23 Comments
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Nov 28
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(suspicious unexplained cryptographic string looking thing removed out of fear of the unknown)

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Could you share a link for 1.?

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Oh sorry, I meant for the one about meditating into bliss

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Oh, this is a reference to jhanas. (Unfortunately I don't know of a good comprehensive reference for them. Maybe this? https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/manufacturing-bliss

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"a show that your brain puts on, just once, just for you, I hope you’re paying attention" - that I read this - I won't be forgetting it anytime soon

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This jolted me awake as well. It's something I think about a lot. The full gamut of experience sits right at our fingertips. Yearning for Some Other Thing™ is yet another operating desire, some motive force to which we can even be thankful.

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I looked up information about Ming the clam (from point # 11). What it boils down to is this: Scientists find the oldest known living animal on earth, a peaceful creature minding its own business, and promptly kill it.

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Accurate. I am thankful that species with negligible senescence exist, though!

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Evolutionarily it would make no sense for running to kill your knees. It's modern shoes with their crazy and foot hostile designs that are to blame!

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Wood is awesome when you think about it

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i think we underrate wood because almost all of the incredible wood things our ancestors built are gone

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How much of the felt heat from a campfire is warm air? I'd guess that it's mostly radiant heat that doesn't really rise (or does it)?

Open topped freezers are pretty cool tho and water heaters are amazingly cool (or hot?). I recently learned that warm water rising is very important to how they function. Excellent tech connections explainer: https://youtu.be/Bm7L-2J52GU

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Damn, I think you're probably right—the heat from campfires is probably mostly radiant, and probably wouldn't be that different if hot air sank?

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Yeah, there's no love for my hedgehog homies* Desert and Indian. Sonic steals all the attention :(

*from now on I'll be calling homologues "homies"

#24 is pretty great though. I've been learning more about the Moon's orbit (through playing a KSP mod with the real life solar system) and it's kinda crazy that things are as stable as they are. You'd think all the weird stuff like nodal precession would mess that up, but apparently not.

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I second the movement to refer to homologues as 'homies'

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Good lord, /how/ I wish to know what unique perversion of Dynomight's is concealed beneath the bonnet of #23...

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trust me, it's better this way

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And thank you for this food for thought

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“We’re only gaining like 0.07 years of life expectancy per year”: so true. I wrote about this as well. https://www.unaging.com/the-limits-of-human-lifespan/ Totally agree, someone should boost that higher.

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That Dynomight makes list like this.

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Thanks! So nice to read realism (in addition to Hannah Ritchie). We don't need to be in doom-loop about things like "MICROPLASTIC!" We have plenty to appreciate (and plenty actually bad we can deal with if we care enough).

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Great list, I sincerely appreciate you shining light on many of these! I hadn't heard of many of these.

Also, in Thanks 3 you mentioned that painkillers stop pain during surgery. I just want to add reason 30.5: they stop sensation long enough to survive incredibly invasive procedures.

Just 60 years ago, a person who sedates people, opens them up, and removes their heart would be called a serial killer.

Now, they're called doctors. You could have your heart removed and wake up fine a couple hours later. And that's just one of our many transplantable organs!

Aristotle thought consciousness is in the heart. We can figure out it's in the brain just by process of elimination. Heart, lung, stomach, intestine, liver, kidney, pancreas, skin, eyes, thymus - all of those have been transplanted. What's left?

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