I’m weird in a lot of ways, but what a lot of people find the strangest about me is that I can almost always wake up without an alarm within 5 minutes of when I intend to. And that’s no matter how sleepy I am. I set the time I want to spring up in my head and just wake up. I don’t know how; it just happens.

For more than a decade as a working adult, I didn’t even own an alarm clock.

The combination of the increase in obesity with the profusion of tattoos has really combined to make most women incredibly unattractive. I can see why the 2% or so who have no tattoos and are still svelte have absurd amounts of choice now. They are rare birds (intended in the cliché and the British sense).

This post reminded me, but I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in a work setting as when my Peruvian co-worker was attempting to say “hippopotamus” and just uttered the most hilarious combination of syllables I’ve ever heard one human emit.

No, we were not laughing at her. She was laughing just as hard as we all were. And she still cannot say “hippopotamus.” But she is getting better.

In what situations do boobs hurt?

When you’re being eaten by a lion or a hippopotamus.

Next question.

Nuclear power: no, yes, maybe, but not like this.

One of the few analyses I’ve seen that is not completely clownish. Gets a few things wrong but nothing that destroys the thesis.

China is able to build a nuclear reactor for under $3 billion, so there’s no reason a nuke in the EU should cost €10 billion-€15 billion+ to construct. Something fishy is going on there, obviously.

Here’s what 45 years of nuclear waste looks like:

In contrast, if you gathered all the waste of a coal plant it’d be a lake two miles around and two miles deep (-ish, this math is not exact). And it would’ve generated more radioactivity in that time (for no purpose at all) than an equivalent nuke plant.

I see the Covidians are still banging on about Long Covid and all that other shit. Long Covid is real, but it’s much less impactful to many fewer people than they’d have you believe. Covid is basically just a mild cold for 99.8% of the population now.

But it’s a religion and thus doctrinal beliefs are organized around it. Such is the human condition. As with QAnon, it’s a way for powerless people to take back some measure of control from an indifferent, uncaring world. Sad to see in both cases.

People are really bad at updating their initial assessment of you, even when it should change a great deal.

It was like he couldn’t shake his image as the young, inexperienced salesperson who’d joined the startup in its infancy, he says. Eventually, he left to launch his own company, GetDynasty, an online provider of trusts.

That is extremely common. Nearly all of the time, people see you as you were when they first met you, no matter how much you’ve progressed or improved yourself. It’s true in in personal life and in roles at companies. This is why most of the time the only way to get promoted or get a significant pay bump is to go somewhere else.

In one of my early IT roles I worked with a manager who insisted on seeing me as level one helpdesk, even though in the four years I worked there I went from being helpdesk (though my skills were always far above level one or even helpdesk) to having a CCNA and an MCSE and being asked for by name to troubleshoot difficult server problems. But she never updated her view of me at all. I went from working there straight into being US IT manager for a medium-size company at 26 years old. Was very proud of that, making such a big jump.

And I bet if we’d stayed in contact she’d still see me as helpdesk, some 24 years later.

Scams are often deliberately crude or obvious to quickly weed out those who are not likely to fall for them. It wastes less scammer time.

That’s devilishly devious.

A plane with 62 passengers aboard just fell in Vinhedo.

Flat spin. How the hell do you get an aircraft that large into a flat spin? I can’t even imagine. That would take some work. Maybe ice and an inadvisable attempt to pull back on the yoke.

In a plane that large at that altitude, a flat spin is basically unrecoverable.

I think when I first started tuning out of modern feminism was on a feminist blog in 2010 or so when the main poster and the commenters (all women) were talking about how hot and sexy 16-year-old Justin Bieber was and how much they wanted to bed him. Tellingly, the same posters and commenters were eager to condemn any relationship among grown-ass adults with even a 2-3 year age gap.

That told me all I needed to know. They had no principles. And were also creepy af. Their feminism was all about dating/mating competition elimination among their cohort while their being “good” in their eyes gave them permission to do whatever they wanted to do — up to and including sexually abusing a minor.

I don’t want a thing to do with any of that kind of feminism. And it was already on the ascent, but is now the dominant strain of infection.

German Rhythmic Gymnast, Darja Varfolomeev performs to Michael Jackson’s “In the Closet” at the 2024 Olympic Games.

Could not find a better-quality version that has her full Olympics routine. That’s amazing, though. She makes it look so smooth. I watched some of her older routines and she’s much, much better than she used to be. Cool to see that.

Never thought curling could be this intense.

I love curling. In fact, it’s the only winter sport I like or would want to participate in. I happened to catch it on ESPN in the middle of night when I was 8 or 9. The announcers never said what it was called and I didn’t know because I’d never found it in any books (my only real source of knowledge then).

Later on, I tried describing it to my parents so they could tell me what it was but they thought I was making it up. (“And there were people with brushes on ice with round weights and they clean the ice ahead of the weight.”) It all sounds like utter nonsense when you tell someone about it.

I eventually found out its name when I caught it again on ESPN and the announcer happened to say it.

One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it’s just full of the most massive tardbiscuits around, but ones who are still relatively literate. The reason I like this unfortunate state of affairs is that it shows that performing well on de facto tests of verbal and mathematical ability does not actually mean there is any wisdom present.

Much like ChatGPT et al. Aella (I think) said that most people are ChatGPT most of the time. I believe she is correct. “Smart” people mostly in fact are not all that smart.