Tim Whatley

My favorite of his are:

This commentary on Batman

The best things in life are free

The true meaning of Christmas

404 is great, too, for coverage of those topics.

Defector is worth a special mention in large part because it’s one of the few places on the internet that still makes me laugh out loud. It’s ostensibly a sports site, but when they stray off topic it’s some of the best stupid shit on the internet.

Defector is fucking great. It’s the team that made Deadspin magical, who all revolted when Deadspin got bought by private equity and run into the ground, and banded together to form an employee-owned outlet whose authors are just all great writers.

The editor in chief of Deadspin, who fought the dumb decisions when private equity took over, ended up resigning in a blaze of glory by posting this article on the site as she left.

She also has a great new book out on how private equity breaks things.

The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can’t be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.

Piefed doesn’t have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml

It’s a California Kong, which is two California kings tied together with gorilla leather.

FitnessGram Pacer Tests, obviously

I think the parent comment is talking about piefed the software, compared to Lemmy the software, not the specific piefed.social instance they’re posting from.

slightly niche

Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn’t have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.

So I keep my reddit sports account.

I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn’t have those either.

Cats keep rodents under control so that our stored grain isn’t destroyed or contaminated.

This study analyzes historical results of three different man versus horse races (in Wales, in Virginia, and in California). The data shows that human performance decreases with temperature, but less so than horses, so that 30°C is approximately where the best humans can start outperforming the best horses that year.

I would think that even with 15 minutes of intermittent pauses/checks, that time is still productive for cooling the animal and would add less than 15 minutes to the theoretical total if they were allowed to run the whole time.

In order to make a firearm from scratch you must first create the universe.

All of us who learned Spanish in the U.S. also know “¿Dónde está la biblioteca?”

Just a bunch of canned phrases like that kicking around in our brains.

A lot of young people don’t realize just how difficult post-school dating was before online dating. Once we exhausted the pool of 5-10 single people who were friends of friends, that was basically it. We’d have to go find strangers at the bar.

That conditioned everyone to be slightly more willing to settle for less perfect matches, knowing that there wasn’t necessarily a replacement available. That could be a good thing (people more likely to have the patience to let a spark develop) or a bad thing (a higher percentage of couples who just resented each other).

I can see an argument that things were better before online dating for some subset of people. But having lived that period, I can say from experience that it wasn’t easy then, either. And for someone like me, who is a better writer than I am a speaker, especially over the phone, the rise of text-based communication was helpful for navigating the early stages of relationships when that became the norm.

Obvious Plant puts fake products on shelves.

True Wagner puts absurd flyers on telephone poles and bulletin boards.

This is more of a True Wagner situation.

It’s a few things that stem from bipedalism:

• We can run and breathe entirely separately. Most quadrupeds lack the ability to run and take breaths independently of the pace of each step. Watching cheetahs sprint, for example, show that they have no choice but to exhale every time their legs come together and inhale every time their legs push apart.
• Running on our hind legs only frees up our hands to be able to use tools and weapons, maybe even water containers for drinking on the go.
• We can see further by standing up, and can make tactical decisions based on terrain, while still running pretty much full speed.

Combined with our unusual ability to cool ourselves by sweating, this gives us an advantage over pretty much any animal in the heat. Wolves and horses can still outrun humans in the cold, but lack the cooling mechanisms to maintain pace in the same heat that we can.

I still use reddit.

Lemmy is still missing a few things:

• Sports discussion. There’s nothing quite like the absurdity of some of the sports communities that really brightens my day, from really deep analytical insights to the dumbest meme jokes in existence.
• City-specific local discussion. I still spend time on my city’s subreddit, which helps keep me tuned in on local happenings.
• Non-tech related career discussion. My field (law) has several subreddits useful for talking shop, growing careers, making fun of shitty lawyers, etc. That doesn’t really exist here.
• Hobby discussion. I’m trying my best to participate in fitness and weight lifting related subreddits but there just isn’t a critical mass of commenters to get a discussion really going. Plenty of my other hobbies and interests are missing here, too.

I’ve deleted the reddit alts I used to use for technology related topics, parenting/relationship topics, political discussion, and stupid general purpose humor or memes, as Lemmy has enough of that I don’t need Reddit for those topics. But for the ones I’ve listed above, I’m still using desktop “old” Reddit.

I’m also still on Instagram, but only follow people I know personally. It’s the easiest way to keep up with my acquaintances’ lives: who’s marrying who, who’s having kids, where people have moved, etc.

Phosphates were banned in dishwasher detergents in 2011, so most of the name brand companies switched to enzyme-based cleaners that use amylase and protease, which dissolve starches and proteins, respectively. And then some traditional detergent, which allows oil and water to mix, washes it all away.

The nature of the enzymes are that as soon as they’ve broken up the starch or protein, they survive the reaction and can happily move onto the next starch or protein molecule. So if they’re overactive, without enough targets, then any portion of the dishes that are sensitive to that particular cleaner is going to get a higher “dose” of that cleaner working specifically at it.

If you have 2 apples, and then I give you 2 more, you don’t suddenly have 5 apples because we all decided 2+2=5.

No, but some types of addition follow their own rules.

Sometimes 1+1 is 2. One Apple plus one Apple is two apples.

Sometimes 1+1 is 1. Two true statements joined together in conjunction are true.

Sometimes 1+1 is 0. Two 180° rotations is the same as if you didn’t rotate the thing at all.

If you don’t define what kind of addition you’re talking about, then it’s not precise enough to talk through what is or isn’t true.

I have a model of everything. Everything I am, my understanding of the world, it all fits together like a web. New ideas fit by their relationship to what I already know - maybe I’m missing nodes to fit it in and I can’t accept it

Same, and I would add the clarification that I have a model for when and why people lie, tell the truth, or sincerely make false statements (mistake, having been lied to themselves, changed circumstances, etc.).

So that information comes in through a filter of both the subject matter, the speaker, and my model of the speaker’s own expertise and motivations, and all of those factors mixed together.

So as an example, let’s say my friend tells me that there’s a new Chinese restaurant in town that’s really good. I have to ask myself whether the friend’s taste in Chinese restaurants is reliable (and maybe I build that model based on proxies, like friend’s taste in restaurants in general, and how similar those tastes are with my own). But if it turns out that my friend is actually taking money to promote that restaurant, then the credibility of that recommendation plummets.