tezzer

It was very relevant to the industry we were targeting

One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.

Pensions pay (paid?) regardless of how the stock market is doing, and they pay for life. They grow with inflation, and you don't need to know anything about stocks, markets, funds, rebalancing or anything else to benefit. It was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it wasn't mismanaged and raided. Incidentally, today only 1/3 of working Americans have 401ks.

Mentos sugar free gum (since I have some handy) has xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose and "sucrose fatty acid esthers"

I seem to recall most xylitol gums also have aspartame, but Mentos is the only one I had handy to check.

I was working with a decoder for the LD-CELP voice compression algorithm. The machine it was running on was compute-bound and the playback stuttered a lot. I dug into the code, then went to the papers describing the algorithm, then went back into the code and modified a piece of it to be better tuned to the data I was processing. In the average case I probably made the code worse, but in my specific case I sped up the thing by 30x. That gave me confidence in a few things:

1) I can figure out issues in other people's implementations.

2) The best solution may not be the best solution for you, and my hunches on optimization might be correct

3) It's fun to look like a wizard to your peers

The centrifuge itself- you get a little nausea as it spins up, and then it feels like forward Gs; an elephant sitting on you or the bottom of a dip in a roller coaster that never stops. Even at higher Gs it's just a continuous crushing that makes it arduous to breathe, but they never spun us civilians up to the point that anything seemed life threatening.

But then on some of the vibration runs (they did a bunch of different frequencies), there was this overwhelming all-focusing urgent need to make it stop. It just felt wrong, and dangerous, and there wasn't room in the head for anything but this worry that something dreadfully wrong was happening. It pushed out any other thoughts.

The target runs (and this was a decade ago so I'm dragging through memory) were mostly just visual effects, though. Everything was bouncing around and you couldn't focus on anything well enough to read; and there was a bit of the worry in my thoughts but not the panic from other frequencies.

Yes, in the experiment we had to touch highlighted groups of numbers on the screen during some phases, do simple math on groups of numbers, or read out numbers. One of the harder parts is repeatedly reaching out to touch the screen under G forces, your arms get really tired really fast.

I was a guinea pig for this experiment- they spun us up in the centrifuge, vibrated the chair in a simulation of launch forces, and had us doing reading and manual tasks. There are parts of your brain that nope out at certain frequencies, it's a remarkable feeling.

Nobody talks about ozone because global cooperation led by science and public policy fixed the hole. Come to think of it, maybe we should talk about it more.

I think it was a fine retelling of "Fern Gully"

I'm with you, 100%

The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. We've developed entirely new capabilities that grew out of tangential conversation after in-person meetings. A few of our technical folks prefer remote work, largely because it saves them from stupid commutes. I've noticed the folks most against it are the ones who have historically built new things (myself included), and if I stick around I'm going to miss collaborating with them in person.

Harper's and the Atlantic have been doing long-form journalism since the 1850s. I think the form clashes with modern attention spans and ability to focus, but I still enjoy it. Since it persists, I don't think I'm alone.

Recipe web sites, however... padding, padding and more. Though Dickens was paid by the word, too, and it shows.