Starting Strength recommends three sets of five reps at 90% of your maximum lift, each with a few minutes' rest between, as the best programme for building strength. For increasing muscle mass (which is what makes you look good, and is surprisingly not as correlated with strength as it would appear) you want something like six to eight sets of ten to twelve reps, at 60-80% of your maximum lift, with 60-90 seconds rest in between.

Effectively, the more time your muscles spend under load, the larger they will get, assuming your diet provides enough protein and calories. I don't know of a program, but anything you can stick to is good. I use the same routine as I did for strength (SS's A/B workouts, plus barbell curls). I still recommend a few months of Starting Strength to get your weight up to begin with.

On pullups - you can replace them with pull-up negatives. Jump up to the chin-above-bar position and lower yourself as slowly as you can, particularly towards the end of the movement. Let go of the bar and jump again. About the only thing this doesn't train, that the regular pullup will, is the starting-from-a-dead-hang motion.

(This has the added benefit of eventually being able to do pullups.)

I'll be there!

Your prior is that there is a 1/5 chance a handful of researchers can find something helpful in 24 hours that isn't listed in something like an Up-To-Date report on the diagnosis (a decent definition of 'everything')?

From the body of the main post (source):

"It is frequently stated that it takes an average of 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice. Balas and Bohen, Grant, and Wratschko all estimated a time lag of 17 years measuring different points of the process."

Granted, I know very little about Up-To-Date, but I would be surprised if they completely eliminated that 17-year lag, especially in the more obscure conditions. They do, after all, have to cover all the conditions, and their return on investment is obviously going to be much higher on common conditions than on obscure ones. In fact, if they put out a fantastically detailed report on Stage III Boneitis (fictional) and nobody suffers a case that year, they've wasted their money. I strongly suspect Up-To-Date is aware of this, though I obviously have no way of knowing whether it affects their decisions.

MetaMed's offer is, as far as I understand it, "pay us 5k and we'll eliminate the 17-year lag for your particular case". This lets them plausibly offer value that Up-To-Date can't, in some cases.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with MetaMed, but I do think they're cool.

On consciousness:

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"

He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts

My understanding having completed parts of it is that it's aimed at someone who doesn't know what a programming language is. If you do know, you're probably better off with another book (and you're also probably better off with something other than Python, but that's my personal opinion clashing with Python's opinions).

I would like to point out that you're probably replying to your past self. This gives me significant amusement.

Implying a (false?) dichotomy between Bayesian and sexism, perhaps? I'm confused too.

Not sure I agree; people are often asked to justify their decisions - to argue their choice was better than another, and calling those arguments an explanation feels like we're stretching the definition of 'explain'.

For what it's worth, the preamble does a better job of explaining to me why Stallman has the reputation he does. Also, I am less sure about this, but I found the prelude to be a joke of sorts - it functioned to set up "completely right" as a negative trait. The edited version lacks some of the punch - it tells me that people hate Stallman for being right, but it doesn't quite communicate the intensity.