• 0 Posts
  • 177 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle

  • I expect it’ll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can’t control himself so he’s going to say some unhinged shit, but it’s definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

    Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the “Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me” strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

    I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it’ll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked


  • Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

    I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.

    And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

    My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like


  • Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS’s (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.

    There’s also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of “OS lineage.” The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn’t copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won’t apply to Arch (hence the meme, “I use Arch btw”)

    Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various “flavors,” which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu




  • Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don’t need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

    The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.




  • If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

    Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

    In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need




  • Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

    If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture




  • My understanding is that there is always color variation because they don’t color their sauces with food coloring, and as a result, the sauces made at the beginning of harvest season will have a different color than the sauces made at the end of harvest season.

    But also they no longer use the same chili due to greed, so that may not apply anymore



  • Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.

    So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn’t get much follow-up.

    Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it’s because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they’re foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I’ll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn’t like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.



  • You’re right, I can’t give medical advice. But having abnormally long or short circadian days is a known thing - called circadian diseases. It’s not really my specialty, so I can’t comment too much on it, but my understanding is that many of them are genetic. These genetic variations can cause the circadian clock to run slower or faster than normal (which happens to be adjacent to what I study, so I can talk about it in excruciating detail if desired)

    The Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASP) is one such genetic circadian disease that gets a lot of attention among the circadian field, but you almost certainly don’t have it, since FASP makes your clock run shorter than 24 hours, whereas you seem to imply that yours runs longer.

    The key thing to remember is that the circadian clock is not psychological. There is an actual, physical, molecular clock running in your brain and in nearly all the cells in your body. If this clock has imperfections, then that will directly lead to consequences in your circadian rhythms and your sleep cycle. The circadian clock is a real thing that people with the right equipment can measure and read. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard - just a blood sample or a swab would be sufficient. To be honest, I myself would like to study your cells to see if there really is anything out of place, but that would probably break so many research and ethics rules.

    Anyways, to answer your question, I would recommend getting a medical opinion - it might be worth specifically bringing up that you suspect you have a circadian disease. I’m not too sure about treatment options, since my impression has generally been that we kind of don’t have any treatments for circadian diseases. But it’s not really my specialty, so maybe there is. My memory is that melatonin is a masking cue, which basically means that it makes you sleep but it doesn’t actually affect your circadian clock (which probably explains your poor experience with melatonin).