As this thread shows, back pain isn’t caused by just one thing, so each specific person’s back pain won’t be cured by the same one size fits all approach.

If your back pain is caused by poor posture exacerbated by a weak posterior chain, lifting weights at the gym or doing other strengthening exercises/physical therapy can be helpful. As plenty in this thread can attest, gym time to offset laptop time can go a long way.

If your back pain is caused by repetitive stress from physical labor, adhering to proper form/technique and rest/recovery cycles to the best of your ability can help.

If your back pain is exacerbated by the weight you carry, losing weight (or in certain circumstances, breast reduction surgery) can help.

We’re all just trying to get through life. Sometimes other people’s tips can help, so it’s worth sharing, but we also shouldn’t get too tied to a particular solution that worked for us, as a the solution for everyone else.

From what I remember, the taunt predates women overtaking men in college completion (which happened in approximately 1995). It’s pretty old at this point.

Here’s a newspaper article mentioning it from 1993:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-01-31-tm-825-story.html

It’s not uncommon for space images to be color-enhanced. On the one hand, it may feel less authentic. On the other hand, the visible light levels in space may be insufficient for our expectations and uses anyway.

Another thing to consider is that human perception of color in celestial objects is often just wrong, so enhancing the color of certain objects is more true than what we often see ourselves.

The sun is the same color all the time: white, consisting of a broad spectrum of all the wavelengths in the visible light range. But our atmosphere scatters the different wavelengths differently, so we see a blue sky and we see yellow, orange, and red sunsets. The atmospheric effects are happening all the time, with all the other light that happens to hit our planet, like the moon seeming to change color while reflecting the same white sunlight.

The stars in the sky are all sorts of different colors, but appear white to us, because our color-blind rods are much more sensitive than our color-sensitive cones, and the dimness of starlight just all looks like faint white lights regardless of whether the star happens to be red, yellow, blue, or white.

Meanwhile, relativistic effects might actually shift wavelengths and resolution, too, whether we’re talking about redshift or gravitational lensing, and asking what the “true” image is supposed to be.

So when we take a long exposure of something in space, that itself may represent something that the human eye can’t see. Using colors to represent the different wavelengths actually present may also require adjustment of what physical filters are used on the capture, and how the actual sensor is configured to account for different wavelengths (including potentially wavelengths not within the visible spectrum), and to account for literal noise captured by the sensor.

Astrophotography needs to make choices about how to translate sensor data to an actual human-visible image displayed on a screen with its own limited color space of what its pixels can display, or printed on paper with its own limited color space of what inks are available for printing.

mostly, sweet potato is the odd one out

And the onion rings.

Week 6 of 5/3/1. Visiting family this week so I had to drop into a new gym near my mom’s place. For my AMRAP sets, targeting 1+ reps:

Squat: 3 x 335 lbs. I’m a little bit concerned I wasn’t able to do more than 5, as I was doing 5 x 335 7 weeks ago. But maybe it’s fatigue from last week’s deadlift 1RM, some bad sleep and lots of alcohol this week while traveling and catching up with family.

Bench: 6 x 180 lbs. This I’m less concerned about. I’ve seen a steady improvement in bench over the last few weeks.

Deadlift: 3 x 385 lbs. This was a grip failure more than it was an inability to do more reps. I set up my straps half-assed and paid for it.

Gonna do a deload week next week (Week 7), and come back at it for another 7 week cycle.

The curvature of the moon’s surface would necessarily be the same distance from the viewer as the people. And the moon surface looks too curved for those to be human sized figures on the surface.

it’s now frowned upon to be hit on?

It’s frowned upon to hit on someone who doesn’t have an exit from the situation: a customer talking to a retail/hospitality worker whose job includes not pissing off customers, colleagues who need to continue working with each other (or worse, a superior-subordinate relationship), etc.

I don’t know what 20-somethings are doing these days, but navigating that transition from school to young independent adulthood was something difficult every generation had to do. It’s just that this generation may have had their social skills development stilted during COVID or the smartphone era so that they’re less equipped to make that jump, and that gap is leaving a greater proportion of that population behind.

It doesn’t have to be structured. It just has to give opportunities for repeat interactions, and maybe a promise of future interaction with the same person, in that low pressure environment.

Dog parks have a bunch of dogs mingling, so their owners will often have the opportunity to get to know each other.

Neighbors who see each other often have an opportunity to get to know each other. That goes for work neighbors, too, even if they work for another employer entirely (but in the same building or something.

Regulars at a coffee shop, restaurant, bar, or gym might learn to recognize each other and go from exchanging pleasantries to actually getting to know each other (and the staff).

Church isn’t as big a thing as it was a few generations ago, but any kind of social meetings, from support groups to volunteer associations, give the opportunity to work together for a common goal.

This is where hobbies and free time come in. And I’m not going to knock video games and other hobbies where you might interact with people online, but there is something fundamentally different about repeated in-person interactions. So it’s worth making sure that your routine includes regular interaction with people in low-stakes settings.

The latest xkcd has one of my favorite hover texts of all time:

It’s important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

I suspect this is actually what’s changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it’s only a little more than fixing their old one.

The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person’s house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it’s easy to diagnose which part has failed.

I always needed practical examples, which is why it was helpful to learn physics alongside calculus my senior year in high school. Knowing where the physics equations came from was easier than just blindly memorizing the formulas.

The specific example of things clicking for me was understanding where the “1/2” came from in distance = 1/2 (acceleration)(time)^2 (the simpler case of initial velocity being 0).

And then later on, complex numbers didn’t make any sense to me until phase angles in AC circuits showed me a practical application, and vector calculus didn’t make sense to me until I had to actually work out practical applications of Maxwell’s equations.

I suspect that ordinary avenues for meeting friends in one’s 30’s is also available for meeting partners, only you have to acknowledge that most of the people you meet aren’t going to be single/interested.

I’m an extrovert. I talk to strangers in certain settings, especially where waiting around is normal. One of my best friends, I met in line waiting to get into a standup comedy show. I’ve met other friends in line for concerts and sporting events, too. I’ve also met friends sitting at the bar or some kind of communal table of a restaurant, and connected over the food itself. It just takes the boldness of asking for contact information and then texting “it was nice to meet you today, great talking to you” and then sometimes that becomes a friendship.

But pure strangers are hard to connect with in one interaction. Most of the friends I made after 30 were from repeated interactions over time: neighbors you see regularly, other regulars at the dog park/coffee shop, etc.

And once you’re in a mode where you can make friends, if some of them happen to be single and compatible, maybe you try going out on a date.

And yes, this means that sometimes you’ll meet people at the gym, or at their place of work, or other circumstances where it’s frowned upon to hit on strangers. But making the friendship bridge first can give you that read on the situation of whether they’re actually open to dating.

muscle gym divorced military dads

I know a bunch of these dudes, and most of them are into books and video games.

Something about the RPG grind mechanic in certain video games and a typical strength/barbell progression program scratch the same itch, so people who tend to be into one are also into the other.

And the solutions we have for 5 or 10 appear elegant: perfect 45° angles, symmetry in the packed arrangement.

5 and 10 are interesting because they are one larger than a square number (2^2 and 3^2 respectively). So one might naively assume that the same category of solution could fit 4^2 + 1, where you just take the extra square and try to fit it in a vertical gap and a horizontal gap of exactly the right size to fit a square rotated 45°.

But no, 17 is 4^2 + 1 and this ugly abomination is proven to be more efficient.

The Icarus myth is still a useful analogy, even if you don’t believe it actually happened.

And what’s their takeaway? Is it about learning from their mistake and trying again? No, it’s “God is punishing your hubris!”

Just substitute any force or phenomenon bigger than human ability for “God” in that sentence and it’ll still apply to a lot of situations.

she got a blood transfusion from Banner

The existence of blood transfusions implies the existence of blood cisfusions.

Yup, small lenses and thin wire frames were the defining trend of the 90’s. And there was a bit of a frameless trend where the earpieces and nose bridge screwed directly into the lens itself. See this picture of Jennifer Aniston as an example.

Carbonation adds bubbles. The bubbles in water dissipate very quickly, whereas bubbles in other drinks with sugars or other compounds tend to have a bit more stability in the bubbles (think about how long the foam takes to settle from a beer being poured).

So when you force carbonate in a bottle, the bubbles tend to rise to the top, and when the pressure is released, will spray out it every direction, causing a huge mess.

It can be managed by being very slow and methodical at adding pressure, and, more importantly, by being slow and methodical and slowly releasing the pressure. But you have to be ready for it to make a mess.

Natural gas is abundant and cheap in North America, and transporting gas overseas has always been inefficient and expensive, so each continent tends to have their own price for natural gas.

Electricity is expensive in California in large part because the transmission lines cause devastating wildfires, so the rates now includes the cost of preventing fires by continuously trimming trees and other vegetation near power lines, and paying off past liability for billions of damage in previous fires.