311 karma · joined March 20, 2017
Deadlifts seem to be an extremely functional form of lifting movement to practice. I can see bicep curls being mocked for not providing any general benefits, or static planks not doing much except make you better at performing the static plank.
But the techniques you learn from and the muscles you strengthen doing deadlifts are the same you use when you lift a heavy box off the floor.
I switched to dvorak over 10 years ago and since the letters on the keys didn't match, and because it's designed to make it easy to touch type, I quickly learned.
But after a year or so of dvorak, I grew tired of being extremely slow when I had to switch back to qwerty when using a shared keyboard in a conference room (imagine reading and hitting single letters in a meeting in front of people), so I switched back to qwerty. I thought that my new touch typing skill would transfer, but it didn't. I still try now and again to properly touch type, but it's slow and with a lot of mistakes. So this practice site looks very interesting to me as well!
Some people say that they can easily switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak, but it turns out that I couldn't. I still miss the speed and ease of dvorak, but I also enjoy being able to quickly use any keyboard now.
I meant winters in general, not the current situation. Today is grey, but still more light than it will be in January.
In Sweden, a winter a couple of years ago, I had just dropped off my son at pre-school. I was waiting on an outdoor subway station platform at 8 AM, listening to "Towards the Sun" from the movie Home. When she sings "Turn your face towards the sun" I looked up into the pitch black sky with tiny snowflakes that fell down stretching into infinity. The contrast was so complete that I'll never forget it.
When people buy eggs in Sweden from "free-walking" hens, they expect them to be outdoors in the sun, but instead they are kept indoors with a maximum of 9 hens per square meter and up to 10.000 hens in a barn.
It's not easy to find an English description of this, so here are some Swedish articles:
Wikipedia:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frig%C3%A5ende_djur
Swedish Egg, an organization from the egg industry:
https://www.svenskaagg.se/?p=19891&m=3959
Djurens Rätt, an animal rights group:
https://www.djurensratt.se/djur-i-livsmedelsindustrin/honor-...
I play point-and-click video games remotely with a friend. We always try to stop our sessions when we have an idea of what we want to try next, because it's much easier to start again next time. You know that you want to try to attach the rope to the tree, which means you immediately get back into the game next time.
On the other hand, I've programmed a video game with the same friend. We programmed separately, checking out a shared file of code. This meant that I always wanted to pass on a functioning version of the game. It's obvious that I wouldn't want to check in a version mid-code line, but even more than that, I got a kick out of only attempting to add things small enough so that I could finish in one evening. Aiming to always hand off a functioning version of the game made me both take on appropriate-sized tasks, and made it more fun to check in the code so that my friend could try the latest version of the game when he started coding.
There's something to be said for checking out a functioning version of the game, looking through the list of features we want to add, and then picking the one that looks easiest/most fun right now. If I had a half-finished feature to complete, I may not feel like it the next time I start, which would make me put off working on the game.
A half-finished feature may make it easier to start, but aiming to always finish a feature made me keep my ass in the chair instead of switching to playing a video game or watching Netflix.
A lot of authors would agree with your advice (I think that Hemingway talked about it in an interview, and Stephen King in the book On Writing), but I suggest trying both this method and the variant where you always try to have a functioning project and add new small features.
Also specifically Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch, that allows you to exercise from home. It's been sold out worldwide, with limited numbers showing up in stores and immediately disappearing.
They don't need to remaster or remake anything, just release it as is, and I'm sure it would sell well. I would anyway prefer the original with original graphics and soundtrack to a 3D remake or similar.
I'd like to get them to play A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger, but I don't think that they're patient enough. Still, beautiful games with great soundtracks.
There's this for 3D printing protective visors:
https://3dverkstan.se/protective-visor/
They print their own visors in Stockholm and distribute them to hospitals. They also act as a hub for amateurs that can help print, and companies with 3D printers with spare capacity, so that the hospitals have a single point of contact. I don't have any more details than what's said on the page.
I've read both good and bad things about The War of Art by Pressfield, but I'm at least very curious to some day read it.
The king in the book has the head of a dragon mounted on his wall as a trophy, and one of his sons finds out that he can enter the wall and look out through the eyes into the throne room. I don't want to spoil the main thing that he sees, but before that he watches his father pick his nose and eat it when he thinks he is alone.
It made me realize that adults are people too, and that you shouldn't idolize anyone to the level of imagining them without any negative traits. It's a bit like realizing that even the most beautiful people in your life or in the media have to sit down and poop like everyone else, and that we all have sides that we don't want others to see. It made me feel more equal to everyone else, and made me feel sympathy with every other human.
Sweden has stayed consistent with what experts have been saying. There's no use in closing the borders when the virus is already in the country.
Same thing with outlawing movement in and out of Stockholm. There's already a very clear recommendation and instruction to avoid travel within the country to avoid spreading the virus. There's no real way of enforcing a full quarantine unless you divert police officers who could be doing other things, or the military which we are reluctant to do (see Ådalen 1931, which is a reason why you don't want armed military to interact with citizens).
Looking at Stockholm, hardest hit in Sweden, numbers from 2014 said that 45% of the people had moved there from elsewhere, and since then more and more people have moved here. For people moving within Sweden, that usually means leaving their parents in their hometown, which makes it very easy to avoid having contact with them as soon as everyone realized how serious this is.
Another factor is that in Sweden there's always been a distance between the older generation and the younger. Since preschools and after-school care is inexpensively available to everyone, you don't need to rely on grandparents watching their grandchildren. People who live in Stockholm and have the grandparents here may arrange for them to pick up the kids a couple of days a week, but as I said above, a lot of people don't even have the grandparents in Stockholm. It's been reported as a problem for a long time that a lot of old people live alone in Sweden and lack social contacts. In this specific case that may actually be a good thing!
People usually live in households with two parents and one or two children, or alone in single households. The areas that have been hardest hit in Stockholm have been poorer suburbs with a high amount of immigrants, and it's a lot more common in these areas to live many generations in the same small apartment. Unfortunately, this means that the virus is easily transmitted from the children to the grandparents. Outside of the largest cities, it's very common to live in a house, which makes it easy to keep your distance to the neighbors.
Swedes have been accused for a long time of being socially distant already. A Swedish wedding will never compare in number of guests with a Turkish or Indian wedding. There's an old joke that if you leave your apartment and hear someone else in the stairs leaving theirs at the same time, you wait a while so you don't have to talk to them. People make an effort to not meet people, in contrast with socially warmer cultures.
Even before the virus, people would fill subway cars in Stockholm by using one of four seats for themselves, and you'd stick out if you shared a four-seat group with someone if there was an empty group of four seats available. I talked to international colleagues before all this started, and they were surprised that no one wanted to do small talk in the subway. They came from cultures where it was expected that you sit down next to the only other person in the subway car and started talking to them, while in Sweden that would make you seem like a drunk or a crazy person. The social distance is built in.
Also, no tradition of kissing on the cheek. Hugs are common between friends, and handshakes when you meet new people, but no kissing. I have a feeling this would be more common in Italy and Spain, as well as multi-generational gatherings.
All that said, it's way too early to say that everything is going to be fine in Sweden. I hope it is, but we're still in the unknown part of this. We still have a lot of people who live in cramped conditions in certain areas, and we had issues with the bus companies using fewer buses in Stockholm when all this started which led to overcrowding.
An ingredient change in Sweden that was minor, but still led to some confusion, was when the Marianne candy [1] changed the text from "May contain traces of milk" to "Contains <0.05 g of milk". Some vegans eat products with traces of milk, but the latter made it sound like it was something that was specifically added. Dairy products can also be completely added or removed from products without any other notice, which is something I'm not too bothered by if I make a mistake, but if I had a real allergy I might need to be more careful.
Fast-food chains sometimes prepare the food differently between restaurants. The Max hamburger chain (or if it was Burger King, I don't remember) usually prepare the vegan options separately. But in some restaurants, due to space constraints, they fry the vegan products together with chicken products, or use the same counter space for preparation for vegan options and cheese. So if you care about this, you need to ask specifically in each restaurant, because they can't guarantee that they never come in contact in all restaurants. It's not enough to just look at the list of ingredients.
[1] https://en.fazer.com/collections/marianne/products/marianne-...
What I thought you meant when you talked about entering ratios of food that you can scale up and down is that at first I created "Spaghetti and sauce" recipes, with a set amount of spaghetti and sauce. But then I may just keep the left-over sauce in the fridge, and next time I'll have a different amount of pasta. Since the recipe is fixed, I can't easily change the ratios of the recipe as I add it, but would have to create a completely new recipe with a different amount of pasta.
I've now started creating recipes for only the sauce part, and will enter the pasta separately for each meal. That makes it more flexible, but annoying for recipes where I always have the same things toghether.
One thing that I miss from the recipe handling in MyFitnessPal is that when I'm in the diary day view and want to add a recipe to a meal, I can't see the list of ingredients or how much it is of each. I have to go to the recipe section first to be able to see that. For example, I have a protein shake I've added as a recipe that's 250 g of plant-based milk and 45 g of protein powder, but I always forget if it's 40, 45, or 60 grams of powder. I would prefer to be able to add the recipe to a meal and from the diary see the amounts of different ingredients in the recipe, like a click-to-expand-the-recipe feature.
That means I can either enter having eaten 0.4 of 1 gram, or try to correct the information. But when you try to correct it, you can't just say "multiply everything by 100" or add a new 100 g option. It's only possible to divide all entered macro and micro nutrients by 100 to get to the value per 1 g, which is tedious to do while cooking dinner for the family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on.
I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s.
It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)
I don't dare keep it on a schedule nowadays, because I have kids who leave stuff on the floor everywhere, including charging cables for phones that can get tangled up in the roomba. What I usually do is a quick check under the couch and tv bench, then start it manually when I leave for work.
I too agree that we don't need articles on someone's cat, but I've had articles deleted as not notable on indie web comics and indie role-playing games with hundreds or thousands of readers or copies sold.
I thought that the fact that the RPG was published and publicly available, and was being discussed in RPG forums would make it notable enough, especially when it was mentioned as an inspiration for rules in more traditional RPGs. But since they hadn't been mentioned in any published articles they were deleted and there was no real way for me to fight it. I had added stuff like the list of contributors, publishing year, and overview of the rules and setting, with no personal discussion of the game.
The result was that I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia, because I don't have the time or interest to fight people with an infinite amount of time that deletes my additions. My main contribution to Wikipedia wouldn't have been on the articles on Barack Obama or World War II anyway, as they already have people who are experts that add information. I could have brought information on my specialized topics of interest, but realized that they would all seem non-notable to someone who's not interested in the same thing and would be deleted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
I still like the idea of round carrots, so I may have to try again some day. I don't think I've seen them in the supermarket.
https://www.ufseeds.com/product/parisian-carrot-seeds/
What type of fertilizer do you use for carrots? The regular indoor flower variety or something special?
Me and my wife have grown stuff on the balcony, but the main reason that we don't anymore is that we go away for four weeks during the summer where there is the most need to water. We can grow things in the spring and in the autumn, but we miss the warmest period in the middle.
We bought four large clear plastic containers from IKEA that are intended to store stuff under the bed, drilled holes in the bottom of two of them for drainage, and put them in the other containers. We filled them with LECA pebbles and dirt, and watered with large PET bottles. It was all very easy.
One summer we grew kale in one container, but were discouraged when we harvested it and only had enough for one pie. Your first sentence triggered this memory, which is the point of my comment. Growing kale on that small scale was terribly inefficient, and the amount of work to water it far surpassed the joy of eating the pie.
Another summer we had curled leaf lettuce that was much better than kale. It grew so quickly that we could continuously harvest it and still have more growing. Of course you can't eat it for the calories, so it's just for fun.
We've also had windowboxes on the inside of the balcony railing with flavorful sallads and herbs, like rocket sallad, basil, chives, and so on. As you say, those add a lot to a meal without taking up too much space, and are easy to start with.
The engineer had specified a 7 mm thickness of a part of a metal beam that was supposed to be 25 mm. She argued that the manufacturer should have realized that the drawing was a preliminary draft because it was undated, it was missing other information, and was "clearly" underdimensioned, but it was still manufactured and put in the bridge without anyone noticing until the collapse.
The reason the story was extra covered in engineering magazines at the time was because the prosecutor argued that the responsible design engineer should go to prison, and three others (the owner of the design firm, a manager at the construction firm, and a coordinator who led the project) should get suspended sentences. No one from the manufacturing firm was prosecuted.
The result of the trial was that the designer got a suspended sentence and a fine, and the design company was fined 1.5 million SEK. All others were freed.
Most people agreed that the lack of process was to blame (the design should have been checked by someone else at the design firm, they should have clear markings on preliminary drafts, things shouldn't be manufactured without a formal handshake, and so on), but it's still an interesting question where the line should be on personal responsibility.
Some forms of negligence in the workplace should be criminal, especially if it results in people dying, but it's pretty harsh if an individual engineer is personally responsible for putting a 7 instead of 25 (possibly due to copy-paste of work in progress) in a drawing or in a piece of code. It's hard to draw a clear line of the responsibility between the individual engineer and the company that they work for, which should have processes to catch these things.
Links (in Swedish):
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kistaraset
https://www.nyteknik.se/bygg/ingenjoren-darfor-rasade-bron-i... (has photos, including the drawing that says 7 mm instead of 25 mm)
It still keeps nagging with a notification saying that my Windows installation is not fully secure since I haven't added a Microsoft account. I've disabled that notification, but it may have disabled all notifications from the settings part of Windows, I'm not sure.
I'm happy to read articles both from the political left and right in Sweden, but I refuse to read the anti-immigration websites by the far right. It just makes me feel dirty, and I don't want to be in their company. I already know that even if we start from the same sets of facts, our conclusions will be completely different, and there's no need for me to even see their proposed solutions.
Speaking of all sides, there's a Swedish web forum called Flashback that is a great example of this. It's very pro free speech, which means that you have posters who are openly nazis discussing politics with communists and others. You have to have a thick skin to read some of the stuff posted, but I'm really happy that there is a platform for these people to meet and discuss, because nothing gets better by only having individual echo chambers.
I think individual spaces are also important, where you agree with people and don't have to fight all the time, but we also need spaces for people with different backgrounds to discuss.