Back when I'd sometimes be on group trips rooming with other people, the nails on blackboard thing for me was when the first thing someone would do in a hotel room was turn on the TV. Admittedly, my brother does it at his house as well.
There's nature not-silence--or a computer-generated version of same--and there's TV (or even music for the most part). Also tons of sounds in my house even if I don't put something on but mostly want to work without added inputs.
Something about comparing the US to other rich nations rubs me the wrong way when, in my opinion, servicing a country as large as the US is very different from servicing a small island like the UK. The post talks about difference in margins and regional squeezing, etc. However, how much of the cost difference comes from transporting the goods? The post also mentions how large stores are, and how large of a selection there is, in US stores. That seems like it'd drive up the cost, but I don't hear Americans complaining about too many options. Honestly, I think it's an achievement that an American can eat as healthy for the same price as the French, they are very different countries geographically!
The link above will give you thumbnails that you can view in browser.
I'm considering making a taxonomic tree (and then forget formal phylogeny and include the varieties) with the thumbnail images. Similar to another pet project of mine.
Built off of NCBI E-Utilities, this currently only works for citations found on PubMed. I would love to find a way to make this more general, have it work for Google Scholar or the like, but I don't know of any free API access to larger citation databases.
Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) by Cormac McCarthy. Quickly became my favorite book after reading it a second time. I've never read a book with more effective language.
Listened to this as an audiobook, and recommend the format for this specific book. The language is amazing but the subject is so brutal. The audiobook relentlessly drives forward, delivering the language and imagery without pause. I think I might not have finished the text.
Second McCarthy’s “effective language” attribution.
I read The Road, and it was so sufficiently “effective” in its descriptions and it’s setting that I’m happy never reading another McCarthy book again. Glad I did once.
it's gruesome. I love westerns but in a way this is some kind of anti-western. Captivating however, in the same way 'Heart of Darkness' - Joseph Conrad , is.
This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.
