adyer07

I looked for a source for this, and found the opposite:

> Newborn oxytocin levels were higher in the umbilical artery vs. umbilical vein, and both were higher than maternal plasma levels, implying substantial fetal oxytocin production in labour. Newborn oxytocin levels were not further elevated following maternal intrapartum synthetic oxytocin, suggesting that synthetic oxytocin at clinical doses does not cross from mother to fetus.

In other words, the fetus makes its own oxytocin during labor. It does not come from the mother.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12884-022-05221-w

Huh. I always just thought it was because my cat isn't smart enough to differentiate between "can noise, human making tuna sandwich" and "can noise, human is dispensing cat food."

I really enjoyed Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It's more of a kick in the pants than an inspirational book, but it actually helped me think about (and act on) my priorities.

"The Art of Responsive Drawing" by Nathan Goldstein.

It's an in depth analysis of the elements of drawing and, more importantly, what those elements actually do. It really celebrates the expressive and creative aspects of drawing, in a way that's both beautiful to look at, and accessible to read.

The generator stuff is pretty wild - I got some real Cronenbergs.

I wonder if, in 5 years, we'll start to see this kind of trippy AI aesthetic filter into illustration and animation. Or maybe the AI will just get more naturalistic.

The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me - it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate relative color, not absolute color. Learning to look at an apple and see warmer/cooler bits of red, for example. As the article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in between.

There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson, mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.

It looks like you can - the repo for VQ-GAN has instructions for this:

https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-c...

This is delightful. The paper sliders are especially charming.

I wonder if the tactility of it helped make assembly easier to learn - or harder, because it didn't have immediate feedback.

For those arguing that grit is all that is needed to lift oneself from poverty: I recommend the book "This is all I got" by Lauren Sandler (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51229737-this-is-all-...). It's a very powerful, deep account of how even those with incredible tenacity need societal support to succeed.

Looking at your website - I don't climb, but I used to use chalk for powerlifting - I desperately want to see photos of HANDS! My immediate question was "what is chalk cream", and that makes me want to see the product in use. Does it turn your hands white? Is it powdery? How could a wet cream do the same thing as dry chalk powder? This seems like a really tactile product, so I want photos that help me understand it on a tactile level. The mountain photos are beautiful but don't sell the product. The photos of tubes could be renders for all I know.

You could also try signing up for HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and scanning for outdoors or climbing-related pitch opportunities. A lot of the posts on there are trash but there's the occasional good one.

The funny thing about drawing is that it’s not one skill - it’s a collection of many different skills. An architect, a cartoonist, an illustrator, an animator, Michelangelo and Picasso are all drawing, and clearly what they produce and its goal are very different. Arguing over whether to use Drawabox or Right Side of the Brain or Bob Ross videos is silly, because these courses are all trying to teach totally different parts of the skills we call “drawing”.

So here’s my very general advice for you:

- Start trying to make the drawings you WANT to make, before you think you have the skills. Illustrate your ideas and blog posts! Then, take a step back and evaluate that work - was it effective? What do, or don’t, you like about it? What skills do you think are missing, and what processes might you use to achieve it? A lovely illustration is much more than looking realistic - it may be completely unrealistic at all. It has mark making, color, design, composition...all separate skills you can work on.

- Identify people whose work you love. Find someone who you look at and think, “yes, I want my drawings to look like THAT.” Make copies of their work for practice (call it a “master copy” to feel smart about it.) Find out which artists inspired them or taught them, and copy their work, too. Find out what artists they like and stalk them on Instagram. Buy a print of their work and marvel at it, every day.

- Get a sketchbook on cheap, terrible paper, and fill it up. Doesn’t matter with what. Get comfortable experimenting and producing a lot, even if it’s junk. The time investment is important.

- Expose yourself to as many different skill sets as possible. Take a community college life drawing class! Draw a comic! Design a chair in AutoCAD! Draw from life, and imagination, doodle and paint and play with infinite patterns in Illustrator. You may start to feel what ways of thinking work for you. Perhaps you enjoy academic drawing and not cartooning. Or maybe you’ve got a hidden fascination with the abstract expressionists. That’s one way to find out.

- Make friends who draw. Share your work with them, and let them share their work with you.

- There are many introductory drawing classes taught by adult education centers, artists communities, colleges, etc. These are likely to introduce you to the same basics as a book like Right Side of the Brain, but also a little bit more of the “artistic” side, like smooshing charcoal around and exercising your arm. If you’re lucky you’ll get a nude model. These are great fun and I recommend one regardless of what kind of drawing you’d like to do - it’s a great introduction to issues that are common to many kinds of drawing.

Do you have a scanner? I think traditional “paste-up” style zines have such a cool hand-made aesthetic. Plus, no licensing fees for a glue stick :)

The final recording is interesting as someone with average hearing - it almost sounds like someone with a lisp articulating very, very carefully. I suppose “s” must be a very high frequency sound.

There actually is a second chance pool, but you usually would get an e-mail about it.

You could look into the IBM Selectric - the typing element is a ball so it can't jam, and it's actuated by little cables that might be hackable. Feed it paper off of a roll, and you have your jam-free, continuous printing solution :)

One suggestion I didn’t see in here was video games! I switch my Switch to a second language to play Animal Crossing. I’ve found it to be a fun and intuitive way to pick up a little more colloquial language and vocabulary. I’ve had similar good luck with other text-heavy games like the Sims.

Plus, the short format makes it relatively painless, even when your reading comprehension is a little slow. Novels and news were always a slog to me, but a few lines of text feels more manageable. (And less daunting if you have to grab the dictionary.)

Very interesting - I will definitely try that next time.

I agree! Flexible work would be a huge differentiator and I was ready to bend over backwards for it. I’ve heard that many companies won’t consider it because developers are just so darn expensive - it’s not worth it to pay a huge ransom and not get someone’s full attention.

I tried this and struggled. After taking a break from full-time developer work, I reached out to multiple tech companies via personal referrals. Everyone said that they’d love me full time, but couldn’t have a part-time hire. I got a lot of soft brush-offs to “reach out when you have more availability.”

Out of the blue, however, a former employer reached out to me and offered to hire me for as many (or as few) hours as I could handle, which has worked out to 10-25 a week. It’s been a really nice arrangement that I’ve enjoyed. The catch is that this company is in a completely different industry, with a completely different pay scale than tech. So I’m happy with my job, but wouldn’t be able to support myself on it with part-time hours if I was the only household earner.

1. I did a year long bike tour with my partner. When I came home, I went back to undergrad to study art (illustration + painting). So now I’m mostly a student, also working on my own art and doing some part-time work.

2. Boredom which became kind of existential. I had reached a new career high, and suddenly didn’t have anything to strive for - at the time, I didn’t have the insight to try and ask for more impactful work, and I really leaned out of my job instead. The dream of doing a bike tour kept getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t get the bike tour out of my head, and decided it was the perfect time in my life to jump on it.

Sounds a bit like a modern version of The Jungle.

Quasi-serious home baker here: think of those pieces of advice as possible inputs, instead of contradictory! How often you feed your starter, and how much water is included, are both factors you can use to control the final properties of the bread. For example, wetter starters tend to lean more lactic (milky) in flavor while drier ones tend more acetic (vinegary). Temperature, time, ingredients, kneading, etc. are all part of a big interconnected system that will have different results in your brand :)

I recommend checking out recipes and the forums on www.thefreshloaf.com. I also really recommend keeping some simple notes when you bake sourdough - what you did, how everything seemed, and how the bread came out. Over time, you’ll adjust and manipulate your own processes to get closer and closer to the bread you want.

Thank you for the link, this is fantastic! I love the complex interwoven nature of the patterns.

Thank you! I do wonder why the resemblance to veins is so strong. There must be something interesting and emergent going on there, too.

Server ran out of memory, apparently - back up now, with more swap space on the server :)

OK, should be back up.

Shoot! On it.

Ha, I had exactly that same experience, with the same injury, no less. The physiologist told me that sure, the surgeon is always going to recommend surgery - but if you’re going to have to do PT, why not do it first and see if it fixes the problem?

PT is the closest I have come to experiencing a miracle cure from modern medicine. Speaking as someone who frequently breaks themselves.

Yeah, I still feel like there's a lot unexplored there. Abstract code visualization seems like it would be an interesting project in its own right.

Certainly - you can look at the source for the p5.js port here, which is basically a line-by-line port of the original processing3 simulation: https://github.com/oxling/p5js_ants

The other parts, the rasterization and vectorization, I haven't cleaned up to the point where the source isn't terribly embarrassing! One of the weird things about this project was the code became more of a means to an end than an artifact in itself, so it's littered with a lot of dead experiments, swear words, and so on.

Thanks for reading! I’m particularly interested in hearing how a technical audience responds to art like this. Did it resonate for you?