The next generation could go down. The PS3 was crazy expensive, and then the PS4 cost significantly less than the PS3 had. So, there’s precedent. Adjusted for inflation, the ps3 was even more expensive than the ps5 pro.

It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.

this was in 2015 btw
not that it’s super important, just in case someone reads it as a contemporary news headline rather than fun historical trivia

Every time I hear this observation, I automatically hear Jim Carrey’s voice in my head saying “It’s dead people laughing! Those people are dead!”

I guess he said it in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon and the line has somehow been permanently lodged in the back of my brain for the last 25 years

Sweet vegetables. Anything that is unambiguously a savory main course plant, but has some sugariness to it. Peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, turnips, beets, etc. I can eat them, they’re just even more work than most food (I agree with the other commenter who said that food in general is just a chore like brushing your teeth, although really good food is basically a neutral experience for me, where the enjoyment is about worth the effort)

Oh I guess now that I think about it maybe there are exceptions, like I think a lot of people would consider red onions sweet but I am fine with those. I think it needs some sourness or sharpness to offset the sweetness, the problem is if it’s just sweet + savory and not much else.

Heh, I just posted a comment without reading the others first, in which I said something very similar about taking a long time to “come up with 2 sentences”. I was briefly wondering whether to write “two” or “2”, so it’s funny seeing the same wording pop up in another comment.

Lol, the timing of this is pretty crazy. Today is a big milestone birthday for my brother, and texting him some birthday wishes is my major task for the day (you know, the thing where, as long as I do that, I have completed today, even though there are other things I will hopefully be able to do, but might not because the main task might take all my energy).

We live pretty far apart, and I don’t have too clear an idea of his current interests, and his job doesn’t leave him with a lot of spare time. Usually I buy him a digital gift of some kind (ebook, switch game I think he’d like, etc) and send a happy birthday email that’s like 2 sentences that I spend all day composing in my head. I haven’t figured out what to get him this year, but also, for my birthday earlier this year he just texted me instead of buying me a steam game I’ll never play, so I’m sort of taking that as a signal that it’s okay for me to do the same (I’m relieved, rather than offended - I’m totally fine with not receiving any particular birthday greeting or gift myself). I ran that idea by my NT mom, and she agreed that that sounds absolutely fine.

So I guess I’m about to text him something like “Happy xth birthday! Hope you’re having a great day! Any big plans to celebrate the milestone?” And then have a brief back and forth on the basis of his response. “About to” here meaning in the next few hours I guess.

On the topic in general, I run into this with Christmas presents as well, who to get presents for at in-person gatherings of various sizes, or for close family that live far away, etc, and what to give them.

I only know his most mainstream stuff, but his part of the roast of Bob Saget was basically him bombing on purpose. I’m pretty sure he was just bombing hard because he knew his fellow comedians would love it, and he didn’t care one way or another about the general audience, although the general audience ended up loving it too.

It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.

She looks great. And powerful.

This has been pretty widely discussed under the name “the double empathy problem”, although as always it’s good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other’s communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they’re speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

I wasn’t sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I’m crazy indicates it’s pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

I was curious to learn more about this, because it sounded interesting, so I googled it. I’m guessing you’re talking about the interstitium? There’s a lot of criticism of that episode for inaccuracies about the interstitium (known for much longer than the 5 years the episode claims - it’s been mainstream since at least the 80s), traditional Chinese medicine (the treatments they mention have been proven to be no more effective than a placebo) and the connection between the two (there’s no relation between the interstitium and the lines predicted by chi). Everyone in the discussions I found sounded pretty disappointed in the episode.

Even if it’s usually pretty accurate (I don’t actually know whether it is), radiolab is not the same thing as the scientific establishment, and this is probably why the OP asked if anyone who does science for a living rather than reading pop science articles could reply.

bobby hill managed to make perfect cell double over in pain, so I’m pretty sure he could annihilate namek-era goku

A few years back I got permabanned on reddit by an automated message, for no reason I could figure out. A couple of days later I was unbanned (apparently it was part of a mass banning, most of which were erroneous and reversed). So it’s possible this is something similar and you might be reinstated soon.

That’s fair, although the tone of the conversation definitely involved her being less happy with my behavior now than before the diagnosis (as I mentioned, she attributed my recent lack of conversational energy to the diagnosis). It felt like it was at worst “complaining” and at best “concerned”, with “celebratory” not really being in the ballpark.

I guess from a combination of what I’ve read in the past about people struggling with autism disclosure, and the fact that my mom is a retired GP who should have a handle on how sensitive a diagnosis might be, led me to assume that it was understood to be a sensitive subject.

Anyway I guess I’ll calmly broach the subject with her tomorrow, prefacing it with a mention of my usual tea-making habits, segueing into what I heard, then mentioning a) how I’d prefer to handle my own disclosure, b) that my conversational reticence is not a result of a newfound distaste for neurotypicals, and c) that maybe she should discuss that sort of thing with me instead of just guessing and then telling other people how I feel.

Thanks for the reply, there’s a lot of good thoughtful input there which I’ll think about.

I was going to just upvote and not reply, but I had an amusing moment while reading your comment (and then felt that if I was going to reply at all, I should first acknowledge that this is some good substantial advice). I’m usually pretty good about understanding figurative language, but when you said “spilling your tea”, there were several seconds of confusion and rereading, with me thinking “but I didn’t spill my cup of tea, I didn’t even get around to making it”. I understood eventually, but kind of a funny autistic moment.

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that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish

The linked article mentions that one of the predator types merged into the dragon is raptors (as in birds of prey, not velociraptors)

You might enjoy crpgaddict, a blog that is playing through every computer roleplaying game in chronological order, providing scores for each one on various metrics. The reason I bring him up is that he doesn’t rate on a curve, or give things marks for being “good for its time” - if pool of radiance scores higher than skyrim, it’s not because it was influential or good for its time, but because he thinks it’s outright better regardless of age (just an example - I’m not saying he would actually rate those two games that way, and he has not rated skyrim). There are early 80s games that he remembers fondly and had a huge impact on the industry that he rates as like 23/100 or whatever, because the scale leaves room for the Witcher 3.

It takes a long time to get through all those games, so he’s currently up to the early 90s, having updated his blog regularly for over a decade. But his list of highest rated games might be a good place to start.

Oh, and while we’re talking about old-ish RPGs that would score well on his scale, I might as well mention Morrowind and the Baldur’s Gate series (before 3, obviously), which he won’t reach for a long time but has been known to hold up as solid examples of the genre. Personally I still think Baldur’s Gate 2 is great. I’m also a big fan of the quest for glory series, which crpgaddict has rated, but might not make his list of top scoring RPGs, because they’re a hybrid adventure/RPG, so not all of their strengths appear on a scale designed for pure RPGs.