It’s that after the wash cycle or after the drying? Pretty normal for towels that are heavy with water to be pinned to the drum after a high spin. But if they don’t then tumble off during drying (or are physically caught on something) then yeah something’s wrong. (You could just try a lower spin cycle)

There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can’t just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.

I’m pretty sure in that case the sound alone would kill us…

Really makes me wonder what cybernetics will look like in a hundred, a thousand(!) years. No-one can experience someone else’s consciousness. But if an artificial brain extension generated consciousness the same way we do and if it could be swapped between people safely. It might be the first time we have something saying, objectively, it has experienced being both of us in each of our brains and we see “red” the same way. The mind boggles…

Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tower which shows how all logic operations can be replicated with little plastic seesaws and marbles. If you put the bits of plastic on the board in the right way you can see marbles falling by gravity performing binary addition. It blows my mind that that’s all that’s going on in my PC, just a trillion times the scale. I’ve worked in IT all my life and it continually surprises me that any of this stuff even works.

The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotional that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.

Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be of you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.

In the core of this reasoning is the idea that “men are inherently dangerous to women” therefore “women must know at all times the biological sex of any person they interact with”.

I don’t believe that, just to be clear. But I think that’s the view of a lot of people, and that’s what i was outlining. because that was relevant to OP’s question.

So you can’t go past the “transition” history for reasons that under all other circumstances you would decry as “misandry”,

I will assume you are not talking about me here as you have no idea of my point of view on the matter. I believe you are talking generically…

even if you are talking generically, i don’t think your assumption here makes sense. many people feel free to discriminate between people on the basis of their biological sex. there are many contexts where (for example) men will accept they are treated different but will not restort to calling this “misandry”. at least in the settings i’m familiar with and amongst the people i’ve lived alongside here in London, UK. you may have very specific incidence in mind or may not be intending to speak universally, but you said “all other circumstances”, which sounds pretty universal, so i’m just pointing out that’s not correct…

entitled to hands down secrecy, given that a random bigot can just shoot them down for being trans with zero consequences.

I don’t know where you live, but this is not true in the UK

while I agree with the thrust of what you are saying you have a writing style that puts words and assumptions in my mouth in a manner that comes across an unecessarily combative. you also use exaggeration to make your point which is itself problematic…

True

Musk: more politically oriented than just money now, had aligned himself with a very large part of the population that thinks at a minimum that even if some people need to transition for their own health, society retains the right to consider their pre-transition history to still be part of reality

Zuckerberg: profit driven, is aligning Facebook etc with the political reality in America and the real prospect of being fined or embargoed by a Trump administration, would flip back if a democrat won in 2028

Rowling: belongs to a British generation of certain age where trans people are superficially accepted BUT regards their pre-trans history to be something still relevant. That’s where this started and it escalated / deteriorated from there E.g. willing to entertain the “fiction” that a biological man is now a women for the sake of that person’s mental health… she them at the shops presenting female, carry on as normal… talk to them, use their current name and pronouns out of politeness… BUT… if they want to access a female shelter, draw a line… if they want to teach young children, risk assess them including their pre-trans gender and history etc. Rowling then got into increasingly fractious arguments on Twitter, largely arising from other people she followed and liked and what the trans community inferred from that. At that point she doubled down declaring advocates on Twitter to be increasingly hysterical and deluded whilst simultaneously insisting she would treat trans people humanely in person. She’s then lashed out in numerous ways including in her writings aligning herself with increasingly extreme anti-trans people. FWIW, I think she would have carried on being a mildly tolerant (if dated) person of a certain age had she just stayed off Twitter entirely. But lashing out, being misinterpreted and misinterpreting others had led her to spiral down into viciousness and bitterness.

The visual difference of the minimoon and supermoon is not that great, see here but hold your phone at arms length. This is the maximum difference (taken 6 months apart) that the moon ever is relative to itself. In practice, from one night to the next or one month to the next the difference is barely noticeable.

When people say “the moon was huge tonight” what they are generally seeing is the moon illusion

The reference to seasons is badly worded, but what I was referring to is that the earths seasons have nothing to do with how close to the sun it is

no, it’s not. it’s a meta analysis of multiple double blind studies. multiple

“For the children described as sugar-sensitive, there were no significant differences among the three diets in any of 39 behavioral and cognitive variables. For the preschool children, only 4 of the 31 measures differed significantly among the three diets, and there was no consistent pattern in the differences that were observed.”

if you did the same with cyanide you would be able to conclude that “taking cyanide and being dead is positively correlated” even if there were other causes of death. in this wide summary of multiple double blind experiements, there is no correlation between sugar intake and child behaviour. that’s not to say kids don’t act up and get hyper, but it’s other causes, most signficantly parents just underestimate how hard kids find it to regulate themselves when having treats of any sort (non-sugar included) or being in a party atmosphere with friends.

I listed it because it’s one of the things I would sworn by too having seen it first hand. However when you conduct a double blind experiment, kids still get excited at parties / treats / days out / when their friends are over when there’s no sugar in the treats.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/medical-myths-does-sugar-make-children-hyperactive

In otherwords as parents we massively underestimate how excited or crazy kids can get just because they’re excited and not because of something in their bloodstream…

No. At least, it’s not the general cause of ‘middle age spread’.

The base metabolic rate refers to how your individual cells respire when at rest. And a brain cell in 20 year old respires much the same way as a brain cell in a 45 year old. Same for all other organs. There is a gradual decline but it’s on the order a single percents.

Organs and tissue at rest respire at different rates, so some of the change people notice is due to change in body composition. Muscle at rest burns twice the calories as fat however this is still only a minor contribution.

Base metabolic rate doesn’t vary much at all. The vast difference in daily calories consumed as one ages is general activity level.

Overall metabolic rate = base rate (varies a little on body composition) + calories burned in general activity (varies a lot)

People typically are less active between 20 and 40. This is not just sport but also lifestyle. People become more efficient in their habits as they age. They drive instead of biking or walking. They sit in the sun on holiday with nice food and wine rather than dancing all night. Etc

Lifestyle choice is the primary cause of excess calorie intake and ‘middle age spread’. Not “my metabolism that I can’t do anything about”.

• that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker (edit: I have in mind a bog standard UK home thermostat)

• that sugary sweets make kids act “hyper”

• that the moon’s apparent size is due to how close it is to earth (same for seasons and the sun)

• that your base metabolic rate slows as you age and is primarily responsible for you putting weight on in middle age

I had a washing machine that made audible chirps as you dialed through the programs and an irritating ditty whenever you engaged a program. It couldn’t be turned off. That was on a physical dial. But it also had flat touch buttons with no bevel or edge or tactile feedback - and these were always silent - so most of the time you didn’t know if you’d really pressed it or not. God. The first time I used it I was like… “what the fuck”. It was brand new in 2023. I cannot comprehend how someone can design, make, and program something so stupid.