I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can’t just assume that if you’re in a hospital then you’ll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you’re there. You have to make sure that you’re getting a doctor’s attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.

My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother’s condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.

(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn’t hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)

Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don’t put things off, folks.

lemon and sugar

Ah, memories. I can’t drink that any more unless I don’t want to eat for several hours until my teeth stop being sensitive, but during my childhood it wasn’t just delicious, it was a way to bond with my older relatives.

Impra Gold orange peoke. Get the loose-leaf kind that comes in a metal container.

But one time, I was dragged into helping a guy I didn’t know move a couch up stairs. Afterwards his wife (they were an Indian couple) made me some chai tea that was the best thing I ever drank in my life. I would happily carry another couch for one more cup. I was a fool and didn’t ask what that tea was, and since then I have tried different chai teas (including when I went to India) and I never even found one I liked at all.

He’s not wrong about the squirrel…

I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

They had to prove themselves worthy by fighting the oven with nothing but their bare hands, man to microwave.

The answer does say

The reason isn’t some special string of A’s, G’s, T’s or C’s found in dad’s DNA.

It’s true that two same-sex parents of either sex have the basic genetic information to create a female child (a male child needs at least one male parent) but the natural process of embryo development is a big deal!

I’m seeing $30,000 per ton there (as of 2018) so wouldn’t the cubic meter cost about $645,000?

You don’t have to go to a specialist to get antidepressants; many GPs will prescribe them if you ask. I also see a lot of online clinics offering prescriptions without an in-person appointment, but I don’t have personal experience with that. The standard antidepressants are fairly safe and I wouldn’t be too worried about side effects to take them without a psychiatrist’s supervision. Nothing except antidepressants worked to end my depressive episodes, as opposed to making them easier to bear.

Other than that, what helped me most was realizing that I couldn’t trust my own thoughts. It’s hard, because generally “X is true” and “I think X is true” are subjectively the same thing. When I went through periods of depression, I sincerely believed that I had never been happy and that my depression would never end, but as a matter of fact I had been happy (or at least reasonably content) for most of my life and prior episodes of depression had ended. Being able to realize that I had actually been happy and probably would be again, despite what felt true in that moment, made depression much more bearable.

Another key intervention for me was moving closer to my family. It felt like a huge defeat (here I was, an adult who couldn’t handle living on his own) but I told myself “plan based on who you are, not who you wish you were”. Having supportive people around helped a lot; when I’m depressed I don’t want to be around other people but that is actually the wrong strategy. “I just want to be alone” is one of those thoughts that I shouldn’t trust.

Finally, a really useful mental strategy is to consider what advice you would give to a good friend in a situation similar to your own, and then to act on that advice yourself. My depression was accompanied by a great deal of self-loathing but that loathing didn’t extend to my friends (even my imaginary friends). I found that I often knew exactly what advice I would give a friend, and it wasn’t to do what I had been planning to do.

Googling this is unreliable because Microsoft keeps patching out ways to do it. I couldn’t get what I read online to work when I got my Windows 11 laptop back in May, but what did work was using the keyboard button that turns on airplane mode.

I get why Microsoft (acting in its own best interest) wants to discourage offline accounts but trying to ban them completely is ridiculous (especially since Windows 11 works just fine with the offline account). I think I would have returned the laptop out of spite if I couldn’t get an offline account to work, but I’m probably much more spiteful than most people.

I never feel inconvenienced by having to wear clothing. I suppose part of that is because as a man, I can go shirtless without getting stares and I wouldn’t want to be without underwear (for support) even if I were on a deserted island. I wonder what the circumstances you have in mind are in which you would like to have the option of being nude in public.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there have been a few times when I wanted to go swimming and just swimming in my underwear wasn’t an option because I would have to walk while wearing it later and that would be uncomfortable.

The apartment I bought had cabinets with fake, decorative drawers on them. Except it turned out that one of those drawers wasn’t decorative. It was just stuck.

Inside there was a full set of silverware (as in literal silver) from the 60’s complete with the original receipt. It’s worth thousands of dollars. I guess whoever lived there before me was in no condition to pack and the people who packed didn’t know about the silver…

I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote y = x and drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.

The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.

That’s how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.

My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.

I don’t think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.

Yeah but then what are the cat ears?

Less documentation means more job security.

Alanine. No baroque ornamentation, just the beauty of simplicity. A timeless classic.

We read the ingredients on shampoo bottles and we liked it!

The fact that it won’t have any record of calls I missed while the phone was off or didn’t have reception, although actually that’s probably the fault of the service provider. They can send me texts I missed. Why can’t they send me a list of missed calls?