Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
A legal and safe psychedelic retreat center in the Netherlands is https://synthesisretreat.com/

They have experienced guides/facilitators who can help in case someone is having a challenging experience while on psilocybin, and they have medical staff on premise if anyone needs it. The one caveat to note is that even though I'd say the retreat center is 90% secular/scientific, there's still a 10% remnant of non-scientific woo such as "shamanism" and "energy flows" and "cosmic surgery" that might be a turn off for the atheistic scientist crowd. Worth taking a peek though.

(And to second the warnings: please read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind first, and be extremely careful if there's any history of schizophrenia in your family before trying any psychedelic)

Comment · 9 years ago
[co-founder of Cape here]

We're already in beta! But since our system involves physical drones located in the real world, we have limited supply of available flights. We currently load balance the demand from our users by having a waitlist from which we whitelist folks on a weekly basis, and a queueing system when all of the drones in our fleet are simultaneously in the air.

Comment · 9 years ago
Yep good point! We currently do not allow our users to actuate individual rotors to this degree of control. Instead, we allow lateral translation to move forward & backward, strafe left & right, ascend & descend, yaw the drone, and pitch the gimbal. Basically, standard WASD + mouse game controls.
Comment · 15 years ago
In addition to suppressing and ignoring jealousy, another option is to learn how to acknowledge and deal with it. Just as fear is quite a natural thing and hinders people in accomplishing their goals, so can jealousy be a hindrance to happy relationships. Both can be successfully managed however.

  Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. - Mark Twain
I believe the same can be said of jealousy. Also note that unchecked jealousy is not strictly a problem of polyamory; it wreaks havoc even in monogamous relationships.
Comment · 16 years ago
If you've ever read a customer review on Dell's, Macy's, Costco's, or Home Depot's websites, you've used an Austin startup product - BazaarVoice. If you've recently booked a vacation rental, you've almost certainly used one of HomeAway's properties (they're in the middle of consolidating the entire industry). Maybe you've looked for a job via Indeed.com? Use Gowalla instead of Foursquare (Gowalla relocated from Dallas)?

The startups are there; they are far and few now but rapidly increasing. I fully agree with you on the disconnect between academia and the startup community though - it's frustrating just how hard it is for Austin startups to hire UT talent.

Comment · 16 years ago
I attended both UCSD (undergrad) and UTCS (PhD), and UT Austin is light years ahead in terms of fostering entrepreneurship at the academic level. Examples: UT had one of the very first business plan competitions in the world 30 years ago (MootCorp) and it created the very first tech commercialization competition 10 years ago (Idea2Product). My personal experience is that the university administration (president, VP of research, Austin Technology Incubator, deans) is very encouraging in regards to any and all entrepreneurship efforts - the major obstructions have come from tenure-track professors. Most research professors consider exploring startups a waste of time, since it does not directly lead to publications.

Another example is that as recently as five years ago, UT's business school (McCombs) discouraged their graduating MBAs from diving into startups. Reason: their rankings were heavily influenced by the salary their alumni rake in immediately after graduation. So the official party line was to encourage them to go into big business with a cushy salary. Luckily that's changing now.

Comment · 16 years ago
> it assumes that we haven't evolved since modern agriculture

No one is arguing that we haven't evolved at all. But humanoids have been around for millions of years, and the 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is a very small evolutionary time step. So the reasoning is more that we haven't evolved enough to fully digest grains without damage to our gut lining.

> Our hunter and gatherer ancestors were starving

You'd be surprised that a lot of hunter gatherers (HGs) were doing a lot better than that, according to anthropologists. One number cited in Robb Wolf's book is that HGs on average only worked on procuring food 10-15 hours a week, with the rest spent socializing, resting, etc.

> people on raw-only diets consistently lose weight, even if they eat a lot

Do you have any supporting evidence for this statement? Virtually all foods on the Paleo diet can be eaten raw (meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables, nuts), and are cooked more for taste than digestibility.

Comment · 16 years ago
> The paleo diet is, I think, 99% bullshit

Would you mind expanding on which parts you find to be bullshit? I can't find any reasons in your current post.

> I don't buy the logic behind exclusion of beans

The logic behind not eating legumes (and dairy) is the same as the logic behind not eating grains: the adult human digestive tract is not capable of fully digesting these (e.g. the protein lectin in grains), causing gut irritation and ultimately causing autoimmunity and inflammation.

> When I've lost enough I think I'll reintroduce grains

Absolutely do! Only then is any nutritional experiment, Paleo or otherwise, complete. I would wager you will feel worse after reintroducing grains, but I would love to hear your results first hand.

Comment · 16 years ago

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