_5659 (u/_5659) - Readit News

_5659 commented on My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown danlawton.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/mudita

_5659 · 4 years ago

"As I lay there musing in the brisk darkness, I suddenly sensed a tightening inside me. It was as if I was being ever so gently wound. Then quickly, the pressure intensified, and I breathed in rapid-fire staccato and violently shook. I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And that’s when I split apart."

This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which frequent Hacker News. It's anecdotal per account and I've found weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think it's interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More specifically, a bass guitar.

_5659 commented on NYT gives 'water witches' the both-sides treatment thewhyaxis.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/jashkenas

ncmncm · 4 years ago

Indeed, that is the purpose and action of the Horoscope column running in every newspaper.

It doesn't matter which "sign" gets which advice; all that matters is that different people get different advice, and get different advice this week than they got last week. The whole birthdate apparatus is purely a randomizing device.

It is a remarkably sophisticated psychological technology that keeps people from getting stuck in ruts, and not paralyzed by indecision. It just doesn't do what its promoters think it does.

_5659 · 4 years ago

I think Co-star is fascinating for this reason because it's not so much the science of belief but the charisma of truth. People like it mostly because it's kind of sassy. For the most part, sun-moon-rising offers a quick and dirty way to assess relationship compatibility in a dating-app world where rejecting everyone and accepting everyone is tedious and exhausting. It's also a particular love language of understanding and explaining what it is you look for and being aware of how people explain themselves, for those that use it.

Technically, astrology is based on algorithms observing data of the planets positions. For the most part, to the naked eye, and to human sensibility, the planets seem to behave in harmony, resonance and stability. In reality, the long-term behavior varies chaotically. It's an n-body problem, which is as of this time of writing, unsolved. Generally, that doesn't mean it hasn't been answered, rather it means that solutions satisfying specific conditions cannot be determined by the criteria of uniqueness or existence.

But yeah, if you're going to make short term observations of a chaotic system, a sporadically random system is basically just numerical approximation. You don't need to rationalize irrationality, because you can't.

_5659 commented on NYT gives 'water witches' the both-sides treatment thewhyaxis.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/jashkenas

_5659 · 4 years ago

I read a paper once about an ancient tribe of hunters who had exhausted the local fauna and consulted the wisdom of the spirits through an oracle bone ceremony for the next bounty.

In essence, the oracle bone would give them a random direction. If there was nothing, they'd ask again, if there was something, they would keep asking. Doesn't matter. The important function of consulting the oracle bones was that they were randomly distributing their hunting patterns without overexhausting one particular area within range. This allows the population of game to stabilize over time.

tldr

If you're looking for answers, searching at random and searching frequently is probably the most efficient method instead of wasting time figuring out how to find it.

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." -Alan Turing

_5659 commented on Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet psyche.co/ideas/why-it-to... · Posted by u/benbreen

_5659 · 4 years ago

edit: I deleted most of my comment. I don't think it added anything substantial to the conversation.

I will point out that this seems like plagiarism.

"...the retina is actually an extension of the brain, formed embryonically from neural tissue and connected to the brain by the optic nerve."

From: https://www.britannica.com/science/retina

"...The retina is actually an extension of the brain, formed embryonically from neural tissue and connected to the brain proper by the optic nerve."

_5659 commented on The Health Benefits of Coffee nytimes.com/2021/06/14/we... · Posted by u/lxm

_5659 · 4 years ago

4-5 cups seems about right. I typically ingest about 8 cups of coffee throughout the day. That's a close-to-full pot of coffee for me. As some have mentioned, "cups" the measurement does not necessarily equate to "cup" a receptacle. I only say this because, one or two coffees brings me to life in the morning. After that, I start to basically sustain a prolonged professional panic attack of concentrated anxiety that is more or less a reason to not schedule meetings with me in the afternoon.

That is to say, a cup from say, Starbucks would come in the following sizes:

Demi: 3oz

Short: 8oz

Tall: 12oz

Grande: 16oz

Venti: 20 oz

Trenta: 31 oz

In the US, to my knowledge: 1 cup : 8oz : 16 tbsp.

Typically, when I make 8 cups of coffee in my coffee pot, I use 6 level tablespoons of coffee grounds, medium, medium-coarse-ish. It literally doesn't matter. You swing from Turkish coffee to Cowboy coffee, the importance is that you have a consistent way to produce your desired grind. Ground coffee is unacceptable, because it oxidizes too quickly since it all tends to come in bags that nobody ever seals those correctly, and mostly because if you drink coffee, you're already lazy in the morning.

As many in the scientific community are familiar, the US is one of the last holdovers of the imperial system.

What most do not know, is that there is even significant difference between how the US and UK measure a tbsp for instance.

US: 14.8 ml for tsbp UK: 15.0 ml for tbsp

If you're making coffee, that's a huge difference.

Example: My ideal ratio is about 6 US tbsp : 8 cups of water.

That's not for flavor – so much that, in the morning, my brain literally does not care about mathematics or physics or cooking or anything really – I want to dump an exact amount of water, pour an exact amount of coffee and have a consistent cup that I can then slowly improve upon if I have a satisfactory cup of coffee.

The difference between US and UK would be 6 * 14.8 and 6 * 15.0 = 88.8 ml vs 90.0 ml.

You might say, that is a negligible difference!

HOW DARE YOU. THIS IS COOKING. THIS IS TASTE. THIS IS CHEMISTRY, THIS IS SCIENCE. THIS IS MATH. TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE, BUT TO NOT CARE IS DEMONIC.

Less confrontational: That's just for one measurement of say grounds or fluid. The conversion of difference in measurement can be applied to both grounds and water.

So let's just convert tbsp by itself between UK and US.

6 tbsp of level coffee grounds. 96 tbsp of water, at whatever quality Los Angeles tap water is, which is terrible.

6:96 = 0.0625

This is an arbitrary ratio which means absolutely nothing, but let's compare it to the UK version.

So we know that UK tbsp is slightly larger. Exactly (15.0/14.8) ~ 10%?

Okay, so that would be... (15.0/14.8)

6 = 6.08108108108 (15.0/14.8) * 96 = 97.2972972973

So notice, when you take the ratio, it is exactly the same. The terms cancel out, but you are making more coffee. This stuff tends to matter more, at higher altitudes or various humidity. Essentially, water is the most sensitive medium for variation in boiling and quality control. This may seem trivial, in my personal experience – I'd rather have too little caffeine than too much.

Basically, I want exactly two cups to be satisfactory. It has more to do with the experience of drinking coffee and taste than the actual 'boost'. Programmers or statisicians, data scientists, machine learning engineers will understand – You'd rather have just 2 of something, than to round up to 3. Nobody pours 2~3 cups of coffee. Either they are satisfied with 2, or they're chugging 3.

In whatever-programming, we call this the domain of non-linear real arithmetic as a decidable language. As in, I decide to drink more coffee than not.

As someone who started drinking coffee heavily since a teenager to offset the fact that I have never been a morning person and never will be, while also trying balance professionalism towards working in different timezones where clients prefer to start their day with a meeting...

Yeah, 1-2 cups of coffee. 8oz exactly. I have Ikea mugs. Those are 8oz. One to install my brain, another to calm it down. The second-order effects of caffeine are not unsubtle.

Anything more? I am bull-riding an anxiety trip of wanting to simultaneously produce Berlin techno and the latest innovation in machine learning. Your Mileage May Vary.

For true scientific intuition and experimental honesty, observe the following video detailing what occurs when you drink a full jar of coffee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpWVk3h2SA8