You’ve mentioned before that you take daily constitutionals around your neighborhood in LA. Did you get the treadmill for safety reasons i.e. because of the uptick in crime and traffic accidents?

How about “shape shifters” vs “worm tongues”?

“Fortunately, the seller could still remember the complex steps of how he rotated the treadmill to get it into the room years ago, and could reverse the process in his head. So all went well, no thanks to me.”

From a fitness standpoint, you’ll do yourself better by lifting and carrying that thing around the house rather than just walking on it for an hour.

The man who visualizes the rotation of bulky objects will or will not work for the man who writes about it, but neither will wish to be the man who does it.

“Not surprisingly, [3-D visualization ability] correlates with political attitudes.”

Is a remark like this called “burying the lede”? In what way does 3-D visualization ability correlate with political attitudes? And why should this correlation not be surprising?

The man who visualizes the rotation of bulky objects wll or will not work for the man who writes about it, but neither will wish to be the man who does it.

“3d brainpower is useful in fighting, hunting, making objects, and moving large, bulky objects like my new treadmill.”

Could it be beneficial in political/philosophical analyses, due to an ability to assess theories by “seeing” them (in the mind’s eye) put into practice in hypothetical situations?

Charles Sanders Peirce claimed that math was diagrammatic reasoning i.e. manipulation of visual diagrams. This is obvious in geometry of course, but even in the more apparently verbal algebraic math, he characterized it as visual manipulation of diagrams e.g. arrays of notation.

I’m a bit puzzled about what verbal ability is supposed to mean exactly. People with high verbal ability are good at manipulating the visual objects that are written letters. Reading and writing involve transforming visual images in one’s head to words and vice versa. I don’t know if there is such a dichotomy.

Re: Cognition and exercise (btw, I thought you hated running??), Harvard Medical School professor and psychiatrist, John Ratey, M.D., is a big proponent of aerobic exercise to grown our brain cells (and mitigate or eliminate emotional/mental problems). He also advocates movement over uneven surfaces (e.g., hikes up hills) to work that part of the brain which evolved to do the millions of calculations required to simply both move through space and adjust for uneven surfaces.

“[Y]ou have the power to change your brain. All you have to do is lace up your running shoes…

What makes aerobic exercise so powerful is that it’s our evolutionary method of generating that spark. It lights a fire on every level of your brain, from stoking up the neurons’ metabolic furnaces to forging the very structures that transmit information from one synapse to the next…

Today, of course, there’s no need to forage and hunt to survive. Yet our genes are coded for this activity, and our brains are meant to direct it. Take that activity away, and you’re disrupting a delicate biological balance that has been fine-tuned over half a million years. Quite simply, we need to engage our endurance metabolism to keep our bodies and brains in optimum condition. The ancient rhythms of activity ingrained in our DNA translate roughly to the varied intensity of walking, jogging, running, and sprinting. In broad strokes, then, I think the best advice is to follow our ancestors’ routine: walk or jog every day, run a couple of times a week, and then go for the kill every now and then by sprinting…

Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high-performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs. So if you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run during lunchtime is a smart idea.”

― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

The site Know Your Meme has an amazingly detailed history of the term wordcel. Apparently it was coined on 4chan’s /pol/ message board, and the Twitter user roon just popularized it.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel

It’s an interesting phenomenon that /pol/, which is WAY outside the Overton Window, has such a short pipeline into semi-mainstream political discourse. All of the smarter-than-average, very online pundits and anons operate in a milieu in which their lives can be wrecked if they say something politically incorrect. And yet, all of these people are now intimately familiar with tons of hatefacts and dissident right arguments; they’re exposed to them constantly in the recesses of Twitter and comment sections. This was not true twenty years ago, and it is true now despite the post-2016 bannings. Today I also noticed Andreessen, a big-time Silicon Valley name, follows and retweets Zero HP Lovecraft, who is basically a full-blown Alt Right account.

This situation doesn’t seem sustainable. I have no idea what will happen, but the mainstream’s hold may be more tenuous than we realize.

Check out these people– many female and/or black– rotating bulky shapes such as restaurant highchairs:

WATCH: Massive Brawl Breaks Out In Bensalem Golden Corral Over Alleged Steak Shortage

Of course, they have more room to maneuver, above table height.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was tickled pink by the dichotomy and it has become a sensation.

Which is Jeff Bezos? He’s paying Rotterdammers to dismantle a historic liftbridge to free his new yacht.

Rotterdam Is Dismantling a Historic Bridge for Jeff Bezos’s Superyacht

Can something that tall even float? Won’t it just blow over?

I still remember the delivery man putting my treadmill down in the basement – it wasn’t really a question of rotation in space (that was getting the sofa into my den), it was a question of weight – man is that thing heavy! Whoever drags that thing up the stairs someday is going to have to be even stronger.

The all time rotation in space problem was getting stuff up the winding staircase of the tiny 19th century row house that my daughter rented in downtown Philly. In the end we removed a window and pulled stuff up (and then down the next time she moved). In Amsterdam the canal houses have a built in pulley at roof level for this purpose.

What does it say that my wife is better than me at arranging the dishes to all fit in our dishwasher so they all get clean?

Someone (Haworth?) makes a computer desk, with usb and power ports, attached to a treadmill, so you can browse headlines while moving your legs. It’s expensive though. I suppose given enough shapelordship you could just kludge your own.
——-
I see the real political correlation being between people for whom words have meaning and people for whom words mean what the caterpillar says. Is that the same thing, with lying coded for facility?
——-
OT disturbing editorial in the Journal today. I remember groaning when they announced the “nonpartisan” redistricting committees which were screamingly obviously partisan. Turns out the hammer making that strategy work was Eric Holder going around applying lawfare to every district he didn’t like, and almost always succeeding.

Just as most people with PCs with high end GPU chips are male, most people with high end shape rotation skills are male, probably for similar reasons: 3d brainpower is useful in fighting, hunting, making objects, and moving large, bulky objects like my new treadmill.

Colorblindness is male. Is heterochromia?

https://www.3blue1brown.com/

3Blue1Brown is a math YouTube channel created by Grant Sanderson. The channel focuses on teaching higher mathematics from a visual perspective…

The channel name and logo reference the color of Grant’s right eye, which has blue-brown sectoral heterochromia. It also symbolizes the channel’s visual approach to math.

Is there a connection here?

I know the feeling, Steve. I used to be a bridge engineer, but that didn’t work out for me.

Are as many good “shape rotators” still needed? I remember walking through engineering sections at Ford around 1990. Big darkened rooms full of \$50K UNIX workstations with high end CRTs, and every one was manned (!) by a male engineer who sat and endlessly rotated parts under design. It was fascinating to watch.

But isn’t today’s CAD software (and hardware) much more capable? How much is required of the engineer?

Anyway, I just read a totally unbiased and completely fair Wikipedia article that says that the small number of female engineers is totally the fault of the men in the field.

If men got together and all agreed to be worse at shape rotation, women would be more competitive. Let’s go Harrison Bergeron!

“Why not ‘shapelords?’”

See, shit like that is how you know you’re a wordcel.

I have a theory that a huge number of our assumptions about intelligence are due to the profession of teaching being almost entirely dominated by women. Perhaps the supposed dichotomy between visual and verbal thinking is due to how men’s thinking has been shaped by women over generations.

The bridge isn’t going to be dismantled, it’s going to be adjusted (1 foot) and then adjusted back. Supposedly it won’t hurt the bridge and will create jobs.

Wordcel gives me the opportunity to mention Wordle. Created by a guy from Wales (white, creative) who now lives in Brooklyn to entertain his Indian girlfriend. Sold to the NY Times for… money.

Take it away, Men of Unz!

No, it’s so he can avoid the sunlight.

The PD Mangan trifecta is “sun, steak, and steel”, so Steve is focused on being a scrawny troglodyte. Eventually, he’ll end up like Golum, eating fish in a cave and pondering riddles with his “precious”, an Apple laptop.

Huh, that’s interesting. I assumed the creator was gay because everything I read about it referred to his “partner.”

And yet ordinary people in countries where everyone walks are fitter and healthier than most gym addicts in the US.

I’m a bit puzzled about what verbal ability is supposed to mean exactly. People with high verbal ability are good at manipulating the visual objects that are written letters. Reading and writing involve transforming visual images in one’s head to words and vice versa. I don’t know if there is such a dichotomy.

More than that. People with high verbal ability can draw on large vocabularies, spell almost any word correctly, make puns and rhymes, create new words when required, solve cryptic crossword puzzles quickly, and learn new languages relatively quickly. They can usually also read extremely fast.

I am not so sure if reading and writing involves transforming visual images in one’s head to words. It can do, but a lot of verbal communication skips that stage all together.

However as Orwell said, it is a good idea when using similes and metaphors to think about what the words actually represent, otherwise you will end up with stale and meaningless verbiage.

I think perhaps that was RFK Jr’s problem with the alleged Anne Frank gaffe. Perhaps he was not visualizing in his mind what unvaccinated people in the US are actually experiencing, when he invoked the image of children hiding from Nazis.

It might be interesting for you to take or review the 3d “spatial aperception” component of the military pilot candidate evaluation tests like the ASTB. You have to complete them very quickly compared to the rest of the exam, something like 100 questions in 15 minutes. It’s strongly selective: I remember thinking it was a strange but trivially easy section of the test, where smart classmates of mine were eliminated by it despite strong scores in both verbal and quantitative sections.

The PD Mangan trifecta is “sun, steak, and steel”, so Steve is focused on being a scrawny troglodyte.

FWIW, Mangan used to be a fanatical vegan before becoming a fanatical paleo/carnivore dieter over the past decade. On his original blog, Mangan’s Miscellany, during the early to mid 2000s, he was just as supremely confident about his vegan diet back then as he is now about paleo. He has a personality type that becomes religiously devoted to fads

There are lots of bizarre, faddish health and diet ideas that have become popular among the online right wing. It takes very little sun exposure for your body to produce huge amounts of vitamin D. There are rapid diminishing returns beyond that. Spending hours in the sun is not some panacea, and there may be risks to excess vitamin D. A paleo diet high in fat is not risk free either, no matter how much in shape you feel or look. This guy almost killed himself with a paleo diet:

How the f*ck did I have three blocked arteries?? I fasted, ate low carb, cut seed oils, did cardio and weights at least 5x a week. End result…. My widow maker was 95% blocked?? thank the Lord I just happened to go to cardiologist after iwatch reported afib pic.twitter.com/o1xsdHLK68

— Michael Reilly (@TheCarnivoreKid) December 21, 2021

The real problem is when you have two bell curves, one red, one green, on the same plot and then a lot of minds tend to go boggle.

Is wordcel a dig analogous to incel? There is no obvious connection between facility with language and inability to find a prostitute or a low value woman to fornicate.

Also shape rotation ability might be a spandrel. Fitting multivariate data is as much art as science and there is a lot of crappy art out there. The conclusions of the intelligence psychos and how to measure it accurately are not unanimous. It is not at all like measuring height or weight. When Jordan Peterson says he has a high verbal IQ and an average numbers IQ he may be full of malarkey.

My spellcheck does not like spandrel!

As an alternative to an “enormous” treadmill may I suggest a folding treadmill. They’re cheap, they take up about a square foot of floor space when folded and set against a wall, and they can be unfolded and ready for use in two minutes. They don’t do inclines, but if you want that you can just prop up the front end with something.

This is a pretty good shape rotation test:

https://www.123test.com/spatial-reasoning-test/

I got 10 out of 10, although a couple were pretty tough. Now let’s see who the wordcels are here.

anon[170] wrote:

Reading and writing involve transforming visual images in one’s head to words and vice versa.

The fact that you phrase it that way suggests that you are (or ought to be!) a STEM person.

Many years ago, I was having dinner with a bunch of STEM guys and a couple of business people.

One of the STEM guys mentioned that the way communication works is that you get an idea that is a picture in your head and then you figure out, somewhat painstakingly, how to translate that picture into English to communicate your thought to others.

All of us STEM guys nodded knowingly.

The business folks looked at us as if we were space aliens.

I myself see analytical arguments, time scheduling, etc. in a visual manner, and not in what might seem obvious ways (e.g., I do not see a calendar in my head for time, nor symbols for a logical argument).

A famous incident in late-twentieth century academic psychology: Stephen Kosslyn at Harvard tried to convince his fellow psychologists that humans often think visually. Many of his fellow psychologists resisted vigorously, coming up with what seems to me (and I think anyone who thinks visually) truly bizarre alternative explanations of the data.

Apparently, it took fMRI and PET scans for Kosslyn to more or less win the debate.

Personally, I suspect that many of his critics actually lacked any significant mental visualization ability and wrongly assumed that everyone else was like them.

(A bizarre addendum: wikipedia claims that Jeffrey Epstein funded Kosslyn’s research.)

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading? It does for me and for some other people I know, but perhaps a novel is just words for some folks.

Thanks, I appreciate this comment. Based on what I have read, this

and there may be risks to excess vitamin D

isn’t really something to worry about unless someone has completely gone off the Vitamin D rails.

There is apparently a correlation between handedness and spatial abilities. From a study four decades ago:

Analyses revealed a sex X handedness X ethnicity interaction on the spatial factor, and no significant handedness-related differences on verbal factor. In all ethnic groups strongly left-handed males had higher spatial scores than strongly right-handed males, whereas strongly left-handed females had lower spatial scores than strongly right-handed females. Among subjects of Japanese or Chinese ancestry, strongly left-handed subjects differed from ambidextrous subjects as well as from right-handed subjects, and these differences, too, were of opposite sign for males and females.

That fits my own anecdotal evidence: when I was a doctoral student in physics in the theery group at SLAC, we found that about half of the grad students in our group were lefties.

But isn’t today’s CAD software (and hardware) much more capable? How much is required of the engineer?

Jay Leno has occasionally mentioned he has access to a some kind of cad program to fashion new, quality steel engine parts for some of his very old cars which, without it, would be unserviceable, since the cars are too old and esoteric to acquire the part from a junkyard. He said, via his new 3D printer, he can now create the part he needs to perfect spec, and even improve the part design, take it out of the printer, and put it right in place in the car engine with no problem.

I don’t know if he has a professional engineer on hand, he didn’t mention if he did, but that’s still mighty impressive. That couldn’t even have been done a couple of years ago. Bringing new life to ancient dead cars is pretty amazing.

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading? It does for me and for some other people I know, but perhaps a novel is just words for some folks.

This is a radical dichotomy. No, novels do not turn into movies for me, but some scenes do turn into vignettes.

I think this is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language. Nb: Wittgenstein was an engineer before he became a philosopher.

Wittgenstein argued that all meaningful thoughts that people have are arrangements of pictures, which, when expressed in language as propositions can be communicated to others. Therefore the perennial questions of philosophy— God, afterlife, morality, beauty, etc. — discuss things that are not demonstrable, can’t be pictured, therefore the propositions are not meaningful and the perennial questions of philosophy are nonsense.

So… Amy Schneider is a man… who is identifying as an comically ugly woman… who has a girlfriend… and is the highest scoring ugly woman… with a penis… on Jeopardy.

It’s not that I can’t keep all these wretched elements in my head at once.

It’s just… I don’t want to.

https://nypost.com/2022/02/03/what-jeopardy-champ-amy-schneider-did-with-her-cash-winnings/

I myself see analytical arguments, time scheduling, etc. in a visual manner, and not in what might seem obvious ways (e.g., I do not see a calendar in my head for time, nor symbols for a logical argument).

I see a calendar in my head not for clock time but for dates. It’s a flattened ellipse with January at the far right end and the summer at the far left. So this time of year, I “feel” and “see” my attention focused on that far right part of the oval form, and “see” a regular month style calendar there. As the year progresses, I will feel and see the other parts of the oval. I see a similar thing for years, but it’s not an ellipse or oval but a timeline grouped into decades.

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading? It does for me and for some other people I know, but perhaps a novel is just words for some folks.

Yes, it is similar to a dream for me. For me, it’s like a movie playing above my head or in my periphery, not in high definition in front of my eyes, but like a running dream.

The staff at the NYTimes might once have been stuffed to the gills with verbally talented people, but those days are long gone.

A lot of high-IQ people are more susceptible to groupthink than many people with lower IQs. Is there a test to measure susceptibility/immunity to mass psychosis?

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading?

Yes. If, and only if, I have seen video media of the novel or the novelist’s universe beforehand. Also I will enjoy reading the novel more if I have seen such video. When I read the Books of Moses I see Charlton Heston.

I read a lot but I haven’t read much fiction for many years.

Do you see movies when you read non-fiction? That seems like it would be kind of strange.

Modern Political Correctness or Wokeness may be the last gasp of the mediocre Wordcels. Humanity is finally able to shake off the dead wood of the word-based priestly class and take off to the stars.

At least that’s my hope.

I say that as someone who may be left behind. So be it.

A treadmill in incline mode with a brisk pace is still an excellent cardio device. It is still better to walk outdoors in hilly terrain, but that isn’t always possible. When I have to, I set the incline at 11% and the speed at 3.5 mph.

Some of us have aphantasia – our host had a post about it a while back.

Movie in my head- always.

“Because very high end of 3-D imagination skills tend to be lacking in women, but verbal skills are more equally distributed, this means 3-D jobs tend to pay more relative to IQ because the supply of potential workers is mostly male and thus smaller.”

Okay, how can we fix this problem? Since women can’t be enhanced, it’s easier to damage the males. (This is how modern math education works, btw.)

At the start of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, the 1984 cyberpunk classic, elite console cowboy Case has been taught a lesson for cheating his employer; they destroyed his ability to work, to enter cyberspace:

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.

Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber space, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

There must be some sort of way to level the playing field, by destroying the superior ability of the shapelords. Ideally, by the end of the process, they’ll stare at a screen and be unable to visualize. They’ll be just like girls. Or these guys.

The process of visualization in the mind is a universal gift/tool. Dreams, memory, navigation, storytelling, reading all tap into this ability to some extent. Some people are more visual-thinkers than others, but the vast majority of us are very dependent on visual thinking. Some more than others, but even if you ask a blind-from-birth person if they dream in visual images and they tell you no, they don’t really know what they are talking about.

Huh, that’s interesting. I assumed the creator was gay because everything I read about it referred to his “partner.”

Outside the US, they think partner sounds more grownup than girlfriend or boyfriend. Really, it just sounds evasive. Why don’t you marry this person you’ve lived with for years? Taxes?

Nowadays, business partner is a “retronym”, like acoustic guitar, reel mower,or George HW Bush. What was assumed in the past can no longer be.

This tripped me up at times, too. We would eat at a long-gone restaurant named Geordie’s. The waitress explained that the “owner’s partner” was from Newcastle. I assumed this meant “gay”. But, no, they were a straight couple. Likewise, an early article about Todd Bol, founder of Little Free Libraries, mentioned a “partner”.

That, the fact that Bol created them to honor his librarian mother, and that they were popular for houses with rainbow flags in the Twin Cities (a half-hour from Bol’s home in Hudson, thus early adopters), led me to believe that Bol was as well. But, no, he was straight, with a normal family life. The “partner” was his friend and business partner, a marketing prof in Madison.

I listen to audiobooks and I do visualize them but it’s harder to visualize when actually reading.

OT disturbing editorial in the Journal today. I remember groaning when they announced the “nonpartisan” redistricting committees which were screamingly obviously partisan. Turns out the hammer making that strategy work was Eric Holder going around applying lawfare to every district he didn’t like, and almost always succeeding.

Democrats got hold of the entire government in North Carolina a few years back, and quickly introduced a bill to adopt the district system for presidential electors now used by Maine and Nebraska. That way, they would guarantee that some Tar Heel yellow dogs would vote their way when the GOP carried the state. (It wasn’t swing quite yet.)

DNC chairman Howard Dean immediately flew down to Raleigh and told them to stop. The legislator who authored the bill withdrew it ASAP. Why?

Turns out the Republicans were doing the exact same thing in California, and the Dems there were going all-out to stop them. The net gains for the GOP in the Golden State would dwarf the Democrats’ in North Carolina. And the latter was prime ad material for them.

Schools do almost nothing to encourage visuospatial thinking. I think it might be because there is a huge (1/3σ or so) sex difference after puberty. Teachers are not comfortable with anything boys do better with. As kids spend increasingly more time with 2D screens they may not be getting enough stimulation outside school.

I guess sports require visuospatial thinking, but unathletic kids are pretty much shut out of sports because we don’t track kids athletically. Which is just dumb. I always enjoyed gym class, got more exercise, and was actually part of the game when the athletic kids were gone for whatever reason.

Thanks! I would be interested in anything more you have to say about the ASTB and especially its spatial component.

I went looking, and here is an overview of the ASTB.
https://kevin-suchernick-q5sq.squarespace.com/s/ASTB-Overview.pdf

Much more interesting is this 2021 paper:
Limitations of current spatial ability testing for military aviators
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08995605.2021.1965786

Two things in particular caught my eye there.

First, the validity seems to be decreasing.

Taken together, the improved performance data over time and the data on strategy use suggest the test’s ability to measure spatial ability may be diminishing, ultimately reducing its construct and incremental validity. This is problematic and should be addressed, since the DOT is the only measure of spatial ability used by the Navy to assess aviation applicants.

Second, the distribution is an odd double hump. I don’t see an explanation of why this is in the text. My guess is a sex and/or race difference, which would explain the silence, but if anyone knows for sure…

Figure 2. Histogram of DOT total correct for all US Navy and Marine Corps aviation applicants from December 2013-September 2020

BTW, if those humps do represent two groups then that seems like it represents a massive Cohen’s d. The mean difference is about 30 and I would guesstimate something like 10 for the pooled SDs.

This 2019 paper discusses updating the DOT (similar list of authors).
Updating the Direction Orientation Task: An Aviation Selection Tool
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1071181319631451

One of the STEM guys mentioned that the way communication works is that you get an idea that is a picture in your head and then you figure out, somewhat painstakingly, how to translate that picture into English to communicate your thought to others.

Or draw it on a whiteboard ; )

Any thoughts on why the spatial ability vs. left handedness relationship is inverted between the sexes? Or how that would work genetically?

I wonder if the SMPY has looked at this. If they just asked about handedness they would have great raw data for doing so.

Eh, what’s the big deal? Nothing a little duct tape – OK a lot of duct tape – couldn’t fix.

It all goes back to 1619.

It’s not a coincidence that 16+19 = 35

And 3+5 = 8

Tarantino made a movie called the The Hateful Eight. Indians in North America foresaw all this 10,000 years ago which is why they left their continent and brought slavery here.

The original wordcel vs shape rotator:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/search?q=high+v+low+m

The Covid Lockdown Boys unleashed the hell of low IQ Wordcells on the world. For two years we’ve been under the tyranny of dumb people like Sharon Stone.

The whole HBD pundit world needs to reflect on why they always walk hand in hand with dumbos.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-rogan-criticized-apos-idiocy-151138807.html

I was working on an important contract, and circulated the latest draft for comments. And an attorney for the bank pointed out that a formula didn’t match the accompanying text.

I should have checked both, but was getting tired from reading endless redrafts. Anyway, intrigued, I mentioned the point to colleagues.

The accountants and economists said that they had thought the formula looked ok, so they didn’t look at the relevant text.

And the legal folk said that the text had seemed fine, so they didn’t think about the formula.

The number/ word split in action!

1) I am inclined to agree. How do you make your assessments?
For me, one index of excellence is the obituary page. NYT obit page often seems to me much weaker than the Daily Telegraph, but, overall, the Telegraph standards seems to be slipping to me as more and more the paper becomes woke. Telegraph is also overtly philosemitic, but unlike the NYT which has yet to publish, this week it published that Amnesty International calling a certain country “an apartheid state.”

2)https://www.statista.com/statistics/192894/number-of-employees-at-the-new-york-times-company/
4700 NYT employees. I wonder how many are in South Asia editing stories.

Leno and his wife are voluntary genetic dead-ends. They saw no point in having children.

But at least he has his cars, right?

I’m so old that I think of Jobs and Wozniak as partners.

Homosexuals wrecked the word “partner” just as they wrecked the word “gay”. “Gay” was kind of gay anyway, but “partner” was a useful word.

I’m an aphantasiac with pretty high visual IQ. Not sure how that works. I suppose the shape rotating happens beneath my consciousness somehow.

The lower hump is almost certainly due to the lower asymptote “guessing score.” If the test items are 4-choice multiple choice then guessing randomly on all items will yield a 25% correct score on the test or on a 50-item test, around 12-13 correct which is exactly where the mode of the lower hump is. The symmetrical distribution on either side of the hump is due to random variation in the results of guessing.

If the test used an open-response format instead of multiple choice, there would be no lower hump at the guessing score because there would be no guessing score. Instead, there would be a long left tail sloping down to 0, with a possible small bump at 0 representing candidates who left the test blank.

Oh, gee golly. The brain is like a computer.

Shucks.

I did not know that, as Johnny Carson used to say.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have said it. Because they were saying the brain is like a computer back in his day.

I often wonder about Asians – who usually test higher in quant domains (including IQ tests) and are sometimes said to possess particular spatial ability – but who seem to have a lower driving ability and sense of direction.

Particularly Asian women can have very high scores in maths paired with very low sense of direction.

What’s up with that?

Great thread, no wrong answers:

Made a helpful visual pic.twitter.com/cgfGUM6CE4

— martian (@holocenite) January 31, 2022

pic.twitter.com/YCPiL4VKAi

— DuckGoQuack (@QuackerJack321) January 31, 2022

Is wordcel a dig analogous to incel? There is no obvious connection between facility with language and inability to find a prostitute or a low value woman to fornicate.

I use my facility with language to cope with my inability to get laid.

“Ah, screw that nasty stuck-up bitch. She probably has chlamydia. And that dumb Chad is just using her for sex. He’ll kick her to the curb and she’ll never recover. After riding the cock carousel for a few more years, she’ll hit the wall and no decent man will ever again so much as glance in her direction. Ten years from now she’ll be just another crazy cat lady drowning her sorrows in wine and Häagen-Dazs.

“If you want a vision of the future, Karen, imagine a tabby gnawing on the rotting flesh of your putrefying corpse – forever.

“As for Chad, he’ll probably die in a tragic hang-gliding accident. I certainly hope so.

“Whew! Glad I got that off my chest. Well, it’s 7 p.m. on a Saturday night. Time to cruise the interracial category on Pornhub while I wait for my RealDoll to arrive.”

Very high levels of Vitamin D can result in calcification of soft tissue.

Jogging and sprinting are both subcategories of running to me. A jog is a run that I can keep up indefinitely. If it’s too fast for me to keep up indefinitely then it’s not a jog but a sprint. And I might as well sprint as fast as I can at that point.

That would matter if “teaching” had any correlation to how you do once you’re out in the real world, but since most simply forget most of it and replace it with learning on the job, the female preponderance is irrelevant. And soon it will be replaced by online learning, so most of the teachers will be sacked and entirely new subjects will be taught.

My father worked for a man who had established a small metal-stamping business that made tiny hinges and other things such as are used in jewelry. This guy was not educated well but he had an amazing knack for figuring out how to design the machines and use them. Sounds like he was heavily endowed with this rotator ability.

Yeah, gay was pretty gay to begin with, but did the gays also ruin the verb “hook up”? I can remember saying it to mean meet up, but without any sexual connotations.

There are very real and severe risks to low vitamin D, and possibly maybe some risks to high vitamin D.

Also it’s not some esoteric “heart attack in 25 years” thing. If you take enough vitamin D to hurt yourself you’ll notice, because pain hurts.

The amusing thing about women being risk-averse is that the risk of conformity apparently doesn’t count. If it’s normal not to do anything, the risk of doing something will always outweigh the risk of inaction, regardless of the actual risk ratios.

I was going to say [heart attack in 25 years] is a sugar thing, but if you have enough sugar/fructose to cause problems you feel like crap. Sugar isn’t esoteric either. The difference between a diabetogenic diet and a food-based diet is night and day.

I played Wordle for the first time just now, and guessed the word (pleat) in 4 tries. It told me I was “splendid.”

Somebody posted some infos along the Sun-line Roger Seheult is drawing here in springtime 2020. I did not archive this post in May or so 2020 -and did not find elsewhere too. But in the meantime I did indeed recommend to quite a few patients to – go out in the sun, especially in wintertime around noon. I’ve been looking for this kind of info for months now – and: Here it is! Thanks a lot, Chrisnonymus.

This video explains a lot, really. – How/why  did you find it, btw.?

 I’d just add two more little things: Near infrared light is radiated by wood burning stoves/ fireplaces in our living rooms – and the benefit it does (especially in the northern winter!) – might well be the reason it feels so good t sit in front of them. – Sauna is the other place that has enormous amounts of near infrared radiation, I would assume – and produces by and large the same well-being effect as the wood burning stove or the fireplace. 

The Vit-D story has been repeated for decades now on a regular basis. But it always turns out that there is no data supporting vit-D supplementation (Edzart Ernst/ Simon Singh were here vey good with their alternative-medicine critical modern classic: Trick or Treatment? – Considering what Roger Seheult says above would be right, the Vit-D story so far would be explained very well too. 
Thanks again!

But then he completely discarded that world view with his theory of ‘language games’ in the latter half of his life. You can’t get very far with that naivete shown in Tractatus which is basically ‘the cat is on the mat’ type of sentences and the rest is rubbish. His latter philosophical works are way more interesting than Tractatus.

Cognition and exercise (btw, I thought you hated running??), Harvard Medical School professor and psychiatrist, John Ratey, M.D., is a big proponent of aerobic exercise to grown our brain cells (and mitigate or eliminate emotional/mental problems).

Didn’t work out well for blacks …

The amusing thing about women being risk-averse is that the risk of conformity apparently doesn’t count.

Conformity is a way to feel sheltered. And that is that then: As soon as you feeel sheltered/protected, you have to be greatful/supportive, because that’s what makes the shelter (= the social protection mechanism) work (and what brings it into existence even). –

– The taboo about the shelter needs to be strong, because if it were otherwise, it would not be that reliable. It’s reliability and usefulness is what protects it from being critizised. –

– That’s quite reasonable. and that’s why you have to be clear and reluctant (and brave attimes too), if you start to bing arguments against conformity and/ or other kinds of protection mechanisms (or shelters). – That’s what made it so difficult to critizise the Corona-cult, btw.: Because cults do work and people like it that way. – The never (ever) eneding story of the dialectic of the enlightenment – (see the prophet is not respected at home trope too – or see Dr. Freud’s reflections about the resistance of the neurotic patient against insights that would help him).

Someone who has avoided DOING, believing TALKING is adequate representation.

Most men genuinely good at what they DO had fathers and family show them the ropes (literally).

Early familiarity overcomes this non-problem. Have to wake up the brain (hands). No hands = no mind.

To BE in the world is to move through it successfully. To cripple a man (literal definition) is to take that away, whole or in part.

Use of hands is primary (literally, the fingers). As it’s not the object to be moved that’s the problem, but how the body will manipulate itself in moving it.

We are today plagued by “drivers” under the impression that video car games or online instruction were adequate preparation to the time & distance triangulation problems of roads.

Mass, is always missing.

So long as all other drivers follow rules, they get by.

When a wall jumps out at one as he’s moving the object — it’s because he’s too far ahead of the dance — feet entangle and some damage might occur (and worse, in a car).

Graceful movement = No Wasted Motion.
Dance, or driving, or as a furniture-mover.

Great actors, dancers or singers inhabit the moment as can no other. Alone, unaccompanied and no electricity involved. This attribute is the heart of the thing.

Not spatial geometry as the furniture-moving problem, then. That’s post-hoc description (which isn’t representation).

Analysis isn’t action. It’s tail-chasing. Zeno’s Paradox, revived.

The world isn’t numbers. And cannot be so represented. (A great lie).

“Universe” has a flow. Real jobs have to align themselves thusly. The higher the risk, the greater the need. (The leap of faith).

In those moments — outside of Time (an artifice) — one comes fully to Self.

One thinks he can excuse himself from reality — not “thinking” in a true sense — but when the house is on fire and OBJECTS impose exit barriers then the choice of submission to cowardice or to take action will still remain.

Banging walls wasn’t ever the problem.

.

Man who fly upside down get in crack-up. ___ The PTB forced Joe Biden out and brought in Sistah Kamala. So Joe went to a Delaware Walmart, where he got a job as a greeter. But he got fired because he kept on saying, “Welcome to Target”

The dude supplemented T (i.e., took steroids) and his chosen form of exercise was certain to keep him in a state with high inflammatory markers. And since arterial plaque is a relatively slow process, it’s highly likely that a goodly chunk of the sludge was laid down before he got fit.

He mentioned being “tested for APOE 3/4 genotype“, but what he meant was “I got tested for APOE genotype, and it was e3/e4“: this is clear from some genetic results he posted elsewhere, which shows that he is heterozygous e4 – which increases his risk of hypercholesterolaemia (as well as a bunch of other nasties).

An individual expression of e4 (e.g., one of the two copies on chromosome 19 is a4) raises the risk of
 • CVD by ~half;
 • ’coronary events’ by ~100%;
(these are just for studies focused on white US men, and e3/e3 – the most common expression – is the numeraire).

Being homozygous-e4 (both copies being e4) increases risk of carotid plaque (by ~185% – this study was in white Australian men; in heterozygous-e4 the risk was only 79% higher than homozygous e3).

Increased carotid plaque and increased cardiac-artery plaque are reasonably correlated (as might be expected: why would your body make sludge in your neck and not in your heart?), although the correlation is more ‘inverse’ (i.e., someone with significant carotid plaque, has a higher probability to have even more significant cardiac-artery stenosis).

Anyhow… lucky/unlucky.

Lucky he caught it before any ‘event’.

Unlucky that
① a genetic wrinkle predisposed him to have the ‘wrong’ cholesterol circulating more-than-usual;
② his choice of diet was a singularly bad fit for those genetics;
③ an overly-intense exercise protocol kept him in a highly-inflammatory state, and trying to repair the ongoing damage to the glycocalyx in his cardiac arteries generated a bunch of sludge (only some of which appears to have calcified).

So on balance: unlucky.

He also has increased risk for
 • NAFLD (PNPLA3) – prone to non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease on high-carb diet;
 • hyperlipidaemia (LPL) – prone to elevated triglycerides → ↑CVD risk (again);
 • hypertension/sodium sensitivity (ADD1 and UMOD);
 • choline deficiency (MTHFD1 and PEMT) which fucks up cholesterol transport → ↑CVD risk (again);
 • folate deficiency (MTHFD1 and MTHFR) which fucks up homocystein clearance → ↑CVD risk (again);
 • gluten intolerance (HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1) – not cœliac, but a candidate for IBS/leaky-gut;
 • ω-3 deficiency (FADS1) – can’t make one’s own ω-3 (DHA and EPA) so need to supplement fish oil (→ ↑CVD (again));

I wonder if he was taking VitK2[M7]? He’s obviously never had a CAC score/scan before (otherwise he would have been aware of his arterial plaques), so the odds are low.

For me, one of the upsides to being Common As Muck and a mongrel hybrid, is the tendency to end up with a very ‘vanilla’ genome (so I’m a3/a3 ; my carotids are clean as a whistle; my CAC score is zero).

It took me almost a year to find a way to finagle a genetic test that is not associated with my meat-name or meatspace-location – a vain attempt to forestall any knowledge of my genetic risks falling into the hands of insurance companies. If any of my siblings get theirs done, correlating them would be a snap – so it’s really just a stop-gap (like that Swamp-German kid who stuck his hand in a lesbian [or finger in a dike – whatever]).

It turns out that a guy in Zimbabwe (who turns out to be dead) has exactly my genetic risk markers… what’re the odds?

What’s been happening is Republican redistricting efforts are getting pilloried, dragged to court, and “fortified,” while equally or more egregious Democrat redistricting atrocities are quietly tolerated. Meanwhile the fact that they have to do this demonstrates that they are dying as a party. They have all those Abrams machines, all those immigrants, and every major city, and they still need Obama judges and lawfare.

Not surprisingly, this correlates with political attitudes.

Gee, I’ve always associated libs and those of the left with “black box” mentality. Their way of thought always relies on a miracle somewhere in the mix.

I’m a wordcel (good at math though), but after watching the decline of American society over the past 40 years have drifted right.

I’ve never been sure to what degree our ruling class actually believes their own BS about races and sexes being equal, but I think as Steve says they have started moving from faking it to actually believing in it, with predictably awful results.

I suspect every society has stuff they lie about, and obviously it changes over time. But this is ours. The Chinese no doubt have a completely different set of taboos.

The fact modern conformity is anti-sheltering is what makes it so funny. Conform if you enjoy being sick, weak, lonely, poor, and want to die sooner rather than later. Did you know Amish have life satisfaction similar to American billionaires? This isn’t Amish supertechnology, this is being born American putting you in a [pursuit of happiness] hole to the tune of one billion dollars. (Cue little Dr. Evil finger.)

You need taboos to shelter a good deal? That’s certainly interesting. So you’re antidemocratic then? Humans demand things that damage them and have low demand for wholesome things? Can’t let the peasants out of the pasture, in that case.
Or maybe this is a trash taking itself out situation.

Cults work if you are already insane, yes. The madman wants to be self-destructive. The therapist isn’t helping him, the therapist is trying to destroy his ego and replace it with another one which is more convenient for the therapist or the group the therapist represents.
The madman is also trying to destroy his own ego, but on his own terms. If what the head case was doing made sense, it wouldn’t be crazy, kind of by definition.

I remember back in the 2000s and early 2010s when some of the data on genetic differences was getting published and Simon Baron Cohen was ascendant and everyone thought the Narrative was about to go down thanks to science. Derbyshire even talked about it a little in We Are Doomed.

Nope, they just forced the wokeness into the sciences.

The tech guys like this stuff because it’s useful and helps you understand the world. Visual people really are different from verbal people, and I am guessing that has significant effects on programming ability.

You’ll notice there are ideas from the dissident right they don’t pick up, like women staying in the home or some of the more esoteric racial stuff. And they’ll take stuff from the hippie left like polyamory that helps them manage their woman shortage, or trans stuff that lets the significant number of them with autogynephilia be more comfortable . (As I have said I do not think polyamory will be good for society as a whole, and the trans stuff, well, it doesn’t bug me that much personally but if I had an tomboyish daughter I would be very worried.)

It’s the Bruce Lee thing, study your experience, take what is useful, discard the rest.

Meh, 7/10. Ironically, I failed one by overlooking a “not” in the question.

There’s a Flashman villain and a LotGH secondary character with similar coloration.
“I took her with my authority, and by violence.”

I really liked Andreesen’s distinction, maybe this was earlier than “wordcel,” between talkers and writers. That seems to be a significant difference, especially with technology enabling the textual correspondent to communicate as quickly and frequently as a talker. If I could I would communicate only in writing. When I talk to people informationally (the qualifier is necessary because most talk is fluff) I feel like I need to go back over what I heard. Talking is almost always less precise or careful than writing.

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading? It does for me and for some other people I know, but perhaps a novel is just words for some folks.

Another interesting question along these lines would be how people interpret metaphors – e.g. if you come across the claim that a society is a living organism, or that an organization is a machine, is it just words, or does it actual trigger images – and if so, what does e.g. a social organism look like?

I got a 10 too. That was actually a fun test.

I once told somebody that a mechanic was one of the smartest people I ever met. They said that was sad, implying I don’t know many smart people if a lowly mechanic was at the top. It is weird that IQ tests show mechanics as having a 100 IQ. To me, these guys are borderline engineers and some of the best shape rotators out there.

“What does it say that my wife is better than me at arranging the dishes to all fit in our dishwasher so they all get clean?”

Only that she’s imposed her view on loading the dishwasher HER way on you.

So she’s a typical woman. 🤣

(My Lovely 🥰 Mrs. does the same damned thing. The Eternal Struggle continues)

I liked you responseAlrenous. But. My but: If only neuroticism wasn’t so utterly destructive (you know, I don’t talk about people shying away from spiders or studdering whenever they are confronted with attractive women etc. – I’m talking here about the severe stuff, like being unable to eat all by yourself because you imagine that as soon as you touch the food you eat, this makes it poisonous – things in that class ( there is an abundance of them – and poeple die of them in impressive numbers (or suffer from them in ways most people would not even want to know).
Rule of thumb old psychiatrists used to apply: The choice between a leg cut off and a severe (notice: a severe) neurosis is – a no brainer! – You’d always want to offer one leg if that would prevent you from being severely neurotic.: That’s how grave these illnesses are.

That you need to help clean up the kitchen more often.

A right-handed person playing golf left-handed, or a left-handed person playing golf right-handed is really playing what a tennis player calls a two-handed backhand, whereas a right-handed person playing right handed is really playing a tennis-style two-handed forehand.

If asked to play a golf swing or putt with just one hand, I suspect that more players would make the swing backhanded than forehanded as this provides a greater control.

Putting accurately on an undulating green would appear to require great visual spatial abilities, but if that is what you do for a living, it may come down to 10,000 hours of practice at selecting a line and speed.

Another interesting question along these lines would be how people interpret metaphors – e.g. if you come across the claim that a society is a living organism, or that an organization is a machine, is it just words, or does it actual trigger images – and if so, what does e.g. a social organism look like?

It may depend on the quality of the choice of metaphor by the original author.

A good, vivid metaphor should shock the reader and create an image in the mind of the reader, but a poor or stale metaphor is just words.

Writers who lack a feeling for the meaning and origin of words often choose poor metaphors, or fail to see the connection between similar words, and so their metaphors become ambiguous.

The example above of an organization being a machine is too ambiguous. What kind of machine? Is it like a sewing machine, which is perhaps the most common machine that people think of, or some other kind of machine? Is the intention to say that the actions of the organization are purely mechanical and lacking in humanity, or to say that it runs very smoothly and rarely requires maintenance.

If we say that California under the Covid-19 state of emergency is the reincarnation of Nazi Germany, what is the intention, and what images are provoked in the mind of the listener?

Steve,

Maybe in todays world, an important skill is being able to parallel process versus serial process. Think about the low paid cashier/sales clerk who can look up while waiting on one customer to tell the next customers that he/she will be right with them. Or the people who have to take long pregnant pauses when they talk versus those who can be talking and thinking about their talking at the same time.

I have always found wordcels to be more serial processors.

Didn’t work out well for blacks …

You’d better hope it helped somewhat for the sake of your income, investments, savings.

This is Biden’s pick to head the Federal Reserve…

Lisa Cook from Michigan State, who has an expertise in African-American history and innovation economics.

An interesting question for everyone here: when you read a novel, does it turn into a movie in your head as you are reading?

Yes.
As a kid on long car rides I would amuse myself by choosing an oncoming car in the opposite lane and projecting where we would meet.

I’m curious how you visualize schedule or logical arguments in your head. I find it hard to describe, but I’ll try.

For schedule, I see work as blocks that I rack and stack, but convert to hours or a date at the end by visualizing the length of the stack and converting to time. I do visualize a calendar when I need a day of the week.

I’m not sure what I do for logic. For something Bayesian, I visualize a Venn diagram. That’s sort of how I see most simple logic assertions too. If-then as overlapping sets. After it gets to a level of complexity that exceeds my working memory, I write down a matrix or graph to analyze.

Interestingly, I think computer programmers may be a different breed than the typical engineer. It’s surprising how many don’t like math.

Pivot!

Gawd, that was easy 😀
(I´ve found BlockOut (3D Tetris) excellent training for that)

So you blew this guy ?

Somethings in mathematics fit that description. The use of category theory is an example. Consider for example the proof of the exact sequence of a triple in homology or cohomology in Eilenberg-Steenrod . This text has the proof for homology written out in complete detail accompanied by a large categorical diagram. If you cover up the diagram and just try to read the proof it is very opaque but referring to the diagram makes it easy to follow. Also the diagram makes it clear that the proof for cohomology is dual which is not obvious just from the written proof.

But lots of other stuff in mathematics seems very different. For example Gauss’ proof on the existence of primitive roots doesn’t seem at all visual. What is visual about class field theory?

One illustration of the power of diagrammatical reasoning is to compare some of the proofs in Kuratowski on connectivity which are not diagrammatic with proofs of related theorems in Eilenberg-Steenrod which use categorical diagrams.

Eilenberg said that he got the idea of category theory from studying diagrams that Hurewicz put in his papers on algebraic topology.

I made a gym for my wife downstairs in one room of the finished basement. Then I installed what they call a Cadillac machine. She has done Pilates for 25 years. When I was dating her, she (10 years younger than I) was featured on the cover of the Westport YMCA catalogue in one of those Pilates positions: Legs held up and out, back straight and angled up, arms and hands out in a double-handed Hitler salute, her whole body planted solely on her cute little butt:

Pilates is very difficult. I have tried it, because of her. It is far harder than it looks, and it is indeed a great workout, especially for women who want to look their best.

We have an elliptical machine in that same gym, and I use it more and more now, because my left knee has given out, and I cannot continue my traditional long walk exercise. There are free weights and a bench too, but these are not my favorite things. I am having to adapt. Such is aging…

Kudos to Steve for doing what he can to stay in shape. All the best to him in that effort.

Do you know of a preferred formula for building muscle mass and not shrinking testicles?

(asking for a friend!)

The left is wordcel; the right shifts shape.

I’ve played 3 x and guessed on the 5th try all 3 times.

That’s part of its genius. It’s for midwits like me. You may be a genius but I ain’t.

I hate “partner” but at a certain point whattayagonna do?

I looked up the partner – some dot-Indian name for girls. Believe me, I made sure.

I’m disappointed with the Men of Unz. My point was white guy invents something for girlfriend, becomes wildly successful by (sorry) word-of-mouth, Woke Central Times buys it and therefore enriches another evil White Man.

9.5/10 (9 plus one lucky guess). But it took me 13 minutes — the test isn’t timed, but faster has to be better. Interesting, thanks.

Not bad, as these things go, but I think one can still discuss whether it really depicts what the metaphor is supposed to convey. The metaphor itself portrays something abstract (society) as if it is something more concrete (an organism). Seems to me that the abstract thing, being abstract, cannot really be visualized. If you try to picture it, as in the frontispiece of Leviathan, what you see is the concrete part of the metaphor (the organism) rather than the metaphor itself (society-as-organism). Samuel Johnson may have been right that a metaphor gives you two ideas for the price of one, but you can only see one of them.

Another difficulty for Hobbes is that he was more addicted to mixed metaphors than Thomas Friedman. For example, he starts out by proposing a mechanistic conception of organisms (“For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body”) and then argues that the “great Leviathan”, also known as the State or the Commonwealth, “is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended”. In the end, you have pictures of machines and organisms and giant men … but still not, far as I can tell, an actual image of society.

I remember catching Keanu Reeves (b. 1964) on TV once. He referred to his “partner” in one sentence and then in the next deftly corrected himself: “business partner.”

Yes, anything with a decent-sized motor is heavy, but those treadmills are something else. I wanted to prop up a treadmill at a hotel with 2 pieces of foot-long 2 x 4’s on the front, to make it go to more than 15% slope, for cardio. 15% is the max you get on normal machines, and that 1 1/2″ over 5′ got me another 2 1/2 %.

I thought I’d be able to just pull up one side of the front end. Man, I had to use the one 2 x 4 for leverage, insert the other one, and then get the other side.

(Those 2 x 4’s were still there when I was back about a year later.)

I also wonder the same. I personally am like Steve. I have nearly equal verbal and numerical abilities, and both of those are high. My 3d spatial skills are miserable. Probably even my 2d ones as well since I have no ability at chess, despite my father being good enough to once beat an expert level grandmaster.

But what is odd is that no one has ever told me my directional skills were poor. In fact, many have commented that they are noticeably strong. I remember when I was in study abroad decades ago and there would be 25 of us kids walking about a foreign city. At the end of the night, it was always only me and one other fellow who knew exactly where we were, exactly which way was north and how far we had walked. It’s as if abstract rotational skills and personal directional skills are not that well related.

Steve, this is totally off your main subject (as usual), but what brand treadmill did you get?

I’ve seen a lot of them, and by quite a bit, Precor are the best. They seem very solid mechanically – but then you’re one guy- it’s not a commercial gym.

What I like about the Precor machines is that the numbers you may have for goals work out, physics-wise, and the consoles have the best usability. (i.e., they do have touch screens, but those mechanical paddle switches for slope and speed are great. It’s hard to use touchscreens when you’re running like hell and sweating like a pig.

I always liked this guy’s fitness plan:

http://www.shovelglove.com/

Basically, you buy a sledgehammer at the home store (they’re cheap), ziplock a towel around it as padding, and then spend a quarter of an hour manipulating it: butter churns, over shoulders, shovel digs, etc. Then you lean your sledgehammer against the wall until the next day.

The example above of an organization being a machine is too ambiguous. What kind of machine? Is it like a sewing machine, which is perhaps the most common machine that people think of, or some other kind of machine?

Yes, it probably does make a considerable difference whether you picture society very abstractly as a machine, or more specifically as a sewing machine, a locomotive, or a table saw. But no matter how specific you got (e.g. “society is a Festool track saw”), it seems to me that you will only be able to picture the source domain of the metaphor (machine/track saw) and not the target domain itself (society) or the meaning of the metaphor as a whole (society-is-a-track-saw).

Anyway, here’s a rather amusing specimen I came across a while ago in the writings of the nineteenth-century neurophysiologist DuBois-Reymond, who inverted the traditional societies-as-organisms metaphor and portrayed organisms as societies, instead:

“[Just as] the central station of the electrical telegraph in the Post Office in Königsstrasse is in communication with the outmost borders of the monarchy through its gigantic web of copper wire, just so the soul in its office, the brain, endlessly receives dispatches from the outermost limits of its empire through its telegraph wires, the nerves, and sends out its orders in all directions to its civil servants, the muscles”.

Here, I can picture most of the mentioned aspects of both domains, but not really at once. I’m inclined to think that the meaning of the metaphor is located in fairly abstract similarities that one cannot really visualize.

Then again, what do I know.

I played about 8 more times on Wordle Archive. I got one in 2 guesses (shout, then blush), but it took me 6 tries to get humph. I don’t want to play it too much. Thinking only in five-letter words could warp your brain. Scrabble is better.

Nah, Sailer bought the hamster wheel so he can more faithfully observe his Vax Covidian religion viz Stay Home Save Lives. No more double-diapered jaunts round the ‘hood.

Ha, 10/10! Most were pretty obvious, but the last one was hard, and I spent a long time on it.

7/10, but I acted like the thing had a time limit (5 minutes), because I wanted to get back to reading comments here. So, 2 of the 3 wrong were just based on my not checking carefully – one cube thing and the simple 6-sector circle one.

That last one – it took me a while to figure what “corresponds to” was supposed to mean (“oh, folds into!”). That was a doozy for me, and I flubbed it.

Thanks for the challenge, S.R.

So this must be why moving men are usually, well, men

Created by a guy from Wales (white, creative) who now lives in Brooklyn to entertain his Indian girlfriend. 

I hope she appreciates the sacrifice Mr. Wordle made. (Northern) Wales is a scenic paradise.
Especially compared to Brooklyn

No man is immune to the mind rays.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/havana-syndrome-symptoms-small-group-likely-caused-directed-energy-say-rcna14584

The hat won’t do anything for you.

When I was given the WISC 30 years ago as a teenager, there were two scores: visuospatial and verbal. These two scores were then averaged to give the overall score.

My scores were 140 on the verbal and 90 on the visuospatial. The psychologist who administered it remarked that it was very unusual for a person’s two scores to be so far apart but didn’t elaborate further. Years later I did some googling and found nothing about such wide disparities except that when they occurred, rather than being averaged, more weight should be given to the higher score.

Make of that what you will.

One of the worst TV shows from a genre and era of unwatchable dreck was Space: 1999 (“The. Moon. Is. Gone.” and “But nuclear power is one of the most important issues of our time!”), which is really, really bad, but which is sometimes defended on the grounds that the skiffs or intermediate craft of the series, the Eagles, were actually a totally realistic and workable design. So there were people watching this show, batting away the insanely bad writing and almost deliberately bad dialogue (the acting mainly consisted of staring), and zeroing in on a conjectural orbital yacht which took style notes from the space stations and serious proposals of its day, and saying, “Hey, now…”
(The first draft of the Nostromo in Alien was a kind of hippie dippie Yggdrasil world egg, a sphere divided into biosphere-like gardens and connected by a giant tree. Not a physics guy but I wonder how they would get the lakes to work, or rather, to stay put.)

What explains people who can think about statistics vs those who can not vs those who will not?

Most people are in the 3rd category, but a vast majority of people who access and use statistics are in the 2nd category. They can attach a statistic to a point they want to make, but fail to take into account baselines, sample sizes, sample quality, confirmation bias etc…

Additionally, when someone communicates a statistical point, it should come attached with some sort of Bayesian prior and confidence interval, acknowledging weaknesses that may detract from the point they are using the statistic to buttress.

Oh I just realized I’m a sperg. Nevermind.

The amusing thing about women being risk-averse is that the risk of conformity apparently doesn’t count. If it’s normal not to do anything, the risk of doing something will always outweigh the risk of inaction, regardless of the actual risk ratios.

For the most part the female brain cannot think its way out of the conformity trap. That hyper-risk-adverse lil bitch who runs New Zealand is a good example. I get pissed whenever I see a photo of her. Hey, I get it. It’s all biological and has to do with birthing and nesting and so on. This is why you do not elect them (women) as your top leaders. Small town mayor is fine.

Unfolding and readying the treadmill is too much hassle. I recommend everyone buying a treadmill to find and dedicate enough room for a rigid one, so they can just step on it whenever they feel like walking. Also, that crease in folding treadmills can be felt under foot and might not last as long as the other components. I have a rigid one (low profile w/o handrails) I bought last spring for 250€. Prices have dropped about 20% since then.

Decomissioned school desks are nice for making a treadmill desk. Not too wide, although there might be profane engravings on visible surfaces. With careful dimensioning and remodeling of a tilting school desk you can get the functionality of an excessively large 300\$ electric stand up desk for a lot less. There should be some way to attach a external monitor or a keyboard as hanging your head to look at the laptop monitor gets tiring quickly. A large TV at a longer distance, with remote desktop or a wireless keyboard is another option.

Working standing up is unpleasant and bad for the joints (beats stoop labour like weeding in that regard though). One should either walk or sit. Excercise ball of the right size can be used to sit on the treadmill when there’s an adjustable desk.

The best pointing devices for walking are: 1. IBM Trackpoint 2. a thumb-operated trackball. With anything else it’s hard to isolate the movement of your arm from the pointing activity.

Some treadmills such as the one i bought have the rear axle exposed at the sides. This is a major hazard for kids playing with the treadmill: hair or a frayed piece of clothing might get caught around the bare axle… If you have one of these the right thing to do is to cover the ends with duct tape or something.

Sending this comment on my ergometer bike setup.

Thanks, that’s a great find in that paper. I imagine the decreased predictive power is due mostly to more available and effective test prep. There was one book available when I took the test in 2007, and several other midshipmen had not prepped at all. It was almost looked down on. The spatial test is kind of gimmicky, and I feel scores on it would respond to a couple hours of prep much more so than other sections.
Another spatially relevant one has all these gizmos illustrated on the paper, and you had to determine what happened with one component if some other one was rotated or lifted or pushed or whatever. That section was challenging but kind of fun, like little mechanical puzzles.
NATC seems to weight the ASTB much more highly than the Air Force weights their TBAS. I knew guys in my flight school classes who had a 2.8 GPA in English but smoked the ASTB and were selected. I got the sense it was sort of set up as a meta personality test, a very high stakes, one shot only test that basically qualified you or cut you on its own. So it seems using it in that way is loosing its predictive power faster and faster due to prep. Even when I went through, it was common knowledge that you filled out the personality exam questions in Character as an Evel Kenevial type.
Secondly, I suppose they measure success of the test based on its predictions vs flight school performance. But flight school has changed a huge amount since they rolled out the ASTB. Instead of an intense, 14 or so month firehouse, now it’s a three year slog, before FRS. It used to be a 4 year commitment, now it’s 8 after wings, at a time when the airlines are screaming and throwing cash at pilots. And the community is just not exactly what it used to be. The queep isn’t as bad as in the Air Force, but getting worse every year. Even as late as the aughts, there was in the Navy a bit of a “boys will be boys” type attitude from the captains I worked under toward 1390s and 1310s that is definitely gone now. Which is a shame. And I think it’s possible a guy with a lot on the ball might see what’s being offered after he hits NAS Pensacola and have some second thoughts.

It took me almost a year to find a way to finagle a genetic test that is not associated with my meat-name or meatspace-location – a vain attempt to forestall any knowledge of my genetic risks falling into the hands of insurance companies.

Got a link? I’d like to get tested, but, like you, I do not want to donate my dna to Megacorp.

You might enjoy this article on blind mathematicians, and how they were able to do their work. Arguably the greatest “shapelord” of recent times is Bernhard Morin, a blind topologist who created physical models to help sighted people visualize shapes better.

“Far from detracting from his extraordinary visualization ability, Morin’s blindness may have enhanced it. Disabilities like blindness, he noted, reinforce one’s gifts and one’s deficits, so “there are more dramatic contrasts in disabled people,” he said. Morin believes there are two kinds of mathematical imagination. One kind, which he calls “time-like”, deals with information by proceeding through a series of steps. This is the kind of imagination that allows one to carry out long computations. “I was never good at computing,” Morin remarked, and his blindness deepened this deficit. What he excels at is the other kind of imagination, which he calls “space-like” and which allows one to comprehend information all at once.”

https://www.ams.org/notices/200210/comm-morin.pdf

3d brainpower is useful in fighting, hunting, making objects, and moving large, bulky objects like my new treadmill.

And passing the drivers test? It strikes me that 3d brainpower is very useful for parallel parking and backward parking. Also for driving on curvy roads.

I’m just a paper shuffler**, but for twenty years have supervised Tool and Die makers. Hearing them discuss how to build and modify complex tooling without any visual aids is inspiring. I always need to make them draw it for me. One coined the term “spatial conceptualization” which I rather like. Some got it, (all men BTW), most don’t.

Being able to draw things in CAD and rotate and zoom has been a boon to those who ain’t got it.

**”Best one we’ve got”

“Somebody online named soon coined the term “wordcel” to refer to people who are good at mentally manipulating words but not physical objects, in opposition to “shape rotators.” (Why not “shapelords?”) Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was tickled pink by the dichotomy and it has become a sensation.”

If “wordcel”, then why not “shapecel”? Keep it in the genes, and in the cells…

Thank you. That is almost certainly the explanation. The DOT has 48 possible trials with 4 response options so “guessing score” average should be about 12. The lower peak is at 14 so perhaps the first question or two are easy enough that people get them right before becoming frustrated, or there is a small “educated guessing” effect from eliminating bad options? What do you think?

But doesn’t that raise the question of why are so many people guessing? The lower peak is about 1/3 the frequency of the higher peak (750 vs. 2100). How do we have a test where most people who take the test seriously are scoring over 30/48 (with the mode at 44!) while about a quarter are so flummoxed they just guess? Who are those people?

This is highly relevant if aviators are selected who have guessing level DOT scores (say through AA). How do they function in action?

The overall distribution from the paper had mean 33.22 and SD 11.22. The peak at the high end was at 44/48.

From the text.

There is a large ceiling effect with 12% of the participants making only 2 mistakes or fewer on the test (greater than 95% accuracy).

Note that the DOT Factor, a combination of speed and accuracy, is used to select aviators. Not the score shown above.

The paper also discussed another study with this sample:

A total of 133 US Sailors and Marines participated in the study, 14 of whom were female. Participants came from two different groups: 98 student Naval Aviators and 35 student air traffic controllers (ATC). The student Naval Aviators were all officers, with a mean age of 24.3 years (SD = 2.2 years), and included 10 females in the aviator group. The second group were enlisted ATC students with a mean age of 21.4 years (SD = 4.3 years), four of whom were female.

The results show a similar double hump effect.

If you count up the “guessing group” (say 21 and below here) I see 17 people. Compare that to 14 women. It would be very interesting to see a sex and race breakdown of the score. Of course, I think we all know the chances of that happening…

One interesting thing about the DOT is people tend to underestimate their performance by a fairly large amount. From the smaller study.

The average absolute difference between the actual score and estimated score for the student aviators was 7.47 (SD = 7.74) and for ATC the average difference was 7.00 (SD = 7.05). There was a significant correlation between estimated score on DOT and the actual score (r = .698, p < .001).

P.S. It would also be interesting to see if the sex/race distributions have different behaviors over the years of increasing scores. Perhaps extra training/cheating to help favored people get better results? Or just making the test easier? Remember how lower ceiling tests can help “close gaps.”

“Is wordcel analogous to incel?”

Any dude with even a modicum of experience with women knows the ability to speak intelligently is a major attractor: physically you can resemble Lennie from Of Mice and Men and still gather attractive women if you can carry on a conservation that reveals a deep well of cultural knowledge. So the answer to your question is no. Incels tend to be interested in fields of study not applicable to what women find fascinating. Look at the male science creeps that have crawled out of the public health woodwork the past couple of years. Total blue-balls. That’s what drives them to their disturbing authoritarian fantasies: they want to punish Lennies like me who can actually communicate with the weaker sex. Although it should be noted that I played Lennie on stage; and stage Lennies, unless they’re Lon Chaney or John Malkovich, are still quite handsome.

That is an interesting question. My two thoughts.

1. Math and spatial ability are not the same thing. Perhaps the spatial ability advantage is smaller and/or the distribution is odd. For example, perhaps the M/F average gap is larger for spatial than math.

2. Environment has not enabled people to develop the practical use of underlying spatial ability. Two examples would be traveling in steep terrain and hobbies which emphasize mechanical ability.

Adequate (or high) doses of vitamin K may help with that.
The Synergistic Interplay between Vitamins D and K for Bone and Cardiovascular Health: A Narrative Review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613455/

For example (some more in the paper).

In an experimental rat model, warfarin was administered to induce vitamin K deficiency and caused arterial calcification [57], which was accelerated when given toxic doses of vitamin D and resulted in premature death.

“Actually, where do you go, Bateman?” Van Patten asks. “For a tan?”
“Yeah, Bateman, where do you go?” McDermott seems genuinely intrigued.
“Read my lips,” I say, “a tanning salon,” then irritably, “like everyone else.”
“I have,” Van Pattens says, pausing for maximum impact, “a tanning bed … at home,” and then he takes a large bite out of his scallop sausage.
“Oh bullshit,” I say, cringing.
“It’s true,” McDermott confirms, his mouth full. “I’ve seen it.”
“That is fucking outrageous, ” I say.
“Why the hell is it fucking outrageous?” Price asks. […]
“Do you know how expensive a tanning salon membership is?” Van Patten asks me. “A membership for a year?”
“You’re crazy,” I mutter.
“Look guys,” Van Patten says. “Bateman’s indignant.”
[…]
“I just think that’s crazy about the tanning bed,” I tell Van Patten, though secretly I think it would be a hip luxury except I really have no room for one in my apartment. There are things one could do with it besides getting a tan.

Avoiding sunlight in L.A. must be quite an achievement.

Vitamin A can also cause problems with too much calcium in blood.

Another thing causing calcium deposits is oxalic acid. My recommendation for people with any kind of gut, kidney or pancreas issues (heavy alcohol use), or who are just persistently skinny like I am, is to look up “enteric/secondary hyperoxaluria/oxalosis” or “oxalate crystal deposition disease” and adjust ther diet accordingly.

Low fat, no mixing lots of vegetables and fat (no Atkins diet); limit mushrooms, chocolate, coconut milk, nuts, crisps, plant based “creams and milks” and other fatty and oxalate containing foods; avoid almonds, xylitol chewing gum, spinach patties and rhubarb pie.

Vitamin C is another considerable source of oxalic acid. People who say that the only danger to excessive supplementation is upset stomach aren’t exactly right. Same goes for xylitol. There really should be a warning.

If you use a calcium supplement, always take it after meals, not in isolation. For other mineral supplements the opposite is true: A heavy concentration of magnesium for example might dissolve calcium oxalate in the food.

It is a rare condition, but nowadays inflammatory bowel syndrome and allergies are very common, as are diets heavy in plants and fat. Some of the IBS associated joint problems are rheumatic/inflammatory, but some are idiopathic. Oxalates might be the cause for those joint pains.

Solubility of calcium oxalate in water is about 1 ppm. For the crystal causing gout (remission might take weeks) it’s the order of one part per thousand. In the liquors of human body the solubility is not so depressing, but it might be a practically permanent condition. Stay on the safe side, don’t accumulate the stuff!

“A lot of high-IQ people are more susceptible to groupthink”

The evidence of this has been on full display since 2017: the managerial and thinker classes of of the Left, a lot of them affiliated with prestigious universities and industries that attract the technology-inclined, have gone batshit totalitarian. They are firmly ensconced in their hives and refuse to accept contradictory evidence that would give lie to their batty-beliefs.

Another factor would be that as far as I can tell, the spatial aperception section is really about how fast and accurately you can incorporate the artificial horizon into your regular 6 second instrument scan. It’s not really correlative to VFR flying. A fair number of guys get cut before you even make it to the instrument syllabus, so they would show as prediction failures for that specific test. Secondly, working memory is probably more important than spatial perception for instrument approaches. Remembering your approach plate #, which holding pattern, which flight level, the frequencies and names of approach and tower and regional and when to switch them, what the bearings are for the navaids and the frequencies to tune into them, all were a lot more difficult to keep in your head than just remembering to scan the artificial horizon, and trust it regardless of what your vestibular system was doing. So you could do great on the “instrument flying” section of the test, and still fail the instrument syllabus hars, since it’s only testing 1/2 the skill set.
Ironically, this kind of makes sense. Only a small portion of aviators, the FAGS (fighter attack guys… so named by jealous non-hookers xD) have to manage the community, approach procedures, and instrument setup and communications all on their own. Everyone else either has a 2p or NFO to help the AC talk and run the approach. So eliminating a bunch of guys with a test designed to simulate instrument performance in the single seat role would wipe out a bunch of guys who will functionally never need that skill in the fleet. Fortunately it’s the highest NST score/best student pilots who get selected for fighters so their overall skill controls for that somewhat. But you can have a strike guy who struggles with instrument syllabus because of the sheer amount of button pushing you’re having to do while flying the approach. I only failed two flights during flight school, and both times it was due to getting overwhelmed by an unexpected instrument approach I hadn’t reviewed enough (weird wind conditions after takeoff meant we had to land on a different runway with different procedures than briefed)

Good idea buying the treadmill, but still take walks outside for sun and fresh air. Treadmill walking at an incline. You can make this into a real workout. I would start at no incline and a fast 45-minute walk. Then 60 minutes. Then start the adjustable incline process. I hope that with your new machine, that you can adjust the incline on the fly.

Esoteric? Eh, well, as I understand it, people taking enough vitamin D to hurt themselves is an extremely rare occurrence, and the max suggested levels are actually very low. If you take enough anything to hurt yourself, you’ll notice.

Very high levels of Vitamin D can result in calcification of soft tissue.

This is why you should take K2 and magnesium glycinate when taking lots of D3. Say over, 10000 units daily. The magnesium counters the calcification. Magnesium and calcium are pair on a seesaw in the human body. One works against the other.

At Amazon you find at least 100 sellers of D3+K2 Combo vitamins. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=d3+k2&i=hpc&page=3&crid=15656KYKCAMDH&qid=1643998195&sprefix=d3+k2%2Chpc%2C96&ref=sr_pg_3

ADK is the way a lot of people are taking D these days.

From the opening paragraphs of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens:

There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

Some ill-conditioned persons who sneer at the life-matrimonial, may perhaps suggest, in this place, that the good couple would be better likened to two principals in a sparring match, who, when fortune is low and backers scarce, will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure of the buffeting; and in one respect indeed this comparison would hold good; for, as the adventurous pair of the Fives’ Court will afterwards send round a hat, and trust to the bounty of the lookers-on for the means of regaling themselves, so Mr. Godfrey Nickleby and his partner[my emphasis], the honeymoon being over, looked out wistfully into the world, relying in no inconsiderable degree upon chance for the improvement of their means. Mr. Nickleby’s income, at the period of his marriage, fluctuated between sixty and eighty pounds per annum.

There are people enough in the world, Heaven knows! and even in London (where Mr. Nickleby dwelt in those days) but few complaints prevail, of the population being scanty. It is extraordinary how long a man may look among the crowd without discovering the face of a friend, but it is no less true. Mr. Nickleby looked, and looked, till his eyes became sore as his heart, but no friend appeared; and when, growing tired of the search, he turned his eyes homeward, he saw very little there to relieve his weary vision. A painter who has gazed too long upon some glaring colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking upon a darker and more sombre tint; but everything that met Mr. Nickleby’s gaze wore so black and gloomy a hue, that he would have been beyond description refreshed by the very reverse of the contrast.

I don’t know. It seems to me that putting everyone under the authority and control of women (usually young women) from the ages of about 5 to 18 for 5 days a week, 8 hours a day seems like it would have some impact on all of our development.

Yes, men are much better at 3d tasks than women, and this test is much more independent of other intelligence tests. But it isn’t actually important in the modern world.

3d tasks are probably valuable to plumbers and car mechanics. But there is no tail of super effective plumbers and electricians. The richest plumbers and mechanics are people who are good at running a business.

3d tasks aren’t useful to math professors. They aren’t even useful to geometry professors. Women math professors are much more likely to be in geometry than men!

The demographics of computer programmers are probably about personality. They might be about different mental strengths of men and women, but if so, they’re about subtle differences between words and numbers, not huge differences like 3d.

And you know Jeopardy! streak winner Amy Schneider still has a penis how?

If someone starves to death because they think their food is poisonous, they want to die. This isn’t irrational, that’s their preference schedule. Death >> eating.
It’s only irrational because if you offer to kill them some other way, they refuse. They want to die in a specific way, as if dead isn’t dead. Like someone who insists on buying a burger with only quarters and never dimes.

Someone who isn’t crazy just, like, eats the food anyway. “Hey look I didn’t die.” Of course someone who isn’t crazy doesn’t develop beliefs out of nowhere in the first place.

Telling them they don’t want to die is just like telling someone who does like to live that they shouldn’t eat.

This is the general reason that State psychiatry can be used to justify essentially any kind of tyranny. Simply define any form of non-submission as irrational craziness. Modern psychs will refuse to treat anyone who doesn’t request treatment, for exactly this reason.

Which is surprising, since they also tend to support de-institutionalization, as if letting crazy folk run free is anything but astonishingly cruel to everyone involved. Sure they shouldn’t be forced into treatment, but a fortiori hobbits shouldn’t have to wrangle madmen.

The proliferation of useless jobs for wordcels is part of the fatal feminization of the West. Wordcels often take their limited talents to Washington.

Are wordcels more emotional and sensitive? I’d think so, being oriented toward subtle meanings and nuances of phrasing. Politicians’ staff dynamics often resemble soap operas, even more so since government functionaries and political sycophants have acquired a level of dubious prestige recently ( like college administrators, who aren’t academics but enjoy the proximity).

The lastest Kamala drama:

https://nypost.com/2022/02/04/kamala-harris-speechwriter-joins-list-of-resigning-staffers/

Please, look at the photo of this chick. Another entry for ‘Lesbian or Bugman?’

8/10

Failed on number 3 – Too fast on the draw, I guess, and in number 10 I never noticed the stippled lines was part of the clue. Facepalm!

The rest was pretty easy as I spend a lot of time at work looking at (and making) 3-D drawings.

Maybe if you have the time you can do a full workup on me.

Do you just need a photo or what?

When I read, I do not see a movie in my head.

However, when I listen to music with my eyes closed I do visualize the various sounds. For example I tend to see cymbal and snare drum strikes much as Lightning streaks across the night sky. Other drum sounds are more round and in darker colors. notes played by horns come across as wave-like, and plucked notes tend to be pulses. I’ve talked to a few friends including professional musicians and none of them experience anything similar.

On the other hand, when I listen to music I automatically separate out the various instruments and notes they’re playing. My musician friends all do this, and it was quite late in life before I realized that most people did not do this.

Thanks Paperback.

Like Desanex had never played but–off to an acceptable start with “ready”, got it in 4 tries. (Words really aren’t my thing, i have a strongly visual “picture” of them and don’t as readily whip the letters around into other words. Better at the strictly logical Sudoku style stuff.)

I would like to see a study connecting male-skewed brains (systematizers v empathizers) with political ideology. Since psychological sex differences mirror ideological differences (one reason why men are more right wing to begin with – rules, hierarchy, emotional detachment etc) you’d expect a correlation between fetal hormone exposure and ideology. I have a pretty extreme male-skewed digit ratio, and I’ve always wondered if this shaped my ideology. I – and I suspect many HBD’ers – look like a libertarian (low empathy, high systematizer, open-minded) on Johnathan Haidt’s moral foundation test. I see HBD as the natural end point for libertarian-inclined people that familiarize themselves with the research on human differences.

Spatial (rotation) ability can really be independent of other abilities. My wife is far smarter than me on paper – even at math – but (what to me is) the simplest spatial-mechanical problem often stumps her.

I don’t think it was just the motor, although it does have a pretty hefty DC motor. If a treadmill is not heavy it is going to bounce around as you run on it, so they make no effort to use lighter materials – you have a heavy particleboard bed where the belt rides, a heavy steel frame, etc. An added benefit to the mfr. is that heavy materials are cheap compared w/ using alu. of equivalent strength.

A decent treadmill is going to be circa 300 lbs. and IIRC they sent 1 guy to deliver it maybe w/ a handtruck (it’s been a long time) and he struggled.

OTOH, I bought a front loading washer/dryer pair (they are stacked in my setup but are sold individually and then get bolted together if you are stacking them) and I assumed that the delivery guys would bring them upstairs (2nd floor laundry) one at time and then bolt them together. Two of me could barely carry one of these things up a set of stairs. Front loading washers usually have concrete blocks inside for ballast so they don’t walk all over the floor during spin cycle. Nope, these two giants bolted them together in my driveway and then carried them as a unit. They had some kind of special webbing body harness that cradles the machines and transferred the load to their torsos (actually very clever) but still….

So you get a fair number of inarticulate guys who can visualize objects in space really well.

I think I’ve mentioned this in comments before, but Henry Ford fit famously into that category, though at times he could communicate effectively with the public in a folksy context, so he wasn’t exactly inarticulate in the usual sense. His engineers couldn’t give him blueprints of some mechanical device they’d come up with. They had to, instead, build a to-scale mock up out of wood and give that to him before he understood how it worked.

When he started his museum in Michigan, it was focused on mechanical things and 19th century technology. Apparently he thought he could just put components of old steam engines or horse drawn agricultural implements on display without any description or explanation and most people would understand what they were. A genius for spacial visualization was one of his many great gifts/curses.

Probably whatever he could find cheap on Craigslist.

Craigslist or similar is a great place to shop for exercise equipment because people buy it and then don’t use it and then after a while they get sick of looking at the thing that is taking up space and reminding them of their laziness and want to get rid of it for cheap or even free if you will come and haul the thing away.

People think gay meant happy, but it really was closer to happy-go-lucky. A little silliness, frivolity, was implied. So it kind of fits, if not in the way they meant.

The loveliness of Paris
Seems somehow sadly gay…

(Guess what song opens with that.)

It would be interesting to know which pro golfers are lefthanded.

MEET JIM KAAT: THE MAN WHO SHOT HIS AGE LEFT-HANDED AND RIGHT-HANDED– Jim Kaat is a man of many talents as he prepares to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Baseball? He should be in the golf hall-of-fame for that.

there may be risks to excess vitamin D

isn’t really something to worry about unless someone has completely gone off the Vitamin D rails.

This has long been known about vitamin A, not just in the healthcare field but among the general public as well. Indeed, that was among the better-known nutritional facts fifty years ago.

David Reuben clarified this in his informative and often funny book about nutrition. He said you’d have to eat an entire polar bear liver raw to get an overdose of vitamin A.

In the early days of automobile crashes and settlements, Wittgenstein had noticed a magazine article about a court case in which the accident was modeled and disputed by using blocks of wood on a street diagram. That was a “picture” of an “atomic fact,” in his view, which if accurate, had the same “logical form” (relations) as the elements in the accident. Language expressing it would copy the same logical form.

Modeling a solution to Steve’s treadmill retrieval would involve the picturing of manipulations and the refinement of language directives such as, “You grab that end, I’ll grab this. Oh, ****!”

Someone (Haworth?) makes a computer desk, with usb and power ports, attached to a treadmill, so you can browse headlines while moving your legs.

Author of “The Shangri-La Diet”

Alas, died of coronary artery disease aged 60 anyway. Genetics 1, environment 0.

Alas, died of coronary artery disease aged 60 anyway.

This sort of thing happens. Jim Fixx, the author of The Complete Book of Running who helped start the running and fitness craze, died of a heart attack at age 52 during his daily run in 1984.

Yesterday, I bought a used treadmill from a man in Valley Glen.

Hey, that’s redundant! And repetitive and tautological, too.

So is River Falls, Wisconsin. (As opposed to Black River Falls or Thief River Falls.) That town’s football team for many years wasn’t their state’s own Packers or the nearby Vikings, but the Kansas City Chiefs, who trained there. The NFL’s most redundant city.

I think computer programmers may be a different breed than the typical engineer. It’s surprising how many don’t like math.

Programming doesn’t have much to do with math. Instead you need to be able to visualize the data structures and how the program will transform them. Then, as a former boss said, “It’s just a small matter of code.”

I met a surprising number of music majors and EEs. The music guys I understand; the EEs not so much.

My calendar goes in a straight line January to June left to right then makes a quarter turn down through June and July, heads left through September, then another quarter turn up to December.

I got 8/10.

There’s a place in Boulder called Table Mesa.

I just found this by accident because I follow the MEDCRAM video channel.

one reason why men are more right wing to begin with – rules, hierarchy, emotional detachment etc

Pat Buchanan said the man of the right determines what he feels first, than works out the logic behind it. Compare that to communists, who appear to have no emotional attachment to anything, and no emotions other than anger.

Women are traditionally more supportive of hierarchy and the status quo in general. Those intensely fanatical rule-enforcers are Karens, after all, not Kurts. Women opposed suffrage more than did men. Women attend church.

Labeling which sex is more “right-wing” is a fool’s errand. Women hate change. Men are both more progressive and more reactionary.

It’s a bell-curve thing. Where have we seen that before?

Berkshire, Hampshire, and Cheshire counties in New England.

an expertise in African-American history and innovation economics

“Koal” (K. Popper) Marx once famously explained that after the revoultion it would be so easy to run a state’s government that a cook could do it: And here we go: Lisa Cook is ready to help the mentally a bit restricted Joe Biden to run the USA.

Kaol Moax the prohet!

It seems like such a ridiculously simple idea.

As my uncle Artie would have said, “Then how come you didn’t think of it?”

I played twice, got the word in 3 tries each time. After that I googled and found a list of 5 letter words that contain the most commonly used vowels and consonants, i.e. good first words to use in Wordle.

I have several daughters. More and more I have come to believe that it’s a rare woman who matures emotionally after age 14 or so. It does happen, but it’s rare.

This is Biden’s pick to head the Federal Reserve…Lisa Cook from Michigan State, who has an expertise in African-American
history and innovation economics.

Things are not that crazy yet. Biden wants to put this useless person on
the Federal Reserve Board. Not be the head of the Federal Reserve Board.

That’s a pretty good idea. His “No S” diet is pretty good too. If you’re young and do a sedentary job like programming, these combined are probably a great way to eat and exercise just enough to stay reasonably trim and healthy.

I concur with your comment but I was thinking I might be missing something when my reaction is that this coinage of wordcel is retarded. Like most stuff that replicates off 4chan I suppose.

Who likes this word again?

This one hit me. As I said – somebody must have mentioned it (or something close to it) last spring already – maybe commenter HA – and I did tell lots of people about this finding. And I didn’t archive it, because when I read it it struck me as being so important and obvious that I expected lots (hundreds – thousands…) to mention it afterwards. But nothing much happened until – you came around with your gloriuous post (I have even asked other commenters at other occasions if they’ d remember this – at least – similar post from last spring).

If I assume, that Dr. Roger Seheult is right (and that might well be the case) that then would be a rather important insight. And here I struggle as I’ve struggled last spring: How come that such – at least possibly insightful – findings pop up and disappear soon afterwards – on the most part unnoticed?

Lots of people seem to prefer it in the ways of old: I go to the doctor. The doctor saves me by handing me something over or injecting me something or… – And be it Vitamin D…

(And Vitamin-D is better than the vaccines. Not least because the vaccines are given to everybody else…)

I too will now have a look at the MEDCRAM channel. Thanks again, Chrisnonymous!

A leasurely laid-back theory of everything gender/socio-political in a few insightful words. Impressive, Reg.

PS

If somebod would write a very short explanation of the modern world (100 or so pages long), this could be a chapter in it.

The first thing I did when I installed our elliptical was to remove the inane screen and its controls. I don’t need a computer to tell me how winded I am or how much longer I want to cycle my feet around. I put a big flat screen on the wall, and now I can pretend to be gliding my way through anything I want.

What does it say that my wife is better than me at arranging the dishes to all fit in our dishwasher so they all get clean?

It means that, like me, you are a dishonest lazy bastard who has found an ego soothing way to get the wife to do it.

Fully Vaxxed too, I bet.

The guy that really saved Henry Ford’s bacon was Charles E. “Cast-Iron Charlie” Sorensen. As you say, Henry would come up with vague sketches and descriptions of what he wanted and Sorensen would translate it into the models you mention, and the patterns for the part.

Charlie, not Henry, prototyped the idea of the moving assembly line (going so far as to pull the chassis through the factory with a rope as workers added parts via simple tasks) where the car moved to the workers and not the other way around. This helped speed the production rate and actually lower the per car cost of the Model T, putting America, and the world, on wheels.

His real achievement was helping spin up Willow Run in Ypsilanti, MI to license build the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. The War Department flew Henry and Charlie out to Consolidated in San Diego before the US entered WW2 and wanted them to sign a contract to produce B-24 components to send to Consolidated. Charlie talked to Henry and they told the War Department “Either we build the WHOLE AIRPLANE, or nothing at all”. Legend has it Charlie went back to his hotel room that night and sketched up the plans for Willow Run on hotel stationary, working into the wee hours of the morning.

Lots of folks had fun at the thought of Ford building anything as complex as a B-24, and constant delays in 1942 – 43 got the factory nick-named “Will-it Run?” But as the tooling Charlie and others ordered showed up and the factory retained more workers Ford got to the point where they were churning out a B-24 Liberator every hour.

Pre war Consolidated was churning out a B-24 every day.

Ford got so efficient at building B-24s Consolidated was told to focus on other airplane projects (Like the B-36 Peacemaker) since Ford was ably meeting production needs. In the end Ford produced 1/2 of the 18,000+ B-24s that were built.

Not too shabby for a shape-rotator.

When I listen to music it tells me a story.

Toccata and Fugue tells the story of a whole dude’s life. He certainly doesn’t have it easy, starting with a rough birth, but his time is not about hope and successes either. He marries and has his own kids, after all. As he ages he gets a little too focused on his job, which is bad because he’s aging and missing a step here and there. He sort of gets it together, then finds out he’s sick and takes it very poorly indeed. In the end, he gets over his regrets before he dies, and his final passing is mourned by all who knew him.

It’s getting tiresome to read how billionaire wordcel widows and divorcees are giving millions to public education initiatives. The government should be prohibited from accepting donations.

There’s usually a tradeoff between speed of maturity and furthest extent of maturity.

Plus it’s just easier to take care of babies if you’re a bit that way yourself. To a completely grown-up man babies can look rather alien. It’s not like he can’t figure it out, but he has to figure it out and even at the best of times it’s a second language to him.

Well, I’m probably not doing what you’re doing, Buzz. I’m just going hard-out, to get my heart rate way up. It’s not for that long, but I need to set and change speed and slope and see the time, if nothing else.

I don’t like the TV screens one bit, and if I bought an exercise machine, believe you me, that part would have to go. However, for me, the more numbers to look at, the better. On some of the Precor (maybe Life Fitness too) models, one can have the whole screen filled up with different numbers. That keeps my mind off of “I can’t go for even 30 more seconds” … for a few seconds.

If you mean more easygoing exercises, I just go outside with the bike, rollerblades, etc.

It’s not necessarily wierd or sinister that Epstein funded Kosslyn, because Epstein’s legend was that he was a guy who understood and loved hard science, but somehow, instead of becoming a scientist himself, he became a billionaire and sponsored people who were better at science than him. The nature of his work meant that there must have been innocents who were solicited or investigated as a prospect. In fact, the only way to clear the innocents would be to properly investigate and straighten out — or we could just burn the building down and now everyone who had lunch with him looks guilty, I guess that’s good too.

Understood. My thing comes from my history: miles and miles of hiking and climbing. I damn well know myself and how much effort and time I have gone. A numbers screen is simply awful for me. The machine is just a rotten substitute for what I would really rather be doing outdoors at high altitude. This is not easygoing at all. Never was. I laugh at men who exercise indoors or in essentially city enviroments — no weather, no altitude, no rocky conditions or inclement weather whatsoever — and they think they are “athletic.” Most have skinny little calves. That is my clue. Skinny little calves identify a man who really hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’m just going hard-out…

ROTFLMAO

Well, maybe it would be better if they used all their unearned money to start academies independent of all the political and education-business BS. You know what? They are too stupid and/or lazy to actually try to do anything like that.

Imagine for a moment, Mr. “Abolish_public_education” what you or I would do with all that money. Imagine founding and funding actual schools, K-12, that adhered to academic standards. Now THAT would be something.

The vast majority of fabulously wealthy people who give money don’t know fuck all about what they are doing. They are lazy — first of all — and they are mostly mediocre. Don’t expect much.

Let me repeat that: Don’t expect much.