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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • A beer belly, despite the name, is not exactly from beer. A beer belly isn’t specifically from the caloric spikes associated with heavy beer drinking (where a certain amount of alcohol for a certain inebriation is accompanied by a massive intake of simple carbs compared to liquor). It’s due in part by genetics. It’s called visceral fat, meaning it’s intertwined with your torso’s organs and muscles. The concern here, particularly when beer-bellied people are heavy enough to show notable fat between their knees, elbows, and faces, is there’s likely fat/cholestoral buildup in the circulatory system. The beer belly is a heart attack predictor (but please understand overall weight is part of that indicator, not just location of fat). Some people are prone to adding fat relatively evenly across their body while some are prone to a beer belly. This variance in fat distribution is why skin-pinch based BMI tests are not accurate for health (testing arm skin misses beer bellies) and why weight/height BMI charts aren’t either (can categorize distributed-fat risks a little too closely to beer bellied fat).

    As for a solution, I support low-carb diets as you’ve indicated you’ll try. They come with risks and peculiarities. As someone with sizable forearms and calves but about 40lbs of beer belly, keto has worked great for weight loss. The consequence of not being careful with eating (counting carbs but not calories to types of fat) is my cholestoral is still high when I do keto stints.

    As you consider a low carb diet, I want to point out some misconceptions for keto, since that’s mostly what you’ll find. Atkins and Weight Watchers are close to keto. Paleo has a similar major component by prohibiting simple processed grain (white flour) but isn’t the same otherwise. It’s not a high protein diet - eat a normal amount. It’s not a high fat diet - higher than the sugar industry-funded diet studies blaming fats will recommend, but still a normal amount. It does push you to choose better fats (nuts, avocado) rather than bad fats (bacon, butter) but fats fare a little better as a snack than proteins.

    A major misconception is that fats make you fat and dietary cholestoral gives you coronary cholestoral. Both are indirectly related by directly false. Your belly is not stuffed with butter and cashew oil. It’s stuffed with human fat. Fat is a category, not a particular substance. Your body has to convert food into body fat. When you eat lots of sugars or simple carbs (which quickly turn into sugar in your stomach), your body is happy to waste energy converting the other food into body fat because you’re rapidly adding energy (sugar) to your blood. While sugar highs aren’t exactly real, sugar crashes absolutely are. It’s why a big pasta meal can leave you hungry in an hour. So what if you stop eating sugar and simple carbs? You can’t put walnuts in your bloodstream. Your body has to take that fat and convert it into body fat, and then that body fat gets converted into blood sugar. It’s a lengthy process that costs a lot of energy. It takes a week of dedication to make it work. When you get ketosis in full swing, your body will fuel itself with body fat as it takes time to convert dietary fat into body fat for later. Similarly for dietary cholestoral, you can’t take egg yolks and coat your arteries. Your personal cholestoral is produced by your body and is related more to total dietary calorie intake, dietary proportion of saturated fats, and genetic disposition for fat distribution.

    Personally, a major benefit from keto is simply being able to confidently turn down all sugar and simple carbs. Beer, cake, cookies, sugary drinks, chips, bread, ice cream, and candy. I can easily convince myself that a little treat won’t hurt in a non-keto month but I have poor self control. A little becomes a lot. Part of that is because I’m “cleaning up” carby foods I abstained form during a keto month. But on keto? It’s an easy rule to follow since I’m as happy with cheddar as I am with ice cream. While I’ll come off for a few months to a year, the monthly keto cycles make my weight chart look like a slinky going down stairs.


  • Have you been tracking your weight to confirm it’s working? Are you eating on a consistent schedule? I don’t think you should be hungry if you are. The reason why being hungry concerns me is that being hungry all the time can mean your body is in a starvation mode rather than a fasting or fat burning mode. Instead of burning fat, your body slows down and weakens your other bodily functions to conserve energy and survive a famine rather than look a little sexier.

    I used to be hungry upon waking up until remote work in 2020 let me casually skip breakfast. I woke up later and started waiting for lunch. I haven’t regularly eaten it since then despite going back to an office. I rarely feel hungry in the morning unless I have something late (later than my general noon-8pm eating timeframe) and generally sugary (immediate blood sugar spike, leading to higher fat storage and followed by a blood sugar drop). If your body knows when your next meal is, it should be able to hold off on the hungry feeling until then.




  • The people who beleive illegal immigrants are the scapegoat for the whole country failing beleive regular brown immigrants are just as much a problem. [verbatim] Not speaking English, dragging their whole families here to mooch, defacing American religious traditions with their own, believing the violence of their birth countries comes from inherent ethnic traits, viewing American etiquette as the only proper etiquette while anything else is barbaric, whatever you want.

    So no, it’s not the best example and probably would get picked apart for your point, but an argument specifying a difference between legal and illegal status is naive at best, disingenuous at worst. Illegals are just step one right now.


  • I don’t upgrade my phone for fun, I upgrade when thirstier software and stuffed storage slow it down to unreasonable rates. Similarly, I’m still on a first gen Xbox One from 2015 and it keeps getting noticeably slower, though mostly from newer games being more demanding rather than storage. As devs are directed to focus on more volume and novelty of content without concern for efficiency because “power is cheap”, this isn’t going away. So over time, yes, more power is more better. It’s not the only improvement, but it’s required.

    As for future innovations? Nintendo being dead? Look at your list, then look at the list of all Nintendo gaming consoles. You’ve listed about 1/3 of what they made since 1990. Not every console gets to be a revolution. Sometimes they’re just an improvement. Gameboy Color added mild color and smaller size to the Gameboy. While the disc system was not initially well received, the GameCube system and cohort of games was peak for many. The Wii U didn’t do anything special that I can remember. The Switch Lite took away Switch features but is loved more as a Gameboy BigBoy. There’s the NES and SNES home consoles that were leaps and bounds more powerful than prior options.

    As for your main point, there’s really no telling what the next innovation will be. Look at the N64. You’re missing the other huge update: 3D modeling. And, to an extent, it had a unique quality of the time with “round” models. Insert joke about Lara Croft ps1 boobs here… Or just a joke about how Nintendo’s joysticks are actually awful with deadzones and drift. Looking at your point for the Switch, I’d say Nintendo didn’t even drive that feature of being hybrid. It couldn’t have happened without the general electronics industry creating sufficient batteries. Actually, similar point for your DS accolade: Nintendo didn’t create the touch screen, they implemented it. The point is innovation is not predictable. It’s often borderline unimaginable because it takes a combination of invention, implementation, and adoption. Maybe they’ll make VR work for the masses. Maybe they’ll figure out convincing pseudo-holograms like the Star Wars chess board. Maybe it’ll be an even smaller console. Maybe it’ll capitalize on mobility and travel. Who knows? I don’t have a crystal ball.

    To call Nintendo dead for one cycle of status quo is short-sighted, in my opinion.




  • I would expect his voterbase to be slightly less radicalized. Sowing the doubt around the legitimacy of the 2020 vota tally gave a very specific item for his fans to stew over during the last 4 years.

    For his actions in office, I expect more damage from the gapped 2nd term because his cohorts have had those last 4 years to stew, as well. I don’t beleive his politicians were nearly as fond of him by 2020, but now they’ve strategized around is 2024 campaign. They didn’t need trump to win, they needed the party to win. He’s just the current face because his momentum is like a steamroller filled with cheeseburgers. 2017 trump left Republicans scrambling to handle his Sasha Baron Cohen style aladeen commands as he played king of the castle. I’m sure they all expect it now and ate happy to let him make wild declarations while they move like roaches in his shadow.

    I’m not worried about 2024 trump nearly as much as 2025 Republicans. Assuming 2020 trump wouldn’t extend past 2024, the party wouldn’t have as much time to regroup.


  • One time on a red eye flight with my eyes closed behind a sleep mask, I swore I was getting that dark blue rainy grainy projection of my surroundings like Daredevil. I could see the seat in front of me, my wall, my window, and the aircraft walls ahead of me visible aboce the seats. There was even the passing of the ground outside the window. That’s where I figured out it was a false image, not some super radiation sense. After toying with a few minutes, I looked out the window to find the ground moved at a fraction of the imaginary speed. However, I do beleive it was a generally accurate recreation of my surroundings.

    When you deprive yourself of a sense, your other senses can ramp up their sensitivity to compensate. Or your brain has less bandwidth than all 5 can provide at once. Either way, your perception is not as rigid as it may seem. You can remember a lot about locations in a familiar place and faint cues can clue you in. It doesn’t mean it’s accurate, though




  • In my experience as someone who rarely gets up for sunrise, they are not really different. I’m sure there is variation caused by rising vs diving temperature, humidity, cloud patterns caused directly by solar radiation, etc. But, functionally, pretty similar. And no, pollution does not make sunsets prettier. (will explain below)

    The main difference is my perception and my ability to predict what comes next. When the sun is setting, I have lots of warning because I can see the sun, obviously. With my spot at the beach, I can watch the sun go all the way down. I know exactly when it disappears and then I watch it a little while longer as the oranges turn even redder. I’m coming from my daytime perception of color and staring at the sun, further delaying my dark adaptation.

    Sunrise, on the other hand, is more of a surprise. The sky colors are morphing, but I can’t quite tell when the sun will pop up. I’m in relative darkness so my color perception is different. Last one I watched I had my star app open to better predict the sun’s appearance and it made it feel a little more like the sunsets I watch at the same spot. As the reds and oranges fade, I continue to normalize the white balance, so to speak, so it seems like a faster event as it approaches normal daylight color.

    Pollution. No, those pretty, dramatic sunsets are not caused by pollution. That’s a myth you can look up, so here’s my observations of why we perceive it as truth. I’ve spent a week at a time a few times a year for a decade watching just about every sunset on an ocean-like horizon over the rest of my country. The sun is creating a massive, flat rainbow of color. The reds get pulled down towards earth due to refraction in the atmosphere than the blue end. On cloudless evenings, the sky, being a poor reflector, turns a sort of yellow-orange hue while the sun itself is the only thing visibly turning red. That flat rainbow array still exists every time, but it’s lost to space as it skims the atmosphere without hitting anything more solid. Think of the classic prism refraction rainbow being projected tangentially onto a basketball. But, if there’s some spotty cloud cover between you and 1000 miles west, that rainbow will be blocked and reflected by some clouds instead of flying miles overhead and missing you. Just about all pretty sunset photos have clouds. The solid orange and Orange-yellow portion of the rainbow will be bouncing off the clouds in a patch of sky that still looks blue or pale white. That’s where the drama comes from.

    I’d also add sunsets blocked at the final stages by very distant cloud banks have made what seem to be the reddest finales I’ve ever seen, a few minutes after sunset, because the light is still being refracted, reflected, and refracted again from even lower than before. I never pack up and go in for these, unlike most people at the beach. On the opposite end, I don’t mind the boring cloudless sunsets because it means I’ll have at least a few hours of clear night skies most times. Stargazing is what I’m really there for.