I'm not sure, either, but I thought it would be a cheap experiment.

I can't access the actual article, though the abstract certainly indicates that BPA is harmful.

Does the article include evidence showing that eating canned food is a significant exposure risk?

What kinds of cans specifically? what kinds of foods?

Are there other significant sources of BPA?

supporting data ?

On eating more fish: How worried should I be about mercury poisoning? Is it worthwhile to carefully select fish for low mercury content?

For instance, one guy on /r/fitness reports that 2 cans of chunk light tuna a day gave him mercury poisoning; while you're not recommending that much fish, I'd expect that health detriments appear long before full-blown mercury poisoning.

(I'm not expecting you in particular to tell me this, I just want to know if someone on LW has already done this research.)

Curious where you got the USMLE questions. Are you able to share them?

Out of curiosity, does creatine change the way the muscles you build look? E.g. my impression is that people who use steroids will develop very vascular/veinous muscles.

My friend will have one month of unemployment in the SF Bay Area and is looking for projects, experiences, and ideas to make zirself awesome. My friend works in the biological sciences, but plans to apply to medical school. Traits include being multilingual (english, mandarin, french), very limited spanish, cooking, sub-power user competent technology use. Not widely read, not x-rational, difficulties with akrasia, drive, self-confidence, public speaking, making friends. No significant knowledge of coding, math beyond calculus II, philosophy, sociology, politics, economics. Normal fitness levels, but does not regularly exercise.

Where should ze look for advice on how to spend a month without work? What kind of activities would be good to pursue? Goals include acceptance to medical school, forming an alternative career, or other non-specified ideas about becoming a better person.

If you want to increase your pulling strength without much effort, get a pullup bar and put it in a doorway in your home. Then just make a habit of doing pullups every time you walk by. This is remarkably effective. I've been doing this for two weeks and have seen significant improvement.

It's important to actually have it on a doorway at all times. Ours was sitting in a closet for several months, and during that time, I used it maybe twice. In the past two weeks, with it actually on a doorway and requiring no effort for me to set up and start using it, I've been doing ~5 chinups every day. (The number has been going up as I've gotten better at it; I'm looking forward to when I can actually do dead-hang pullups.)

$20 on Amazon.

I think a general policy of decreasing the startup cost of doing things you want to do is a useful one. Rewarding yourself helps too, but sometimes you just need to lower the activation energy.

What about a mentally disabled person, or other groups of humans who will never be capable of consciously entering into a 'moral agreement' with society? Should they also be considered 'outside the realm of morality'? What makes them different from an animal, other than anthropocentricism?

Depends on plant species (not all survive trimming well) and cattle density (trampling certainly kills plants). However, most meat and dairy are not sustained purely by grazing. That said, harvesting grain to feed to cattle doesn't have to kill plants either, unless we consider the embryo in a seed to have the same moral status as a mature plant.

In practice, growing grain to feed to cattle to feed to humans will involve killing a lot more weeds than growing grain to feed straight to humans.