Once a society starts seeing itself as “the best,” traditionalism starts sinking its claws into it. Innovation slows down and society begins to keep harkening back to “the good old days” and failing to reinvent itself.
Because they’re doing things with their life. Think of what you wish to accomplish, then find someone who has done it in a way you respect.
But often they lack the ability to communicate in a constructive way, which is generally what makes them come across as disrespectful. It’s not what is being said, it’s how they are saying it.
My dad made sure I was able to communicate. So no matter where we went, I had to order my own food, drink, talk to the other person behind the counter. As a result, public speaking was never an issue for me.
If they make you feel bad more often than they make you feel good, they aren’t your friends.
An author just starting out? The catchy title of the book is going to be the biggest text on the book. The author has brought out 3-4 books that are proving successful? The text size of their name is going to be equal to the title. Ian Rankin or Kate Atkinson? Their name is going to be the biggest text on that cover.
Maturity is knowing when to be immature. In my experience, it’s the goofiest people who others turn to for the most serious things in their lives. I think it’s because they know goofy people have learned the difference between goofy and clownish. Also, goofiness when it’s genuine is a very attractive trait because it shows you are comfortable in your own skin.
That’s a common problem in analysis of competitive games. A team will look way worse when they’re up against a better opponent.
They make far more mistakes because they are getting pressured or feel the need to do unusual things since their normal strategies don’t work.
One of my favorite cookbook’s advice is to go grocery shopping when you’re already eaten, to refrain yourself from buying junk food.
One of the things I like to keep in the back of my mind is that I feel that marriage is like a business. You need to spend time and energy on it for it to grow. If you neglect it then it will break down. It’s very easy to become complacent in life.
They know it’s short term and they don’t care. Because the only real option for true long term happiness is building real, deep relationships with other people. But other people tend to let you down in a way that a phone can never do. The phone doesn’t one day just decide it’s in a shitty mood and unload their stress on you or lie to you or simply stop giving a shit about you for some arbitrary reason. Material things are short lived but more reliable than people.
You will only romanticize past, failed relationships. I say, it is better to appreciate being unique and focus on improving yourself.
A closed court is a very rare thing. That is a huge part of the motivation behind why companies prefer to settle out of court (besides the intense costs).
Courts need to be open in order to ensure that justice is served.
Extreme ownership: Assume everything is your fault. Never blame others. It does you no good. You can’t force colleagues to do what you want them to do. Be the change you want to see in others. Lead by example.
How to win friends and influence people: Be kind to others. Even when they might not deserve it. Compliment them. Empathize with their issues. Listen intently to whatever they have to say. Stay smiling. It’ll pay off.
Just like a lawyer represents my interests without also following my level of knowledge of the law, a politician should be able to represent my interests with a higher level of understanding of how to achieve the best results than I have.
Quite frankly I vote for a representative because I do not devote my life to the intricacies of everything a government handles, and I shouldn’t have to. There’s a reason politicians campaigns don’t go into the finite details of everything. We have to be able trust politicians to represent our interests at a higher level than “do what I tell you to,” because it can’t work that way. They’re the people you hired to do things you don’t have time to do or know how to do.
Why teach people to think critically so they can revamp the system and alter the flow of money when you can teach them to work for you?
I’m always fascinated by how disposable males are in the insect and arachnid world.
Don’t take it personally. How people treat you has less to do with your actual mistakes, and almost all have to do with how they treat themselves. Imagine that they are yelling those things at themselves, not at you.
We don’t actually read every word in a sentence. Our brains pick up the patterns and fill in the blanks as we skim along the text, which greatly increases our reading speed while doing very little to reduce comprehension.
We do it with just about all sensory input, as well. We blank out while driving but still reach our destinations with no incidents, we tune out smells pretty quickly (no matter how bad the smell is), we tune out physical sensations (you’re now aware of how your tongue is resting in your mouth, also you’re breathing manually), we hit that autopilot button at work and just coast through it while thinking about the grocery shopping, etc.
It’s probably an evolutionary trait that evolved from a need to be vigilant against unique sensory input, like sudden movements and noticing things that aren’t supposed to be there. We’re good at recognizing patterns, and tune things out to reduce overall taxation from sensory inputs so we can instead focus on novel inputs.
Our brains are tuned for pattern recognition and prediction, not detail. That’s also why things that break the expected pattern/outcome can be so jarring. Sometimes it’s in a fun way, though. See movie twists, stage magic, joke punchlines and so on.
It’s a filtering mechanism. Ignore the leaves, see the broken up/partial shape or movement of the predator hiding behind them.
Your leg veins have one way valves in them. They work when the skeletal muscles around them contract and release.
When you are walking around, the flexion/relaxation of the walking muscles are literally pumping the blood back to your torso. When you are standing still, you aren’t getting that pumping action naturally. You could flex/release your legs intentionally, while standing, but it’s not nearly as effective as walking is.
Infinity is not a number. Being infinite is a property of a set.
So if you consider it as a different property - like “blue”, or “hot” - it makes more sense. You can’t count to blue, and whether one set is bigger than another doesn’t affect whether it is blue or not.
Our oath is different than the enlisted soldiers (the actual fighters) in that obeying orders is not part of our oath. We are only required to use the Constitution and our principles as a guide when deciding if we should follow an order.
By virtue of how the oath is written, we swear to place the Constitution above the President. This is designed to prevent the President from being able to subvert the Constitution via the military. The reality that an order may not be followed by subordinate officers is a form of checks and balances that is designed to prevent tyrannical, unethical, or just plain dumb efforts from getting off the ground.
What makes it brilliant is that the US military learned long ago that decentralized execution, meaning empowering subordinates to make decisions, works very well in combat situations as well as operational design and our central leaders are willing to accept the risk that comes along with that approach.
Some folks may not realize this but one of the reasons we have ROTC on college campuses is to ensure that future military leaders will always have a connection to the general public. This is to balance the effects of a dedicated military academy, by its makeup, tends to lean more tribal.
Also, we also have another safeguard by maintaining separate branches of the Armed Forces instead of having a unified military command. In the third world, it is quite common to have one branch side with the government while another sides with the rebels. Checks and balances, if you will.
You could consider the Guard, which is subservient to state authority, as another branch as well.
There is also the State Guard, which is completely subordinate to the Governor of the state (and who is usually the Commander of the “state military forces” which includes the Sheriff’s departments of the counties, the State Police (in Texas, it’s the Department of Public Safety) and the State Guard. When the state’s National Guard and Air National Guard units are not federalized, they also are under the authority of the state’s Governor. In effect, each state has its own army.
If the Joint Chiefs tried to stage a coup, my suspicion is that the governors would call up the Guard in each state and offer a stiff resistance. At worst it would be a protracted civil war, but I think you would see such overwhelming support against the coup that the coup would quickly fail, especially when you consider the number of officers and units who would immediately defect rather than overthrow the government.
Even if the coup plotters managed to kill everyone in the presidential line of succession and murder the entire Congress, the American government’s federal structure would be able to heal itself naturally.
Since the Congress is destroyed, each governor is empowered by their state laws to fill the vacancies by appointment. Doubtless former members of Congress, state legislators, and others would be drafted. A new Congress so assembled would have the power to choose a new President as soon as a quorum was established. Specifically, the House of Representatives would elect its own Speaker (or the Senate a President Pro Tempore). Under the 25th amendment and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Speaker would then immediately ascend to the Presidency, at which point he would be empowered to appoint a Vice President and cabinet officers as well as fill all the other rolls of the office.
Your body is like a steam engine. The fireman gets a load of coal (food) and either shovels it into the engine (your body’s metabolism) or shovels it into the tender (your fat reserves).
The fireman doesn’t know when the next load of coal will show up, but if the train stops, he dies. As soon as he makes room for it, he wants more coal. As much as he can just in case the coal stops coming in. He isn’t the smartest, so even as the train starts creaking under the weight of so much coal he wants more.
It’s not the fireman’s job to monitor the size of the fuel reserves. Really, the train designers never expected the idea of too much coal to ever be a thing to design for. Especially since the coal now comes in the new Coal++ form. Far more dense and in fancy colors.
Hunger is only partially driven by how many calories we’re taking in. It’s also affected by things like how much stuff is in your stomach, which is why you get fuller faster if you’re drinking a lot of water with your meal. And how difficult it is to digest what you eat. Simple carbs (bread, rice, sugar) digest quickly, so you become hungry sooner than if you eat fiber, fat, protein, and complex carbs.
No your hands aren’t covered in dead bits of bacteria. They’re covered in happy, healthy bacteria.
Washing your hands removes dirt and debris that carry the nastiest bacteria.
While all spiders and many lizards are predatory, the best survival strategy for most species of them is to be ambush predators. Lie in wait for your prey. This is especially helpful because (outside of Komodo dragons), neither are without predators of their own. Moving = being seen, by predators and prey alike.
Most organisms are in a constant struggle for energy. Obtaining energy is dangerous, you have to leave your save burrow or go risk injury in a hunt.
That’s why many organisms develop strategies for minimizing the risks they need to take. And one of the most popular strategies is simply having simple, low demand physiologies, slow metabolisms and generally low energy needs.
Warm blooded animals are fairly unique. We’re like a car with the engine constantly running. That means we’re ready to go from zero to a 100 right away but we’re also guzzling gas constantly, even if we’re standing still. That’s why warm blooded animals need to constantly eat. Some of the smaller more high energy creatures like humming birds can starve to death in a matter of hours.
By comparison, cold blooded animals waste zero energy on body heat. The downside is that they need to warm their bodies up with external heat like sunlight in order to get their digestive enzymes working or to get their muscles ready for fast action.
But on the upside, they need so little energy that they have to take far fewer risks than warm blooded animals. Some cold blooded animals can go up to a year or even longer without food.
Your emotions are really just another evolutionary adaption. There’s no advantage to boredom if your survival strategy relies on doing nothing.
Boredom is essentially the inability to articulate what is a meaningful activity for you right now. It motivates you to change whatever it is you’re doing and find something meaningful or productive to do.
That lizard isn’t questioning what it should be doing. It’s surviving by doing nothing and not wasting energy. Humans on the other hand have so many needs that doing nothing is nearly always the wrong thing to do, so you get bored.
What sorts of sensations and feelings do you have when you start getting bored? Maybe you start being really sensitive of your physical body, things itching, being hot or cold, in a way you don’t notice when you’ve got something on your mind. You also frequently start noticing you are hungry even when you don’t really need to eat, or sleepy when you’ve got enough sleep, or are more conscious of your bladder. And of course if you’re bored it’s really easy to get horny too.
That’s basically running down the entire survival and reproductive needs checklist right there, and it’s pretty much hard coded to run in all of our heads as soon as we’re not focusing our physical and mental power on something else. Once you’re idle again then it’s our brain’s evolutionary job to once again get us to start taking care of ourselves… or fuck.
Creatures that are highly active (birds, rodents, etc.) eat an absolutely massive amount of food compared to their size. Some birds eat double their own body weight in food every day. Imagine a 150 pound human eating 300 pounds of food every day. That’s the price for moving around a lot.
So some animals go the opposite route. Move very little, eat very little. This works especially well for ambush predators like spiders. Make the web and then just wait. No use in burning excess energy. When something lands in the web, go eat it and wait some more.
Humans are interesting in that we’ve developed very complex brains and behaviors to survive, AND since we’ve been so successful survival-wise, we have a lot of surplus energy to burn. We’re omnivores that are extremely adaptable, so to aid our survival, behaviors like exploring, keeping up with social bonds (and all the complex tasks and behaviors we do for that, like playing games and navigating social rules), hunting, gathering, farming, building, inventing tools, etc etc etc… all of those things had a purpose for us, so there was incentive for our brains to be thinking about doing stuff all the time and feeling a sense of reward for accomplishing those things. Since we established more organized societies and agriculture, food is usually in ready supply, so it’s okay to even “waste” that brain power on stuff like entertainment, science, philosophy, arts, whatever - which all has social benefits or benefit society in the long-term even if they don’t have immediate survival benefits - or in the case of entertainment, because we’re wired to feel rewarded for doing stuff.
TLDR If we were lizards, we probably wouldn’t find playing video games very rewarding because its a waste of time and energy. As humans we have the energy to burn and social/societal benefits for doing stuff all the time, so we get bored because we have the energy to be doing something rewarding.
Light carries energy. Things with color, like your skin, absorb light. When they do, the atoms that make them up get ‘excited’. Depending on the atom, and what state it is in, a few things can happen. If the atom is part of a molecule that energy can go to work breaking it out of the molecule. If the atom or molecule is on the surface of a solid or liquid, the energy can go towards flinging it off, into the air, turning into a gas.
If there’s not enough energy to do either of those things, then the atom will just release the energy to its surroundings. Most of the time, most of the energy is released as heat. This is what you feel when the sun feels warm. Sometimes the energy can be released as light. This is how glow-in-the-dark things work.
We all are moving through spacetime at the speed of light. This starts to give a rough understanding of why sufficiently fast motion of the observer actually slows down time itself. When you travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, you’re in effect “borrowing” from your total speed through spacetime; by increasing the magnitude of your speed through the “space” part, you are thus decreasing the magnitude of your speed through the “time” part to compensate (and what I just described as “traveling at a slower speed through time” is experienced as time itself slowing down).
Light speed is absolute: say Vtotal= Vspace+Vtime (very rough formula). If You’re stationary, the Vspace=0 and Vtime=c, you experience the fastest time pace.
For light, Vtotal=Vspace=c and Vtime=0. In the referential of a photon, time is effectively stopped. It experiences no time from its starting point to its destination, be it millions of lightyears. Light effectively travels instantaneously from its point of view. Whatever your speed is relative to the photon, the photon goes to Vspace=c and Vtime=0 and you’ll appear to be stationnary relative to the photon, your speed is not relevant for a photon.
In a nutshell he revealed data that showed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to do things like listen to everyone’s phone calls, read their texts, their emails, follow their internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people’s cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
In short, it was estimated that the data revealed that the US and it’s allies had transparency into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
It’s less that this was “Bad” honestly, more that these agencies shouldn’t have been doing A. to US Citizens, and B. on US soil and C. that the major data providers, the Verizons, AT&Ts, etc, were providing the “keys” to their networks for the government to provide this access.
Obama administration charged Snowden under an antiquated law called the Espionage Act meaning that Snowden’s trial would effectively be secret and he could not even voice his reasons for breaking the law at trial.
In the summer, using the AC to drop the temperature just a few degrees removes a ton of water from the air and the drier air feels much cooler to humans with our constant evaporative cooling and all.
Stepping outside in Florida from May-November your body’s evaporative cooling functions are immediately overwhelmed by the humidity and shut down as your body initiates the drying process.
When you’re inside and have things at what you think is a comfortable temperature, you’re normally not wearing very many clothes, usually aren’t very active, and there usually isn’t much air moving around. So your body becomes used to a very small temperature range and you really notice it when it drifts outside of that small range. This awareness of change gets boosted by your home being your almost-entirely-controllable “area of comfort” where you learn to expect a lot of control over the temperature you’re in.
When you go outside, often you have a lot more clothes on and are moving around in a much more active way, and the temperature has a tendency to shift up and down. So between the extra insulation you’re wearing that protects you from temperature change, the “wind chill factor” that contributes to robbing your body of heat or adding more heat to it when it’s really hot out, and your own activity level generating and removing heat from your body, you don’t really notice a few degrees of change as much. And because it’s not entirely under your control, you get used to not really controlling it and so become a little less aware of how it changes.