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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • You’re not alone.

    I never liked humans aged 0-10, and could only kinda stand adolescents and young adults in small doses.

    But I wanted adult children because I wanted the relationship that I had with my parents from my 20’s onward. Many of the well adjusted adults I know had or have really close relationships with their supportive, loving parents, and it seems like a relationship that goes both ways, between the 30-something child and the 60-something parent.

    So now I have kids. I still don’t really care for other people’s children, although I’ve softened my views and attitudes towards them. But I love my own children, and I’m very excited about how they’re developing into actual humans with their own personalities who will one day be their own full fledged adults who I love and who love me.

    I found the helpless infant stages to be simultaneously boring and stressful. It wasn’t until they were eating food that I cooked for them (5-6 months in) that started to feel an emotional connection, and some kind of meaning in parenting. Then, when they started talking I became more emotionally invested in the relationship.



  • It’s not uncommon for space images to be color-enhanced. On the one hand, it may feel less authentic. On the other hand, the visible light levels in space may be insufficient for our expectations and uses anyway.

    Another thing to consider is that human perception of color in celestial objects is often just wrong, so enhancing the color of certain objects is more true than what we often see ourselves.

    The sun is the same color all the time: white, consisting of a broad spectrum of all the wavelengths in the visible light range. But our atmosphere scatters the different wavelengths differently, so we see a blue sky and we see yellow, orange, and red sunsets. The atmospheric effects are happening all the time, with all the other light that happens to hit our planet, like the moon seeming to change color while reflecting the same white sunlight.

    The stars in the sky are all sorts of different colors, but appear white to us, because our color-blind rods are much more sensitive than our color-sensitive cones, and the dimness of starlight just all looks like faint white lights regardless of whether the star happens to be red, yellow, blue, or white.

    Meanwhile, relativistic effects might actually shift wavelengths and resolution, too, whether we’re talking about redshift or gravitational lensing, and asking what the “true” image is supposed to be.

    So when we take a long exposure of something in space, that itself may represent something that the human eye can’t see. Using colors to represent the different wavelengths actually present may also require adjustment of what physical filters are used on the capture, and how the actual sensor is configured to account for different wavelengths (including potentially wavelengths not within the visible spectrum), and to account for literal noise captured by the sensor.

    Astrophotography needs to make choices about how to translate sensor data to an actual human-visible image displayed on a screen with its own limited color space of what its pixels can display, or printed on paper with its own limited color space of what inks are available for printing.


  • Week 6 of 5/3/1. Visiting family this week so I had to drop into a new gym near my mom’s place. For my AMRAP sets, targeting 1+ reps:

    Squat: 3 x 335 lbs. I’m a little bit concerned I wasn’t able to do more than 5, as I was doing 5 x 335 7 weeks ago. But maybe it’s fatigue from last week’s deadlift 1RM, some bad sleep and lots of alcohol this week while traveling and catching up with family.

    Bench: 6 x 180 lbs. This I’m less concerned about. I’ve seen a steady improvement in bench over the last few weeks.

    Deadlift: 3 x 385 lbs. This was a grip failure more than it was an inability to do more reps. I set up my straps half-assed and paid for it.

    Gonna do a deload week next week (Week 7), and come back at it for another 7 week cycle.


  • it’s now frowned upon to be hit on?

    It’s frowned upon to hit on someone who doesn’t have an exit from the situation: a customer talking to a retail/hospitality worker whose job includes not pissing off customers, colleagues who need to continue working with each other (or worse, a superior-subordinate relationship), etc.

    I don’t know what 20-somethings are doing these days, but navigating that transition from school to young independent adulthood was something difficult every generation had to do. It’s just that this generation may have had their social skills development stilted during COVID or the smartphone era so that they’re less equipped to make that jump, and that gap is leaving a greater proportion of that population behind.


  • It doesn’t have to be structured. It just has to give opportunities for repeat interactions, and maybe a promise of future interaction with the same person, in that low pressure environment.

    Dog parks have a bunch of dogs mingling, so their owners will often have the opportunity to get to know each other.

    Neighbors who see each other often have an opportunity to get to know each other. That goes for work neighbors, too, even if they work for another employer entirely (but in the same building or something.

    Regulars at a coffee shop, restaurant, bar, or gym might learn to recognize each other and go from exchanging pleasantries to actually getting to know each other (and the staff).

    Church isn’t as big a thing as it was a few generations ago, but any kind of social meetings, from support groups to volunteer associations, give the opportunity to work together for a common goal.

    This is where hobbies and free time come in. And I’m not going to knock video games and other hobbies where you might interact with people online, but there is something fundamentally different about repeated in-person interactions. So it’s worth making sure that your routine includes regular interaction with people in low-stakes settings.



  • I suspect this is actually what’s changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it’s only a little more than fixing their old one.

    The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person’s house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it’s easy to diagnose which part has failed.


  • I always needed practical examples, which is why it was helpful to learn physics alongside calculus my senior year in high school. Knowing where the physics equations came from was easier than just blindly memorizing the formulas.

    The specific example of things clicking for me was understanding where the “1/2” came from in distance = 1/2 (acceleration)(time)^2 (the simpler case of initial velocity being 0).

    And then later on, complex numbers didn’t make any sense to me until phase angles in AC circuits showed me a practical application, and vector calculus didn’t make sense to me until I had to actually work out practical applications of Maxwell’s equations.


  • I suspect that ordinary avenues for meeting friends in one’s 30’s is also available for meeting partners, only you have to acknowledge that most of the people you meet aren’t going to be single/interested.

    I’m an extrovert. I talk to strangers in certain settings, especially where waiting around is normal. One of my best friends, I met in line waiting to get into a standup comedy show. I’ve met other friends in line for concerts and sporting events, too. I’ve also met friends sitting at the bar or some kind of communal table of a restaurant, and connected over the food itself. It just takes the boldness of asking for contact information and then texting “it was nice to meet you today, great talking to you” and then sometimes that becomes a friendship.

    But pure strangers are hard to connect with in one interaction. Most of the friends I made after 30 were from repeated interactions over time: neighbors you see regularly, other regulars at the dog park/coffee shop, etc.

    And once you’re in a mode where you can make friends, if some of them happen to be single and compatible, maybe you try going out on a date.

    And yes, this means that sometimes you’ll meet people at the gym, or at their place of work, or other circumstances where it’s frowned upon to hit on strangers. But making the friendship bridge first can give you that read on the situation of whether they’re actually open to dating.





  • Two things.

    First, dating and commitment is about matching and compatibility, not about some kind of objective ranking system of quality or merit. It’s about how a partner or potential partner rates on your own personal scale, not some sort of societal scale built by social consensus. So while it is ok for you to find a particular trait to be a negative, or even a deal breaker, your point is completely irrelevant to the advice being given, which is not to hide important traits of one’s identity.

    Second, your own preference here is stated in unnecessarily condescending terms, as if your preferences are right and the opposite preference is wrong or the sign of some kind of disorder. Whatever your definition of “toys and dolls” are, it probably isn’t a very tightly defined term, and I’d venture to guess that you are OK with some kinds of “toys” but not others. People collect stuff. People develop emotional attachment to physical things all the time. And for you to gatekeep and say which things are acceptable or unacceptable is kinda an asshole move.




  • Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it’s a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.

    The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.

    If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we’re still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.

    And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you’re still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.