2-3 times per week in a normal week. Usually a scheduled dinner with neighborhood friends (and all our kids) midweek, and usually one or two social events on the weekend with whoever is scheduled. Plus I consider my work friends to be real friends, so I tend to see them almost every day.
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The bones are their money.
The coiled form makes it somewhat retractable. If you have the phone earpiece on the phone itself, the coil makes for basically a 6 inch (15cm) curly cord, but you can still bring the phone up to maybe 6 times the length, nearly 1.1 yards (1m).
It's common for signal cables that don't carry much power.
Anyone who has alleviated their back pain loves to prescribe their solution for everyone else with back pain:
- Do these exercises I learned from an occupational therapist or physical therapist or physiotherapist
- Just lift weights and get stronger
- Do yoga
- Stretch more
- Get a standing desk and improve your posture
- Get a better pillow/mattress
- Get regular massages
- No not that kind, get these kinds of massages
- Acupuncture or dry needling
- Cryotherapy
- Certain types of medication
- Certain types of injections
- Certain types of surgery
And the reality is that all of these are potential solutions, and some of them are just good to do anyway, but anyone who has had chronic back pain has probably gotten sick of hearing it.
And I get it. I used to be that guy who advocates for heavy deadlifts and posture exercises and standing desks. And I still know that works for me. But these days, I at least have a bit more humility about the universal applicability of these solutions.
See also people who have gotten out of poverty (or gone from middle class to rich) giving financial advice, people in good relationships giving advice to their single friends, etc.
Just have them drink from a giant hamster tube thing hanging outside your door.
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If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.
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My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn't catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn't notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.
I didn't get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.
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Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).
When I was a student with a small budget in an expensive city:
- Basketball, softball, flag football, soccer, kickball, bocce, volleyball (free for pickup games, very cheap for organized leagues)
- Picnics/cookouts at the park with friends (same price as eating and drinking at home)
- Lifting weights and other fitness-oriented exercise at an indoor gym (relatively affordable monthly fees)
- Museums (cheap/free access for students, some memberships can be a good deal if you're going regularly)
- Volunteering (free, easy way to meet and socialize with people)
- Live events. Sure, an NFL game or a Taylor Swift concert isn't going to be cheap, but the thing with big cities is that there are literally dozens of small music venues, semi-pro sports leagues, comedy venues, theaters, etc., putting on small shows for less than $10/person (or maybe $20-30 after buying a few drinks at the venue). Some things are free, like plays or movies or concerts in the park.
- Festivals. There are always street or art festivals going down in big cities.
I'm not a musician or artist but I know plenty of people who get together to play music with friends, or do creative things together.
And even now that I have money I still do plenty of the cheap/free things in my city, and I donate a lot to the libraries and museums and park cleanup/beautification nonprofits around me in large part because those are great public spaces worth supporting.
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Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
It's too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you're breathing heavily. Then you'll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
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The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That's nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we're building trains, let's build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It's only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don't actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified "touch" perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one's proprioception, because it's all integrated in how it's perceived.
Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?
Ok ok, I get that it can be a lot to dive into.
Stan Kelly is a fictitious cartoonist that has what can only be described as conservative boomer ass tendencies, and is published as if he writes for an audience of conservative American boomers with strong cultural and political opinions without even the slightest bit of media literacy.
So every symbol or allegory has to be spelled out in a painstakingly obvious way. He has several recurring characters: a crying statue of liberty, horrified at whatever is being depicted, and the opposite, someone who enjoys the depravity and needs to be labeled with the word "sickos" on his sweater, usually saying something like "yes, haha, YES!"
The joke is that it satirizes the type of political cartoons that sometimes become popular among the right wing (see Ben Garrison). More recently, the satire has often been focused on trivial, petty grievances being made out to be much more than they really should be. This particular comic is an example: that boomers hate being reminded that they don't even have a monopoly on nostalgia, and that it's been a long enough time since they were being cut out of the cultural zeitgeist that people are now nostalgic for things that they were too old to understand the first time around.
Stan Kelly is the creation of cartoonist Ben Ward, whose comics in his own name generally poke fun at conservatives more directly.
"Sisqos" absolutely kills me.
We already do this, even when the original reference is forgotten.
We use idioms that refer to Greek mythology (hanging over your head, as with the Sword or Damocles, or Achilles heel), or Bible stories (Judas meaning betrayal, shibboleth meaning some kind of identifier of membership in a group), or Shakespeare (pound of flesh), or horse racing (frontrunner, hands down, across the board) or other sports (bullseye, slam dunk, par).
And in terms of our technology, we use all sorts of things that harken back to some obsolete technology. We use a save icon that is a floppy disk, a database icon that uses cylinder drum memory. We refer to the smartphone interface that enters phone numbers as a "dialer" from the "dial" in the days of rotary phones.
For another example of a plant that just didn't make it into modern society at scale, there are skirrets. Carrots, parsnips, and skirrets were related umbellifer plants with edible, nutritious roots, cultivated over the centuries as food. Carrots and parsnips were responsive to breeding for root size, and could produce comparatively huge roots, but skirrets never really did. Once the potato was brought over from the new world, the skirret fell out of favor.