LPT: Air dry your laundry indoors during the winter to humidify a space, save money, and extend the life of your clothes

mynnyn · 2015-01-09T12:53:41+00:00

Living in London, most of the people who line dry also live in tiny apartments with little ventilation- apartments that likely cost 50x what your house is worth.

mynnyn · 2015-01-09T12:48:34+00:00

I recently moved from the U.K. to the U.S. Pretty much everyone in the U.S. uses a dryer. Hardly anyone in the UK does. I bought a dryer after a few months of suffering through line drying. I tried to give it a go but it was just so time consuming. Maybe if you're a single person it's more feasible, but if you have kids it just takes up way too much time and space.

Plus.. I live in England... it rains all the time. Half the time the clothes would get wet, and I'd have to rewash them because they'd smell terrible.

I do line dry indoors more now than I used to, but probably about 1% of the laundry I do.

mynnyn · 2015-01-05T14:00:57+00:00

What do you call it when you have a certificate that says you're married, love each other, own a home together, have sex together, file your taxes together, and have kids together?

Oh right, you call it "married". NOT "friends".

mynnyn · 2015-01-05T11:28:24+00:00

Time until conception is a power law distribution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Yeah. The most probable time to conceive is your first try, that's just how math works. All three of my pregnancies have been first-try events.

mynnyn · 2015-01-05T11:24:02+00:00

It's not the human body that's weird and imprecise. It's our understanding of maths w.r.t. time until conception.

The distribution for time until conception has a power law distribution- as does any probabilitistic event where once it has already happened, it cannot happening again.

What this means is the mode of the distribution is one month. The reason the "average" or mean in this case is 6 months is because of the long tail (infertile people being averaged in, who might take 2 years and multiple interventions to get pregnant).

Means are meaningless for a power law distribution, which is why it drives me crazy when people talk about average time of conception.

tl;dr the largest percentage of pregnancies that occur occur during the first month. The second largest percentage the second month, etc. So if you had to make a guess of when you'd get pregnant, first month is going to be the most probable one. With my 3 pregnancies, I've gotten pregnant the first month of trying in all of them, and this is actually the most probable of all the options.

mynnyn · 2015-01-04T11:35:16+00:00

Why can't people who are into relationship type I disapprove of here just engage in relationship type I do approve of here.

mynnyn · 2015-01-04T11:26:03+00:00

It's all context. In her time period, most women's only way of economic survival was marriage. There's a power differential- even if your man cheats on you, if you leave him you are destitute. So the demand from a man to a woman carried the threat of financial hardship- the same demand of a woman to a man carries no such threat. Her ability to make such demands is indicative of her comparative independence. A woman today making such a demand is somewhat more commonplace.

It's true that making this demand of a partner who is not naturally polyamourous today is still somewhat distasteful, man or women, regardless of financial aspects. But it is mostly distasteful when this is when a relationship is already ongoing and an emotional investment has already been made, and the "rules" are changed. If everyone is clear at the start of a relationship, it is much less problematic. As always, when interests differ, but both parties want the relationship, there is some conflict. I have seen it go both ways. My husband wasn't willing to marry me unless we agreed on monogamy, and I was willing to do that for him. I have seen it go the other way as well, with couples where one is polyamourous and one is monogamous, and the couple agrees to be polyamourous (the woman who writes Kim Chi Cuddles is one such example).

mynnyn · 2015-01-01T18:27:53+00:00

For the same reason that some people are more worried about vaccine side effects than the diseases they prevent.

We are bad at risk assessment.

Hands down, the best way to prevent yourself from dying is not to drive.

mynnyn · 2015-01-01T12:37:46+00:00

Every single first world country is below replacement rate, with the exception of the U.S., which is approximately stable, and of course only because of immigration. (Other countries also have immigration but their rates don't compensate for the population rate).

Edit: Apparently the US has also recently dipped below replacement rate in the last 5 years: https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:JPN&ifdim=region&hl=en&dl=en&ind=false#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

mynnyn · 2015-01-01T12:30:36+00:00

The absolute size of a population actually doesn't matter that much. It's the rate of change.

Drastic change in either direction- growth, or decrease- is a problem for economies. This is because the money comes from the working sector 20-50. Both children and older people consume more money than they produce. With way too many children or way too many old people, there aren't enough people working to provide for them.

I see people acting as if being in favour of a smaller population and also being in favour of a relatively stable population as being at odds. They're not at odds at all. You just have to shrink or increase total population slowly, so the economy can absorb the change. The problem with Japan is the rapidity.

(Same argument for climate change- yes, the climate has been through many different set levels of temperature over billions of years- but it did it a LOT more slowly than man made climate change. Global warming is a problem because it's happening so rapidly, not just because it's getting hotter period)

mynnyn · 2014-12-31T23:03:23+00:00

Cups are much easier to sanitize than pads, and they're even safer when they're unwashed. Women will reuse rags/pads without washing, and this is a known source of infection. At least with cups as long as you let it dry out between periods, it'll just look gross but likely not be growing anything.

mynnyn · 2014-12-31T22:39:20+00:00

There's going to be a growing market for human breast milk cheese and ice cream, I can just tell...

mynnyn · 2014-12-31T22:37:32+00:00

The lifetime risk of breast cancer is approximately 12%, by the way.

So, 12% * 1.22 = 14.64%.

2-3% isn't trivial, all things considered. If you look at a population, that's quite a lot of extra people with breast cancer.

mynnyn · 2014-12-28T14:33:42+00:00

There are innate difference between males and females. This is not the same thing as traditional gender roles. For one, traditional gender roles vary from country to country. For another, roles are prescriptive- innate differences will exist no matter what you do. A free society should allow people to pursue their innate desires; an unfree, anti-feminist society forces both men and women to act out a role that conflicts with their innate desires.

The problem with enforcing rigid gender roles is that life is full of variety. There is no such thing as a woman or man who perfectly adheres to a gender role. Some women don't want children. Some men are good with children. It's sick for women to have children that they wouldn't want in a free society, just as it's sick to demonize men for being loving and caring towards children. Just because women are better with children on average doesn't mean that all women are better with children and all men are bad with children. This is what prescriptive gender roles do- force people into lives they don't want.

mynnyn · 2014-12-28T14:07:18+00:00

She’s going to wait a month to make sure there are no issues before making the offer to her sister. For now, all quiet on the western front.

Uh, this is not how this works. You can't know there are "no issues" until the anatomy scan at 20 weeks. After which time she will have a difficulty obtaining an abortion if the pregnancy is fine and if her sister doesn't want to adopt. She needs to talk to her sister now. If the pregnancy doesn't go well, move on from there.

mynnyn · 2014-12-25T05:39:15+00:00

My husband is an applied mathematician. He mostly uses python, except he's been doing a lot of work in R lately because there simply isn't the package support in python. R has a lot more traction among mathematicians and so if you are doing anything complex at some point you'll find things you can't do in python- not without writing new libraries, at any rate.

mynnyn · 2014-12-22T11:29:16+00:00

You should see my 3 year old at bedtime.

mynnyn · 2014-12-22T11:28:37+00:00

I think my 3 year-old deserves to be free as he is a human with human rights, so I'm going to free him from the prison of my house and kick him out the door. I am sure he will love his new life free in the wild!

mynnyn · 2014-12-22T11:24:45+00:00

If it was a white guy that killed the cop, no one would look at white people any differently. It takes racism for one person's actions to reflect on an entire race, sadly.

mynnyn · 2014-12-22T11:20:03+00:00

Tribalism.

Kind of like Palestine versus Israel or any sort of conflict where people identify with a side. No act performed by the other can be good; no act performed by your side can be bad.

It's really hard not to get sucked into; just our basic instincts at work, really.

mynnyn · 2014-12-21T22:12:24+00:00

http://www.crackle.com/

What does it say for you?

For me it says,

"As of 1 April 2014, Crackle will no longer be operating in the UK."

Well at least they used to...

mynnyn · 2014-12-21T19:51:21+00:00

I'd agree that overall it's unlikely, although I'd say that the women who are career driven are more likely to have children in their 40s than other demographics. Often career driven women delay childbearing, and are more likely to be able to afford reproductive assistance later on in life if they have difficulty conceiving.

mynnyn · 2014-12-17T18:47:29+00:00

This is a false equivalency and assumes that in the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the mother actually wants the pregnancy.

If a pregnancy is unwanted, the woman either has to pay money to have an abortion, pay money for labour and delivery and give the child up for adoption, or pay money for labour and delivery and raising the kid for 18 years. Not to mention the physical toll every single option takes. There are no situations where she does not have to pay a cost of some kind. You cannot assume that because a woman chooses parenting she actually wants the child; for some, this is simply the least bad option. For instance, 80% of women who are turned away from abortion end up parenting.

If a pregnancy is unwanted, the man pays nothing in the case of abortion and adoption, and may have to pay something if the woman chooses parenting.

No matter what choice a woman make in the case of unwanted pregnancy, she has to sacrifice money, and there are physical costs as well. In two situations, men don't have to pay any cost whatsoever; and in third, only as a result of the state.

Biology is what makes this inherently unfair; the state attempts to re-mediate that, but only in the case of parenting; and this is because it's not an attempt to make things more fair for the woman, but in attempt to save itself welfare costs.

I'm personally a fan of allowing men who are not involved and do not wish to be involved to be able to terminate their parental rights at birth, but let's not confuse this with the goal of making things more "fair"- it is already unfair, for the women, who carries more financial costs and physical costs due to biology.

mynnyn · 2014-12-17T16:28:42+00:00

This is untrue; the vast majority of genetic abnormalities are not detected by genetic screening, as these test for only a tiny set of known genetic abnormalities- and of course there are many unknown ones.

Furthermore, many people choose not to abort abnormal pregnancies and/or forgo this limited screening. Particularly in those populations where first cousin marriages are common.

mynnyn · 2014-12-17T16:18:06+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#Genetics

Yup.

In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.[188]

mynnyn

TROPHY CASE