rate of work = 1 / (deadline - current time)

Breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence, just like what the rest of us are waiting for.

The US ranks 36th in literacy.

This is a deceptive statistic. It merely indicates that many countries like Uzbekistan and North Korea falsely report 100% literacy rates. Look here. The USA literacy rate is actually about the same as that of other wealthy Western democracies.

I think she learned it as a kid because it was the language of where she lived, but she didn’t use it much in the USA. The reason we met was actually because she wanted someone she could practice speaking it with.

Once an hour sounds awesome but I suppose a person dying of thirst would think that a person drowning was having a great time.

I have never had a woman hit on me, but a gay man did once and the memory of that warms my heart. (I’m not gay.)

My native language is Russian and I have met a black woman who speaks Russian better than I do. (I haven’t been there for over thirty years so maybe there are some black people living there now, but I never saw one before coming to the US.) Her parents are diplomats and she is fluent in a couple of other languages too because her family lived in several different countries when she was growing up.

I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can’t just assume that if you’re in a hospital then you’ll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you’re there. You have to make sure that you’re getting a doctor’s attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.

My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother’s condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.

(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn’t hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)

It’s worse with context.

The article does say

stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year

and it’s true that those particular stocks have gone down, although I wouldn’t call a 4% drop a “plummet”. The headline is still a deliberate lie and most people just read the headline. Shame on the New Republic.

Also, Pfizer’s market cap is about ten times bigger than Moderna’s and Moderna’s is about ten times bigger that Novavax’s. In other words, Pfizer is more than one hundred times bigger than Novavax and putting the two in the same “biggest pharmaceutical companies” category is bullshit.

Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing worth trying to do because the things I want are either impossible IRL or boring. For example, people tell me to travel but I don’t see the point of that. No matter where I go, there will only be people. People who speak a different language, but that’s just annoying. There aren’t cyborgs, or aliens, or elves, or wizards, or anything interesting out there in the world.

Work often feels like that too. I’m lucky enough that I get to do something I find intellectually stimulating, but sometimes I look back and realize that I spent the last five years writing a computer program that estimates ligand binding affinities a little more efficiently than the previous state of the art. Ligand binding affinities are important, but I’d rather be questing for the Holy Grail…

(And then there’s porn. It can’t replace a relationship but it does make me less inclined to volunteer for the miserable experience of being an uncharismatic introvert and trying to meet someone.)

I think this is a problem for me mostly when I am alone. I do value the real happiness I feel when I’m with my friends and relatives.

Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don’t put things off, folks.

Why not both?

How big does a human hand thriving in the UK get?

There’s precedent for it, with West Virginia. The problem is that the way that the Senate works makes what could have been a local issue extremely national.

Yes. Good for him, and for everyone who got to use his road too!

Note that

Despite the Kelston Toll Road not being approved by the local council, Watts hadn’t committed a crime.

The road was in use for 14 weeks before the council asked for retrospective approval and the nearby highway A431 reopened early.

He stopped because there was no longer construction for drivers to avoid by paying his toll.

What fraction is under 18? It’s hard to tell by looking at the graph. I want to calculate what ratio of combatants to civilians killed a number of 70% implies.

Many senior Democrats were calling on Biden to resign long before he got covid, but he repeatedly made defiant announcements that he would never resign (and Harris supported him). He’s the guy who said that he would only resign if God told him to! His covid infection appears to have been mild (lasting less than a week), and he resigned not because of it but because pretty much the entire Democratic establishment (led by Pelosi) told him that he must.

There are two components to this question. Did many in the working class feel that Democrats had abandoned them? And is Trump’s economic policy actually better for the working class than Harris’s? I think the answers are “yes” and “probably no”. However, voters don’t listen to economists. If they’re not happy with the status quo, they vote for disrupting the status quo even if experts tell them that that’s a bad idea.

I suppose Sanders thinks that the working class would have supported a Democratic candidate who proposed a leftward (as opposed to Trump’s rightward) disruption. My guess is that that isn’t true and socialism is still a dirty word in America, but who knows?

If the quotes are accurate then I think my original reply still stands, just without that first paragraph. I don’t understand how anyone could argue that the Israeli army has already achieved all its objectives in Gaza. Maybe it should withdraw because the remaining objectives are impossible to achieve, but that’s a different matter.