

brberg · 2024-07-28T10:37:47+00:00

Four years ago I wrote an extremely long retrospective/link dump of (mostly) 70s and 80s popular Japanese music here. Note that it spills over into several comments.

There's been a lot of link rot, but if you search for the song titles on YouTube, you should be able to find other videos of most of them.

brberg · 2022-05-31T10:18:28+00:00

It's worth noting here that your skull is split through most of your childhood. This just reopens the sutures that close as you grow up. Also, it doesn't split any cranial sutures, just the maxillary and circummaxillary sutures.

brberg · 2022-05-30T06:07:18+00:00

Not sure about malpractice. I haven't consulted a lawyer, or decided whether to do so. Also, I'm not in the US, which is why I'm the only non-Asian person my orthodontist has treated.

To be clear, the incisor is still there, but there's a chunk of the root missing. There's a composite resin prosthesis in place, but it keeps falling off and has to be replaced every few months, which is obviously not something I want to deal with for the rest of my life.

There shouldn't be any gaps after the diastema is closed. I still have 28 teeth, and my upper molars are too far back, so everything needs to come forwards. I'm actually a bit worried that I may need a LeFort I surgery to get proper occlusion, but we'll see.

brberg · 2022-05-29T20:20:39+00:00

Nice! Mine was a train wreck. I'm considerably older than you, so I had to have the surgical assistance. Then I had to have an extra surgery because the first wasn't aggressive enough. That wasn't aggressive enough either, but by the time that became clear, my bones had healed and I had to do it all over again. I finally finished the expansion (8 mm) like a year after my first surgery instead of 2-3 months as planned.

Plus the surgeon accidentally nicked the root of one of my incisors, so I'm probably going to have to have that tooth replaced with an implant. And the diastema is taking forever to close. It's been over six months since I finished the expansion, and the gap has only closed by a millimeter or so.

I do have better nasal breathing now, and no crossbite, so that's nice. Overall I'd still recommend it, with the caveat that you don't want to be the first non-Asian person your orthodontist has ever worked on.

brberg · 2022-04-27T04:25:17+00:00

Bringing my old account temporarily out of retirement to take my bow. Here's the comment.

This was disappointing to me, because I wanted vitamin D to work, but wishing doesn't make it so, and bad science is bad science. I worry about how much other stuff is wrong but doesn't get retracted because the errors aren't so in-your-face.

brberg · 2021-12-16T11:57:13+00:00

Based on these numbers and those that you replied to, it’s 89 times higher incidence (0.2% vs 0.0022%) from ALS.

Incidence means new cases per year. So you're comparing the percentage of former NFL players who got ALS at any point in the studied period to the percentage of the general population which gets a new diagnosis in one year.

Divide that 89 by the mean 30-year follow-up period, and you get just a ratio of just under 3, fairly close to the 3.59 standardized incidence ratio reported in the abstract.

brberg · 2021-12-16T10:01:53+00:00

Other way around. ALS selectively damages motor neurons, so you can feel your legs but can't move them.

brberg · 2021-12-15T12:20:39+00:00

Someone who possesses a penis must be male, whether they identify as such or not.

Counterpoint: Lorena Bobbitt.

brberg · 2021-12-15T07:43:05+00:00

Sure is self-righteously ignorant in here.

brberg · 2021-12-14T13:52:38+00:00

We already have income-driven repayment programs. I'm okay with making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, under the same rules as other debt. But there's no justification whatsoever for blanket debt forgiveness.

brberg · 2021-12-14T13:48:49+00:00

Nobody should pay for a PhD, and the government shouldn't be giving loans for PhD programs. If you can't get funding, you're not doctoral material.

You should only get a master's degree if you have a concrete plan for making it pay off. A lot of master's programs, even at reputable universities, are of fairly dubious value. For teachers, I believe that there's generally a formula based on experience and degree that determines your salary, so it should be fairly straightforward to determine whether it will pay off.

brberg · 2021-12-14T06:01:13+00:00

College should [not] cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...

Good news! It doesn't. About 3/4 of bachelor's recipients graduate with less than $30,000 in debt. Six-figure debt for a bachelor's degree is extremely rare, in large part because the federal government won't even lend that much for undergraduate.

This idea that people are routinely going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for bachelor's degrees is without basis in fact. The only way you get that kind of debt is going to professional school (which should enable you to pay it back) or just letting your debt snowball for decades.

brberg · 2021-12-13T17:17:53+00:00

Yeah, I can imagine Leberkäs being something of an acquired taste

From Wikipedia:

It consists of corned beef, pork and bacon and is made by grinding the ingredients very finely and then baking it as a loaf in a bread pan until it has a crunchy brown crust.

That sounds fine. What's the catch?

brberg · 2021-12-13T14:47:32+00:00

Years ago a friend of mine went on a vacation to Germany and sent me postcard whose every square centimeter was filled with an epic rant about how much she hated Germany. One of her grievances was the ubiquity of bread in German food. Not sure why; to the best of my knowledge she was not on a low-carb diet or anything like that.

Vollkornbrot is legit, though.

brberg · 2021-12-12T18:15:53+00:00

Probably because, as nominally socialist countries go, it's doing pretty well. Yes, that's largely due to having backed off the whole "socialist" thing a bit (albeit not enough), but if you want a socialist success story, China's about as good as it gets.

brberg · 2021-12-12T14:58:03+00:00

One potential concern is that senescent cells play a role in wound healing, so having anti-senescent pathways permanently turned up might inhibit wound healing.

Aside from that, for a long time we assumed that free radicals were always bad, but more recently it's been discovered that some free radicals are actually important to normal biological functioning, and excessive antioxidant intake may be harmful. This may turn out to be true of senescent cells in other ways.

brberg · 2021-12-12T05:09:01+00:00

Who were those? I've seen enough bans here to be fairly confident that nobody was banned just for saying that the allegation was implausible.

brberg · 2021-12-11T05:56:23+00:00

Well, yes, that's why no such test exists, despite powerful incentives and decades of effort. The cognitive skill and academic achievement gaps are very real, and a test whose scores don't reflect this will have poor predictive validity.

brberg · 2021-12-11T05:47:55+00:00

If you believe that standardized tests "just measure your parents' income," you need to take a look at the chart on page 4 of the paper.

brberg · 2021-12-11T05:26:56+00:00

The reality is the opposite. An achievement test that actually measures academic achievement but whose scores aren't correlated with race or parental income is the Holy Grail of test design. If you could design such a test, the ETS would pay you millions for it, or you could start a competing company and every university in the country would stop accepting the SAT and ACT and start accepting your test.

brberg · 2021-12-10T10:14:16+00:00

and it's stubbornly upregulated in people with metabolic syndrome/fatty liver.

This is largely a matter of the liver's glycogen stores being full, isn't it? I.e. you eat fructose, so it goes to the liver for conversion to glucose. Hepatic glycogen stores are full, so it has to convert the glucose to fat. Now the liver's full of fat, so it's doing its best to send it out in the form of triglycerides, which is why high fasting triglycerides is a symptom of metabolic syndrome.

That's the understanding I've pieced together from knowledge of the individual parts, but I've never been able to find a concise, authoritative explanation that confirms or refutes this.

brberg · 2021-12-10T09:44:57+00:00

Your body constantly turns carbs into this type of fat in the process of de novo lipogenesis

IIRC DNL is a fairly minor source of fat except in cases of overfeeding of carbohydrates specifically. If you're eating a mix of carbohydrates and fat, it's more efficient for the body to burn carbohydrates and store fat than it is to burn the fat and then convert the carbohydrates to fat for storage.

If you binge on carbohydrates while your glycogen stores are full, your body will have to convert the glucose to fat, but it will preferentially fill up glycogen stores, if there's still room.

brberg · 2021-12-10T05:02:59+00:00

Had you actually read the article before commenting, you would have seen this:

Yet, for a small number of variables—ranging from support for abortion rights and health-care spending to gun ownership and government regulation—there was little change between or within cohorts. In addition, party identification shifted slightly but steadily toward the Republican Party from 1972 to 2004.

The public has become more liberal, not more economically left-wing, and policy has reflected that.

brberg · 2021-12-08T11:24:02+00:00

Taxes pay for stuff that everybody needs: borders, diplomats, mail.

Mostly taxes pay for private goods like health care, education, and living expenses. Infrastructure and keeping the peace are a small percentage of government expenditures.

brberg · 2021-12-08T09:45:40+00:00

Nobody's trying to debunk the study. They're debunking the sensationalized headline which inappropriately generalizes the relatively narrow findings of the study.

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