+1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly
The college I went to explicitly billed itself as for teaching, and most of our professors were just that. They might do research with the upperclassmen, but their priority was teaching.
That is, until we got a new president who set a new strategic goal for being a top research school and adjusted all hiring and tenure standards for that.
I don’t know how to say this without seeming rude, but a few hundred acres is very small. 500 acres is less than a square mile. Is there something about your community that makes farms of that size more common than normal?
Edit: my (extended) family has a farm, and they cultivate X0,000 acres every year, though they own far less. They do plant a larger area than most for their community, but they’re not planting 20x their neighbors.
It's small in that you can't support a family farming 500 acres of corn/beans. It's big in that buying 500 acres would cost $5M - $10M, that's real money!
If you don't mind me asking, how do you make it work for yourself? Are you single, so you don't need more? Or perhaps you're closer to a 'hobbyist' farmer? (although 500 acres is also well beyond a hobby haha)
I've been a FAANG engineer for the last 15 years, tech pays pretty well. The things you see on the news about "farming subsidies" often show up as government subsidized loans (lower rates and higher leverage) which has helped.
It's somewhere between an extra job and a hobby. It's just touch for planting / harvest season -- lots of nights / weekends / day job PTO along with getting help from relatives.
Oh wow, you're FAANG _and_ you're farming? lol that's impressive. I hope you make lots of jokes about how the F no longer stands for "Facebook", but rather "Farm" :)
On a recent Odd Lots episode, they interviewed a Canadian lentil farmer. His claim was that a family of 3 (Father, Mother, Daughter) could farm 1200 acres of lentils with time left over due to modern automation.
So I guess it would depend on the automation level of the kind of crops you’re planting.
Is it remarkable that Hemingway was convinced? I can understand if I was a 'mundane' person and thought somebody was spying on me, I could be convinced that I was paranoid. But if I have ties to one of the obvious enemies of the US, I think it would be very hard to convince me that I _wasn't_ being spied on because the motive seems obvious. Do we know why Hemingway was able to be convinced?
Ya, I specifically remember solving word problems in school / college and getting distracted by irrelevant details. Usually I would get distracted by stuff that _seemed_ like it should be used, so maybe cat facts would be fine for me to tease out, but in general I don't think I'm good at ignoring extraneous information.
Edit: To be fair, in the example provided, the cat fact is _exceptionally_ extraneous, and even flagged with 'Fun Fact:' as if to indicate it's unrelated. I wonder if they were all like that.
I had always assumed that the extraneous information was part of the test. You have to know/understand the concept well enough to know that the information was extraneous.
From what I remember of school, extraneous information was rarely included and the teachers who did add extraneous information seemed to do it maliciously.
There was one math class at a private school I attended that was the exception. The textbook had identifying relevant information as part of several chapters.
The key ingredient in beet juice, from an endurance perspective, is nitrate. Once you eat it, bacteria in your mouth convert nitrate to nitrite. Then the acidity in your stomach helps convert the nitrite to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide plays a whole bunch of roles in the body. That includes cueing your blood vessels to dilate, or widen, delivering more oxygen to the muscles, faster.
The article summarizes the results of several studies into beetroot juice for physical athletic performance.
I sent the following summary to Andy Jones, the scientist most associated with beet juice research, to see whether he would agree:
“It works. It probably works less well in elites, like most things, but there may still be an effect. Higher doses taken for at least a few days in a row probably increase your chances of a positive effect.”
Jones thought that sounded reasonable. He pointed out that there’s a separate body of evidence emerging that beet juice also enhances muscle strength and power in some circumstances, an effect that Poon’s review confirms.
I see everybody talking about the nitrate, but there is another substance in beets that might be relevant... betaine, also known as trimethylglycine HCL. I take about 800mg of this pure in my orange juice in the mornings and it gives me a very noticeable boost. But it is possible that this effect is specific to me and maybe other people who are "under-methylators" (which I think is a somewhat pseudo-scientific concept, but it led me to try betaine and I got results).
Betaine was first isolated from beets, hence the name, and as the other name, trimethylglycine, hints it has 3 easily donated methyl groups, so if you do need those for some reason it may be useful to you. It's also pretty cheap and unlikely to be harmful.
The rule of thumb is 1mL per Kg bodyweight, so a child can drown with less than 15mL of water in their lungs. The most common mechanisms are laryngospasm or contraction of the laryngeal muscles closing the airway (dry drowning) or pulmonary oedema caused by irritating of the alveoli (secondary drowning).
I'd imagine it's hyperbole. A tbsp is likely enough to just snort and not have (too many) issues. People do drown in surprisingly shallow waters, however.
It’s not hyperbole. It requires prior incapacitation, but if you’re unconscious then even a tiny amount of water can kill you.
Similarly, intoxication vastly degrades the instincts that would otherwise keep you alive. I will never understand how people think getting drunk is _fun_.
Re: intoxication, I don’t really like drinking either, but I can kindof understand the appeal. It makes me overthink everything less, so I can be more unfiltered. That can be fun, especially for dancing/stuff like that — if you feel self-conscious while dancing I’d recommend trying a couple drinks first. But I’m not a perfect person, and usually I want some filter, I rarely drink
I'm 30, so maybe still too young to have a meaningful perspective, but I take comfort in the fact that I will always get to choose what I _try_ to do. I can't control my body's state, but I can insist on doing exciting / eventful stuff until my body gives in. My friend's grandma (80+ yo) just flew from Bay Area to Paris on her own, to catch up with old friends. I'm pretty sure her doctors would advise her not to do that trip, but she is doing what she wants. I admire her for making the choice to assert her free will, despite the increased risk; I aspire to be like that.
It is interesting how the perspective of society can set an expectation of not doing certain things. Of course its personality and body/health dependent but I've seen 95 year olds still doing daily light farm work and totally independent until the day they passed away, or seen 75+ year olds out there on some pretty challenging hiking trails. There's no reason why an average older person can't still do a ton of things.
I think this argument only makes sense on the surface level. If it was the case that humans hit some hard limit to growth (perhaps running out of 'room' to grow, or losing the ability to process new energy, etc), then I think it could make sense to do this sort of 'graceful decommissioning' behavior, which we'd come to know as aging. But is there a hard limit we hit, aside from the aging process itself? None is obvious to me.
What limitation is our body pushing off by 'choosing' to age, instead of continuing as normal?
Edit: Regardless of the validity of the argument, I loved that comic, thanks for sharing.
It's commonly thought that if your cells kept dividing the way that they do when you're young and they accumulated genetic damages you'd get cancer more often.
AFAIK most cells can only divide a limited number of times, because the dna gets shorter with every copy. There is a finite bit of padding at the end (that you're born with) and once that's used up through too many copies, the cell can no longer divide (supposedly).
but we can just make another human with new cell timespans? something doesn't add up. also, men without kids age slower but die early while men with kids age faster and live longer.
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