I hit 300 pounds on the deadlift today! Wasn’t even that hard considering how difficult 250 was only a little while ago. Shit, that is a lot of weight.

I’ve gone from 185 pounds to 300 pounds in less than three months on the deadlift. The road to 400 will be much slower and harder.

The hardest part of interstellar travel assuming it is done by organic life forms won’t be getting there — it’ll be creating an engineered ecology sustainable enough to allow long-term voyages of more than 10 years. The drive technology, if we pushed, we could probably have in 20-50 years for 10%+ of c travel. That’s just enough for interstellar voyaging.

But the eco side of it? We’re not even close.

There was some photo of Gal Gadot that I can no longer find that Reddit was criticizing as “fake” because the dress she was wearing was specifically cut for her body.

Do these people not know that nearly any celebrity you see in a magazine or out at a public event, the clothes they are wearing are tailored for, and sometimes specially made for, them? I mean, come on. That’s why they look so damn good in them — it’s not just their statistical aberrance on the attractiveness scale. Anyone can look pretty damn sharp if they’re wearing clothes cut or made just for them.

I’ve only had a suit specifically tailored for me once (at great expense at the time) and wow, does it make a world of difference.

And even more so for Gadot — of course she has clothes made for her. She’s 5’10”. Off the shelf stuff wouldn’t fit very well at all because not only is she in the top 5% of women’s stature, she has very long arms and very long legs. Nearly nothing would fit or would look terrible even if it technically worked.

I guess they deemed the photo “fake” because having specifically-tailored clothes is like Photoshop applied to the real world? I don’t know.

The whole problem with doing nothing about climate change summed up succinctly:

It is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system, as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures. Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. pic.twitter.com/KTPDM6uaBR

— NECSI (@NECSI) December 14, 2018

All of the climate models are wrong, some likely spectacularly so. However, they are useful to us. What I mean is that we’ve loaded a revolver with a bullet, closed our eyes, spun the cylinder and pointed it at our faces, then started pulling the trigger. We don’t have an accurate model for where the round is but we know it’s there. Nor do we know exactly what it’ll do but it will be very bad indeed.

This is climate change and its models. None predict an anodyne, salubrious future. Even the most positive predicts trillions of dollars of losses and huge dislocations. Do people not understand risk and insurance? No, it seems they do not.