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Fencing is extremely bad for your knees :(. -- An ex-foilist.
I've heard that. I suppose it's for the best that I moved into a style less lunge-happy (German and Italian longsword.)
In response to
Lifehack Ideas January 2015
For several years I had lower back pain reoccurring regularly - pulled muscle. I tried the standing desks and it helped but not that much. Then I heard it was due to weak core muscles. Once I started doing the exercises it helped quite a bit. I just did the ones where I was on my back and I did them in bed.
But once I stopped having back pain as often then I stopped doing the exercises. Mainly because the exercises are boring and easy to skip. For the last year I have had luck using the slendertone waist band. It seems to work. I play video games to take my mind off the 30 minutes of discomfort - plus it is positive reinforcement .
edit for clarity
I once had the same problem with a weak core. Fencing cured it for me within a few months, though for the first two months I ended the classes with pain in that area.
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Recovery Manual for Civilization
Knowledge is very fragile. When Hellenistic civilization fell to the Romans c 150 BC, it left behind libraries of science, but the Romans never understood it. Virtually all of the books have since been lost, so we don't know how much the Greeks understood, but we do know how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and that the Romans never understood, but instead substituted magic.
This rings false. Greek learning didn't disappear just because the already faltering Hellenistic dynasties were toppled.
The ability to compress language
If I was given a goal of cutting my verbiage in half, I think I can do that reasonably well. The question is, what's the meta-heuristic here? When should an authour go to the effort of aiming for shortened prose as opposed to longer text?
As a reader, it's less work for more reward.
Do you have a source for the claim that fat people don't generally have slow metabolisms?
I assume you mean some kind of formal reference as opposed to common sense arguments or general observations. If so, are you seriously skeptical of the claim? If the answer is "yes," then I will try to dig something up.
This is interesting enough that I'd like to see some more explanation, too.
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Unpopular ideas attract poor advocates: Be charitable
The negation that "Popular ideas attract disproportionally good advocates" seems also worth attention. People accept sloppy thinking a lot more readily if they agree with the conlusion. This can be used as a dark art where you present a sloppy thinking argument for obvious truth or uplifting conlusion and then proceed to use the same technique to support the payload. The target is less likely to successfully deploy resistance.
Also it's quite often that a result that is produced in a rigorous way is rederived in a sloppy way by those that are told about the result.
That explains theology.
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Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed
Fascinating. I'm a programmer and I do that (minus the rubber duck), but I didn't know the term. Thanks!
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Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed
No problem. It seems like programming is a perfect example of something with a very large working memory requirement and the manipulation of a lot of symbolic, linguistic information.
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Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed
In computer programming, this is commonly called rubber ducking.
WIS is more how good your inbuilt heuristics are, which is not quite the same as the way "rationality" is used around here.
Ask five gamers what WIS means, get five answers.
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If you define God as "an invisible bearded wizard living on the top of the clouds", then yes, we have empirical evidence against that. But that's not the only definition of God. But as I said, there are much better places of coming up with proofs and disproofs about the existence of God that this article.
I find more sophisticated theologies as unconvincing. The fundamental problem is the more coherent and logically provable your god is, the less she matters, until it's nothing left that could be thought of as a god at all, let alone produce any real consequences that we should worry about. It's like the driving paradox - to paraphrase George Carlin, everyone that drivers slower than you is an idiot, everyone that drives faster is a maniac. If someone has a more literal god than you (you in the general sense) they're clearly just a straw man or an idiot. If someone has a less literal god than you, they're misguided or heretical or cowardly.
In this analogy, I choose not to drive.