If I ever made an album I’d be forced to call it “Eclectic Dialectic.”

What other choice is there?

I’ve seen the stats. I know a lot of people have trouble losing weight. And yet I didn’t. I lost over 25% of my body weight in less than six months. Because I am not that big anyway, I had to buy three new sets of clothes in that time period.

That weight has been off for almost five years now.

But I’ve long wondered why people have such trouble. Thinking about it more and reading this, I’ve realized that people mainly (in my opinion) have great difficulty keeping weight off because we frame it as a punishment, as yet another instantiation of our Judeo-Christian “sin/punishment” guilt-cycling belief system.

This is doomed to failure.

Because I am not strongly connected to my culture and don’t understand much of it, thinking about weight loss this way would’ve never (and did not) occur to me.

So why do people gain it back if it’s so important to them? If they’d rather be blind or have a leg amputated, why can’t they just keep up with their weight management efforts? Is it because as Tara describes their bodies work against them? Certainly in part, but I think the bigger reason is because they’ve likely chosen inane methods of loss and maintenance – like those described by Tara. To lose their weight they’ve gone on highly restrictive diets, they’re denying themselves the ability to use food for comfort or celebration, they’re regularly white-knuckling through hunger and cravings, they’ve set ridiculous Boston Marathon style goals for their losses, and they’ll often possess highly traumatic all-or-nothing attitudes towards their efforts. In short? They’ve chosen suffering as their weight management modality.

I have the best “diet” ever. Check this out: I eat whatever the fuck I want.

I just don’t do it whenever I want to. If there is something I really want, I say, “Well if that still sounds good on Saturday, I’ll eat it.”

So I do.

Or if I absolutely just can’t wait (which is rare), I have a tiny bit of it, maybe a spoonful or so.

But it turns out that if you reframe how people think about weight loss, a large percentage of them can and do keep the weight off.

Paying attention to intake, exercising, and applying the education they received from their expert research team. And would you take a look at that graph!  By year 4, of the folks who’d lost more than 10% of their weight in the first year, some did indeed gain it back, but 42.2% kept off nearly 18% of their presenting weight for the full 4 years! In fact they kept off virtually all of their year one losses. Moreover, looking at all comers of the trial and not just the folks who lost a pile in year one, nearly 25% of all participants maintained a 4 year loss greater than 10% of their initial weight.

That’s sure a far cry from no one.

Like anything else in life, you’ll get in return what effort/thought you put into it. Surprise.

I stole this from somewhere, but now I can’t remember where and I can’t find it.

But some wag observed – accurately – that the definition of YA had expanded so much that all that being a YA novel now means is that it is a novel people actually want to read.

So true.

Women can’t do pull-ups only because they are not trained to do them.

I served in an airborne unit in the army. All the women I served with could do quite a few pull-ups, some more than me. In an airborne unit, pull-ups are more necessary than in most other units as you have to be strong enough to pull the risers of your chute to steer yourself.

In a chute without real steering, this is the only way to do it, and it requires nearly lifting your entire bodyweight using the same muscles as a pull-up.

I think I could 19 pull-ups at my best. Maybe a bit more. I knew at least one woman who could do 40+. She wasn’t even that bulky, just short and strong.

Remember this when ISPs claim that 250GB is enough for anyone, etc.

You’ll need 165Mbps internet in just 6 years, study finds.

Bandwidth needs will continue going up at about the same rate for ~20 years or so, if other technologies are any guide (which they are).

Women being masturbated at in public isn’t as rare as you might think.

Who thought it was rare? I personally know two women it’s happened to, and I don’t know many people.

Yeah, I know it’s a tampon commercial and thus designed to sell things, but it’s also really, really well done.

I was on a work softball team a few years ago. We weren’t that good. There was a player there that would sometimes join our team when we needed an extra, who usually was on another team.

She’d played Division I softball in college, and damn was she good. She could hit better, field better, run faster and make better decisions than anyone on our team, or than anyone else I saw playing in the entire league. She saved us from utter embarrassment in many games.

I am glad she did it all like a girl.

Google is going and making the same old mistakes in GUI design as has been done a million times, but can’t even recognize it because they are the “best and brightest” in their own eyes.

It can do things that physical paper can’t, like grow and shrink with animations. Those animations were important to Google, because they help users understand where they are inside an app. "A lot of software … kind of feels like television or film in terms of jump cuts," Wiley says, causing you to lose your sense of time and place. For apps, you want something more akin to a stage play. "It’s going from one moment to the next," he says, "that scene change, and what’s happening onstage is choreographed and transitioned, and there’s meaning."

Here’s what animations do: they slow me down. They slow my device down. They make it harder to tell what is going on in 99% of cases.

They are designed to appeal to the first-use “wow” factor and little else. This sort of animation-heavy design suffers greatly with continued use.

I always disable all animations (if possible) the moment I get a product.

As for the rest of it, it looks like a poor copy of Windows 8.

This is really good, and shows just how much artistry and language play goes into rap.

Eminem, however, in this song is different. He interlinks his rhyme groups, a poetic technique known as “synchysis” in classical poetry like Vergil. This can be represented in the form ABAB. Poetry (…or rap) involving multiple synchyses would be represented as something like ABACCAB, or AABACBADC. Hm, I wonder what Eminem does…

But no female rappers? Dessa? Early Lil’ Kim? That’s a big omission.

What’s really funny is when people who think rap “isn’t hard and isn’t music” attempt it. It’s absolutely hysterical and bad.

Test yourself: Are you preachy, arrogant, and annoying?

Shit, I don’t need a test for that. The answer is, hell yeah I am.

This is true of me as well.

I would­n’t make it past the résumé scre­en if I were start­ing my care­er today.

Luckily when I started it was fairly easy to get a job in IT. Now it’s not so easy and there is no career path to move up – most of the lower-level jobs are being de-professionalized or eliminated.

Strange to make a society that cares more about credentials than actually being good at something.

But that is pretty standard for oligarchic societies, which is what we pretty much are now.

This is a good review of one of my favorite films.

Both Anna Farris and Angela Bettis are just great in the movie, and it does as the reviewer points out skewer the “I’m so quirky and weird” rom-com crap.

This is also why I could not be a modern scientist.

It’s not just a cliché to state that a modern scientist often knows very much about an extremely tiny area. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not for me at all.

It’s often why I can romp all over intellectually those with college degrees, especially the arrogant ones who believe their degree in computational hydrodynamics means they know everything about every field. When in reality they usually only know a moderate bit about that one field they’ve studied and usually not much else.

I’m not an expert in any field, but I’ve always strived to know moderately much about every thing I possibly can.

I think it is a huge mistake for no generalists to be present in science as specialists often see very little, and understand even less. That’s just the nature of specialization.

Stepping outside of science and into the broader world, administrators and politicians certainly much prefer specialists to generalists. A specialist is not likely to oppose much of anything or have strong political opinions either way as they just do not understand enough outside of their field to do so.

A generalist is more of a threat. For similar reasons, humanities scholars are also a threat, and this is the main reason humanities programs are being sharply curtailed or outright eliminated at many universities. (In the humanities, you absolutely must be a generalist before you become a specialist, as otherwise you cannot even understand your own field.)

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Let’s say that we could stop all cultural appropriation tomorrow. No feathered headdress would ever again mar a fashion runway. Blackface would remain a thing of the past. Only those signalling their identification with the Palestinian struggle would wear the keffiyeh. Yet here’s a sticking point – since the scarf was once just a symbol of Arab masculinity, should we revert to that? Given that almost every cultural form has been purloined from somewhere else, it proves tricky to tell what belongs to whom, and to separate the offensive jerks from those pursuing respectful cultural innovation. The line between insider and outsider can be surprisingly indistinct.

Obsessing so much over cultural appropriation is to me extremely silly because 99% of everything in every culture everywhere ever has been “appropriated” from some other culture.

That is just how humans work.

I think I truly must not be human, as I can only solve captchas about 40% of the time on the first try.

This guy has the same problem it seems.