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panglott

2,272 karma · joined March 10, 2015

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panglott··on The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax
I'm in my 30s, but get most of my exercise from cycling, which doesn't exercise the back much. My back pain problems have been increasing over recent years, but I've had good success in the last few months with 15-20 minutes a night of yoga. I'm doing regular plank, bridge, locust, and downward dog poses for back strength, and cat/cow, sphinx, and forward fold poses for back stretches. I like a lot of the leg and hip stretches, too.
panglott··on The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax
Laying on a hard floor with my arms above my head has been my near-term way of coping with back pain. But a little isometric back strength exercises like a nightly plank have helped with prevention over the past few weeks.
panglott··on The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax
It's not mere availability of food. Obesity rates vary quite widely across OECD countries; the US is at 35%, France/Italy/Spain are at about 5-10%, Korea is below 4%.

Overeating is a stress response for a lot of people, and overeating often occurs among people in high-stress situations. The US is a country that tolerates a very high level of poverty, inequality, and insecurity, and this results in high obesity rates in some sectors. Obesity isn't the same problem for people who shop at Whole Foods and spend hours at the gym on weekends; it's a more severe problem among people who have to work a horrible job 60-80 hours a week to avoid really desperate poverty, live in decrepit housing, spend hours on neglected bus lines, and are physically insecure.

panglott··on Base-4 fractions in Telugu
English is less than 1,000 years old in its identifiably modern form.
panglott··on Base-4 fractions in Telugu
Your Wikipedia link disagrees that all of the Dravidian languages are derived from ancient Tamil. It describes them as common descendents of Proto-Dravidian. It cites the attested literature of Tamil as being 2,000 years old.
panglott··on Study of ancient and modern cat genomes reveals an unusual history
It's interesting that cat breeding happened among colonies of wild or feral cats, and it wasn't until the Middle Ages that cat fancy began developing breeds.

There are large colonies of self-sustaining feral cat populations in nearly every city—at least in the U.S. and surely outside it as well. Certainly cat breeders supply a number of pets, but these feral cat populations are a major source of house cats. Certainly all our pets are rescues or were originally born outside.

panglott··on Study of ancient and modern cat genomes reveals an unusual history
Our cats are not the best mousers, but since we have an old house and the mice try to move in in the fall, their hunting instincts definitely keep the house free of vermin. This is quite good.

We keep them inside, so they don't bring in songbirds.

panglott··on Study of ancient and modern cat genomes reveals an unusual history
Domestic cats raised among humans and feral domestic cats have very different personalities. Feral cats can be quite wild, although we have tamed a few. They are very quiet and very secretive, quite unlike house cats.
panglott··on Polynesian people used a kind of binary number system 600 years ago (2013)
Pebble-tables are fine for that, but don't leave a persistant record. Mostly when I hear "writing system" I think "linguistic writing system", a writing system for language, rather than "mathematical writing system".

But IIRC a number of writing systems started off first as mathematical record systems before developing to encode linguistic information. Maybe a good example is cuneiform, which started off as tally marks in balls of soft clay stored in jars, for tax purposes, which developed symbols for encoding what kind of goods were being counted. Quipu may be similar, with more nascent development as a linguistic system.

panglott··on Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced
Most people find it hard to read books with long s, for example, or even know what long s is or where it occurs. "Why are all the s's replaced with f's?" people will ask. It's fine if it's "ash-tray" instead of "ashtray", but the further you go back and the more of these archaicisms you encounter, the more of a barrier they become to ordinary readers (instead of English majors). I don't necessarily like this kind of textual modernization, but in general it's necessary to keep the text accessible to moderns.
panglott··on Polynesian people used a kind of binary number system 600 years ago (2013)
Those don't seem related to me at all. Quipu was an Incan record-keeping system that we don't understand well. Abaci are very ancient calculation devices that don't use writing. The oldest Mesopotamian and Roman versions were just a table with pebbles on it. And that's where we get the word for "calculate".
panglott··on A Look Inside James Baldwin's 1,884 Page FBI File
A James Baldwin history of the FBI in the South sounds like an amazing book.
panglott··on Vegetarian Diets May Be More Effective for Weight Loss Than Restricting Calories
It's hard to read a ketogenic diet page that begins with a long disclaimer about you only you are responsible for your health and diet and "we can't take any responsibility for the consequences", and then conclude that the result represent good advice for the overall health of average people. Normal people are not going to tune their diet by measuring their blood chemistry.

Edit to say that the point may be that those diets were broadly comparable except in consumption of animal foods; the vegetarian diet was modestly higher and lower in protein and fat, but not by much.

panglott··on Vegetarian Diets May Be More Effective for Weight Loss Than Restricting Calories
The actual study (linked above) examined subcutaneous and subfascial fat distribution, not weight loss or muscle mass.
panglott··on Vegetarian Diets May Be More Effective for Weight Loss Than Restricting Calories
"The aim of our study was to compare the effects of a vegetarian and a conventional diet on thigh adipose tissue distribution in subjects with type 2 diabetes (T2D)."

The broader conclusion seems plausible to me, since a healthy vegetarian diet can have lots of high-fiber foods that give high satiation with relatively low calories. But: The study focused only on diabetic patients.

panglott··on The first genome data from ancient Egyptian mummies
There's a whole Wikipedia article on this, interestingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Turkish_peo...
panglott··on The first genome data from ancient Egyptian mummies
Interesting. The Afroasiatic languages are attested from long enough ago that the date of their divergence can be estimated at ca. 10,000 BCE or earlier, orginating probably somewhere around the Red Sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages

Sub-Saharan Africa was marked by the Bantu expansion some time later, with Niger-Congo-speaking peoples expanding out of West Africa between about 3,000 BCE to 500 CE. This at best just takes Bantu speakers to the very peripheries of the Egyptian sphere, the modern slave trade and maritime trade with East Africa are probably likelier causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

panglott··on The Turing Tumble lets you and your kids build real mechanical computers
Can't understand all the negative comments here (I'm definitely in shut-up-and-take-my-money mode): this looks like an amazing toy. It is only a puzzle toy, but I know that as a kid I would have had a blast with this thing. Physical objects like rolling marbles are fun, memorable, and accessible in a way that typing text into a screen simply is not. The mechanical switches are incredibly easy to understand, and it is very obvious why a gate does what it does. The point here isn't to make someone curious about programming per se: it is to build a contextual foundation so that, much later, when they are learning these things more formally, they have a direct, useful metaphor. So they can make a cognitive hop instead of a cognitive leap.
panglott··on Who Owns England?
The Georgist argument is that the problem is property taxes aren't based solely on land value, and this creates excessive deadweight loss from taxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Under a system of pure land value taxes, an empty lot downtown would be taxed at the same rate as the highrise next to it, and taxed much higher than an empty lot in the outskirts—a huge incentive to put that empty lot to more productive use.

The proliferation of parking lots is a regulatory/zoning issue.

panglott··on Who Owns England?
This comment remind me of Michael Lewis's profile of Greece during the 2008 financial crisis...

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-... 'The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” ...Relationships with the rich and famous were essential in Vatopaidi’s pursuit of government grants and reparations for sackings, but also for the third prong of its new management’s strategy: real estate. By far the smartest thing Father Ephraim had done was go rummaging around in an old tower where they kept the Byzantine manuscripts, untouched for decades. Over the centuries Byzantine emperors and other rulers had deeded to Vatopaidi various tracts of land, mainly in modern-day Greece and Turkey. In the years before Ephraim arrived, the Greek government had clawed back much of this property, but there remained a title, bestowed in the 14th century by Emperor John V Palaiologos, to a lake in northern Greece. By the time Ephraim discovered the deed to the lake in Vatopaidi’s vaults, it had been designated a nature preserve by the Greek government. Then, in 1998, suddenly it wasn’t: someone had allowed the designation to lapse. Shortly thereafter, the monks were granted full title to the lake.' ...which they exchanged for government land at inflated value and then got into the bond market.

panglott··on Who Owns England?
"Who owns land is one of England's most closely-guarded secrets."

This seems really strange to me. Why should this be the case?

Some interesting information at their blog https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-... https://whoownsengland.org/2016/11/10/why-we-must-open-up-th...

panglott··on The SS Palo Alto and the Surprising History of Concrete Ships
The Seasteading Institute had some pages about concrete oceanic structures that captured my imagination a while back https://www.seasteading.org/2010/11/green-float-the-botanica... https://www.seasteading.org/2010/05/cocrete-structures/

They are not "boats" exactly!

panglott··on Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
Thanks. I must have been thinking of Miss W's story there. Miss A's account is even more serious: clear sexual assault.
panglott··on How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
It's a widely known myth, but I'm pretty sure that Inuit absolutely has 100+ words for snow: it's just that's a meaningless and unsurprising assertion. The Inuit languages are polysynthetic and can say in a word what European languages need a sentence for, so Inuit can sidestep Zipf's law on word frequency.

But also, English has plenty of words for snow, here's 50: https://www.thoughtco.com/snow-terms-types-3010117

panglott··on Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
My understanding is that he had consensual sex with them, they went to sleep, then he had nonconsensual sex with them while they were sleeping. They were individually disturbed by these events, but did not decide to file charges until they compared stories.

That's very different from "the sex became nonconsensual retroactively". And I don't think it's uncommon for women brave the consequences of speaking out about sexual assault when they believe there's a pattern of behavior they can protect other women from.

panglott··on Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
I linked the NY Times story above, but at least one of the women remains adamant that she was raped, and is shocked by the decision to drop the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/world/europe/julian-assan...

'Elisabeth Massi Fritz, who represents the woman who accused Mr. Assange of rape, issued a scathing response after the prosecutors abandoned the case. “A legal examination is very important for someone who has been raped, as is the possibility for redress,” she said. “In this case, there have been many turns and the wait has been very long. My client is shocked and no decision to shut the case down can get her to change her position that Assange raped her.”'

panglott··on Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
No mention of the alleged victims in the OP?

Here's the NYTimes story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/world/europe/julian-assan...

'Elisabeth Massi Fritz, who represents the woman who accused Mr. Assange of rape, issued a scathing response after the prosecutors abandoned the case.

“A legal examination is very important for someone who has been raped, as is the possibility for redress,” she said. “In this case, there have been many turns and the wait has been very long. My client is shocked and no decision to shut the case down can get her to change her position that Assange raped her.”'

panglott··on Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
That was Assange's claim, but there are two women in Sweden who say that he sexually victimized them. The details of their claims have been out for a while: IIRC they had consensual sex with him, and later that night he had nonconsensual sex with them. It seems Sweden (rightly) takes sexual assault much more seriously than some other jurisdictions.
panglott··on How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
"To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!"

These kind statistics are a kind of lie in themselves. You can say something like "omae wo aishiteimasu", but that's no more a normal way to say "I love you" than "I'm bonkers for that shithead". That has nothing to do with the grammar, it's lexical. "omae wo aishiteimasu" has a different meaning from "anata ga suki da yo".

panglott··on How we invented new ways to teach Japanese
Yes, the grammar of Japanese has a very simple internal logic and is easy to learn, although quite different from European languages.

The problem is all the words, and there are no cognates.

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