Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
I will refer you to my ER physician friends, who have stories of people attempting to use adhesives of all varieties in the most absurd ways. People will apparently attempt to put anything, anywhere.
Comment · 4 months ago
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
Comment · 4 months ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Churning out the blog posts isn't a bad idea if it's true. Repetition isn't inherently bad.

Comment · 4 months ago
Amen to childhood leukemia rates improving being awe-inspiring. I had a friend I rode the bus with around 2001 who was diagnosed with leukemia and didn't make it. They let us know over the PA system at school. I suspect these days she would have survived.
Comment · 5 months ago
It's misleading because a single murder in this case is not statistically significant, but phrasing it using probabilistic terminology (i.e. percentages) obscures that fact and implies that you have enough data for the probabilistic language to be relevant.

Choosing to use percentages when there is a countable or small amount of data is typically misleading, even though it is "technically" true. In fact, a misleading statement is almost always something that is technically a fact.

Comment · 6 months ago
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.

Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.

Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.

Comment · 9 months ago
This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).

https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html

> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).

The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think many people in the Bay Area also see careers as a game.
Comment · 1 year ago
I think this was meant in jest, but Florida is not that wide on the peninsula. You can drive from Clearwater to Cocoa Beach (the entire width from west to east) in about 2.5-3 hours. So if you live in the middle like near Orlando or Gainesville, you just...drive an hour to go surfing.
Comment · 1 year ago
The funny part of this is, you just described not only travel, but all of life prior to about 2003ish (at least in the United States). This is when, in my social circles, we transitioned to most people having cell phone access and the ability to "let people know if you would be late." Still a long time before smart phones became ubiquitous.

So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.

And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.

We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).

Comment · 1 year ago
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.

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