Crocodile Dundee

thirst quenched by 650 ml

Pathetic. I will never respect an Australian again.

I know it's supposed to have molasses in it and in principle I don't object to molasses, but when I say "strong" I mean that there was way too much molasses for my taste.

It's not just the posts. The neighbor used nails that are way too long. IMO that's a safety hazard.

It isn't great, IMO. The one I got was very dense and had a strong molasses flavor.

Just driving your Tesla without trying to apologize for it would be a lot more dignified.

When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn't supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn't actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.

(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn't actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren't doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)

I don't see why I would be in any more danger than a native-born American citizen.

1. I don't expect anything catastrophic to happen so suddenly that I won't have time to flee.

2. Everyone I know is here, including people who depend on me.

3. I don't want to learn another language.

4. I feel a lot less connected to the USA than I did before, but I don't feel more connected to any other country than I do to the USA. The one my family and I came from is a huge mess and I certainly don't want to return to it.

I'm taking the idea of leaving the country much more seriously than I had before, but it still seems unlikely.

rate of work = 1 / (deadline - current time)

Breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence, just like what the rest of us are waiting for.

The US ranks 36th in literacy.

This is a deceptive statistic. It merely indicates that many countries like Uzbekistan and North Korea falsely report 100% literacy rates. Look here. The USA literacy rate is actually about the same as that of other wealthy Western democracies.

I think she learned it as a kid because it was the language of where she lived, but she didn't use it much in the USA. The reason we met was actually because she wanted someone she could practice speaking it with.

Once an hour sounds awesome but I suppose a person dying of thirst would think that a person drowning was having a great time.

I have never had a woman hit on me, but a gay man did once and the memory of that warms my heart. (I'm not gay.)

My native language is Russian and I have met a black woman who speaks Russian better than I do. (I haven't been there for over thirty years so maybe there are some black people living there now, but I never saw one before coming to the US.) Her parents are diplomats and she is fluent in a couple of other languages too because her family lived in several different countries when she was growing up.

I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can't just assume that if you're in a hospital then you'll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you're there. You have to make sure that you're getting a doctor's attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.

My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother's condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.

(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn't hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)

It's worse with context.

The article does say

stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year

and it's true that those particular stocks have gone down, although I wouldn't call a 4% drop a "plummet". The headline is still a deliberate lie and most people just read the headline. Shame on the New Republic.

Also, Pfizer's market cap is about ten times bigger than Moderna's and Moderna's is about ten times bigger that Novavax's. In other words, Pfizer is more than one hundred times bigger than Novavax and putting the two in the same "biggest pharmaceutical companies" category is bullshit.

Sometimes I feel like there's nothing worth trying to do because the things I want are either impossible IRL or boring. For example, people tell me to travel but I don't see the point of that. No matter where I go, there will only be people. People who speak a different language, but that's just annoying. There aren't cyborgs, or aliens, or elves, or wizards, or anything interesting out there in the world.

Work often feels like that too. I'm lucky enough that I get to do something I find intellectually stimulating, but sometimes I look back and realize that I spent the last five years writing a computer program that estimates ligand binding affinities a little more efficiently than the previous state of the art. Ligand binding affinities are important, but I'd rather be questing for the Holy Grail...

(And then there's porn. It can't replace a relationship but it does make me less inclined to volunteer for the miserable experience of being an uncharismatic introvert and trying to meet someone.)

I think this is a problem for me mostly when I am alone. I do value the real happiness I feel when I'm with my friends and relatives.

Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don't put things off, folks.