Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
That happened to me in high school. I was in "advanced" freshman bio. Teacher gave me a B. When my parents inquired during a parent-teacher conference, she said I looked like I wasn't paying attention.

Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...

Comment · 2 years ago
Maybe that’s true but I don’t think it is. Star Wars was before my time but I still enjoyed those movies. I was a little too young for the Matrix when it came out, and when I saw it as an adult I really liked it.

Not all summer blockbusters are created equal.

Comment · 2 years ago
There’s a picture book of Greek myths my dad would read to me from when I was a kid. It toned down the gore and rape stuff (it was still there just implied so a kid won’t get it), and made for great listening as a kid before bed.

20 years later I’m in grad school and I meet some classicists. It seems basically every one of them had that book as a kid. Maybe I missed my calling

Comment · 2 years ago
On Achilles, wasn’t he told he a god / oracle that he can choose between going and having his name remembered as a hero for all time at the cost of dying young or staying home, living a happy life, and nobody remembering him after he passed in old age?
Comment · 2 years ago
I’ve given that as a review to friends about movies before.

The ultimate sin is not being bad but being boring.

Comment · 2 years ago
Nonlinear things start looking like linear things again in very high dimensions
Comment · 2 years ago
I used Android for a long time before switching back to an iPhone. While mostly I’m happy with my iPhone, I do miss some of the UI customization features like being able to switch graphical shells like this
Comment · 2 years ago
They shouldn’t. It makes papers less accessible which means they’re less impactful. That said, a lot of academics are good at their discipline and bad at writing.
Comment · 2 years ago
The issue is it turns player wages into a zero sum game. In the NFL, quarterbacks have been taking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the cap, while players in positions that don’t last as long (due to injuries or just aging out) make less as a result. Now, on one hand, it makes sense because QBs have been more impactful to teams over the last 25 years, but at some level, you have to respect players like RBs who take more hits, have shorter careers, and more medical issues after retirement are getting shafted.
Comment · 2 years ago
I moved into an apartment and kept the plan the previous resident had. They also sold us the non-xfinity router they had st a discount.

My roommate and I had spotty internet at various times of day. We measured it and it was way below what our plan claimed. The previous tenants had no such issue. Comcast refused to believe the problem was on their end and claimed my router was too old. This went on until I bought a new router just to prove a point (new router did nothing).

They finally send a repair guy out. He’s there for 5 minutes before diagnosing the problem: the cables were water logged to hell and back. He fixed it in 20 minutes and was gone.

Comment · 2 years ago
I have no experience with this but my understanding is that they don’t go straight to wage garnishes (which I’ve heard the bureaucracy is slow to handle in situations where the garnished individual moves). That happens if you don’t meet payments as required.
Comment · 2 years ago
Your personal one is the correct one from my perspective (as someone that knows a lot of math and is familiar with statistical mechanics as math and not physics). The ODEs that we get from classical mechanics are typically reversible: we can write down an ODE that does the same thing but backwards.

You cannot do that for the PDEs that arise in statistical mechanics and the result is the second law. These PDEs arise from approximating many copies of deterministic systems as continuous distributions of states. Entropy is not a concept that makes sense when discussing single trajectories of systems — only the macroscopic view of many copies of that system evolving according to the same dynamics.

Comment · 2 years ago
Is the mania with this game really just that people are hungry for anything pokemon-like?

I tried the game the other day and played it for 4 hours. I knew nothing coming into it besides “pokemon with guns” and I just found it to be awful

Comment · 2 years ago
I find it interesting that you dislike the combat in the originals but like Pokemon Stadium which only features combat (and horrid mini games).

Also I’m not really sure what exploring you’d want to do in those early games. I guess if you wanted to explore, I’d be annoyed by the constant fights, but that never occurred to me. The point of leaving a town was to get into a fight for one reason or another. That style of random fights outside of towns was also a staple of a lot of top down RPGs at the time.

I haven’t played a pokemon game in 20 years, but I think you might have been barking up the wrong tree a bit. Outside of the combat, there isn’t much to do. If you don’t like the combat, then it’s just not your game.

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