bittermang

I think the worst thing about gym is that I didn't learn anything there.

I didn't learn about calories, or healthy eating. I didn't learn about basic cardio, why it's good for you, or how often to do it. I didn't learn about how to build muscle, what reps or sets were.

Gym amounts to mindless busywork. Do stuff or you get an F. It could serve as a foundation of knowledge to set yourself up for healthy habits for the rest of your life. Instead, it has the opposite effect of training you to hate fitness.

So you're telling me I can't make my old Pentium immune to bullets?

Well that's disappointing.

The ONE good thing about Bank of America, and it was only available on their credit cards but not debit cards, and I don't even know if they still offer it: You could generate new credit card numbers on demand, and set a hard spending limit on them, and their expiration date could be set by you.

This was pitched by their marketing as a way to make online shopping safer, because even if they did get the card and the expiry date and everything, they couldn't spend more than the limit which you likely already hit when you bought your item. But the hidden feature was it made cancelling difficult services a breeze, because you could just log in to your banking portal and kill the temporary card you made for that service.

The chat networks do.

As well as several of the methods outlined for protecting/locating the dead drops. WiFi hotspots, bluetooth beacons, etc.

The elephant in the room that this article highlights, but never addresses.

A mobile phone has become a de facto a requirement for illegal commerce, as described, and to me presents a pretty huge single point of failure.

And yes, I know, EVERYBODY has a phone. But I don't. Why would I want to carry a police officer in my pocket? Especially if I'm a criminal.

Sometimes it is.

Listen. I'm from the Midwest, so for all you #WestCoast refugees seeking asylum here. Sometimes you gotta drive a half an hour, and you'll find a really shiny gem sleeping just outside your 'burb.

All I ask is that you please don't ruin this land for the rest of us. We've enjoyed our lives here quite well, while you mock us for being "fly over country".

Yeah, the article goes on to explain why the premise of the headline is wrong. But it is a fascinating unintended consequence of the algorithm none the less.

A few months after seeking help for my mental illness, I had this moment of clarity. All the relationships that laid broken, all the opportunities that were missed. I could suddenly see and understand how my illness had contributed to these failures. How warped perceptions and erratic behavior just let to ruin.

There is this stigma around pills, in society, but also in my family. I would go to the hospital if I had bronchitis, but seeking help for mental issues was completely off the table. You get told to suck it up, stop whining, be a man, but all these actions really do is internalize and compound the illness.

If you're struggling with mental issues, and you're reading this, I just want you to know that it doesn't have to be that way. There is help. You can get help. It does not make you less of a person. It's just an illness, like any other. If you have a cold, you wouldn't think twice about grabbing a cough drop. This is the same. Seeking help isn't giving in or giving power to your illness, it's you taking power over it, and gaining control of your life back from it.

Just as a counter to your anecdote. I'm 35. My mother wouldn't let me so much as cross the street. I live in a small rural town with little to no crime.

Well that explains it. I wanted exciting new news in the world of squashed rocks, dammit.

That sure was a lot of words to once again raise the question, "Why hasn't the LHC found what we thought it would?" And I never did get to the point, if there even was any, that the headline about squished rocks led me to click.

The article kind of answers itself, when it talks about dark matter. It's a placeholder for what we don't know. We work off what we do know, and have confirmed through scientific rigor. From this, we have math models that show us where we think things should be. But we haven't found them. And we keep beating our heads into the wall that the LHC hasn't found them, so who do we blame?

I just feel like it doesn't work that way. Eureka moments and scientific breakthroughs have never been a product of budget and man hours. You have a question, you do your research, you come with your answer based on your information, and you test. And with a machine the scale of the LHC, tests aren't as simple as a baking soda volcano in your kitchen. And with the kind of questions we're asking, maybe the LHC isn't the machine that will find the answers, no matter how many people we throw at it and particles we shoot through it.

So, from my (completely amateur and unqualified) understanding, either the question we're asking is wrong, the methods and devices of the test are flawed, or the hypothesis itself is wrong and no one wants to accept what that means to particle physics.

But even if the only thing that comes out of the LHC is confirmation and understanding of the Higgs, that's more than plenty enough to satisfy me. I'm just so exhausted by all of these articles railing against the LHC. I get it, you're mad at progress in the scientific community, but don't take it out on the equipment. It's done more than well enough, so far.

I've known this since I was a young boy and Tetris was new.

Knocking out 200 lines is faster acting and more effective for me than Hydroxozine, and I think that pill has done wonders for me for as needed anxiety.

There's a lot of factors. Music. The rhythm and speed of the game. Lower levels let you get in to a relaxing pace, while speed increases over the course of the game force you to become sharper and more attentive on the game.

But I think the solo experience of it is what I like the most. It's me against myself. Old high scores or speed runs. I watched the end of the Tetris World Championships this year, and I'm confident I could make a run at it, but would the competitive atmosphere and head to head play ruin it for me? Would it remove the therapy of the game for me, and actually bring about more anxiety?

Comedy Central is doing a similar but different thing. They're adding more commercials to a commercial break, so now a 30 minute block is like 34 minutes, creating a weird stagger in the schedule. MTV does this too, but they play catch up on the occasional episode by cutting out the intro completely, and their schedule stays on the half hour. Both are Viacom networks.

TBS has been doing this for YEARS. They use every trick in the book, but messing with the timing of episodes is the most jarring. And frankly, ruins a lot of shows, comedy is all about timing after all.