Unbelievably lucky for the eclipse, had a family gathering planned way ahead of time in Waco tx, some are older and anxious and wouldn’t have been up for a journey onto the roads to try and get out of the clouds. It looked like the sun would for sure be obstructed at totality, it peaked out a few times leading up to it but never for more than a minute. But like a hole opened up just as totality was reached and it stayed for 3 whole minutes. Actually I was happy for the bit of clouds at the end because the obstruction allowed my phone to capture the last 60s and was still plenty visible with naked eye.

Super cool celestial event, spectacular even, would recommend!

I’m really sorry to hear that, I don’t have too much experience with chronic anxiety but every few years I’ll have a full on panic attack just randomly and it’s absolutely excruciating, I can’t imagine having to live with that on the regular.

Just one other comment, I’m a bit wary of using antihistamines in general, probably irrational paranoia but there’s been some news that over the counter ones can increase risk of dementia later in life and hydroxyzine seems like it’s a lot dirtier and more powerful. For just passing out there may be other options, have you tried an alpha agonist (clonidine, tizanidine)? I feel like these are tragically underutilized as sleep meds, not everyone gets super tired but most do, and from personal experience at least the sleep quality is very good. Probably easy to get from the doc and I’ve never heard of anyone becoming addicted to these although there is technically now a street drug in this class (xylazine).

It’s perfectly possible to be racist and still not on board with genocide. Also just the general vibe is bad for Biden. People wanted a return to normalcy after trump/COVID and if anything the world has gotten more bizarre. Personally I am somewhat nostalgic for the trump years, the last 4 years have been the worst of my life and I’m surely not the only one. Not that that should have anything to do with who is president but also people are even dumber about politics than they are in general

No

Unless your tolerance break is like 6 weeks plus and you also plan on being buzzed all day every day that’s not going to be an issue. The real concern is you might develop a taste for it, and that’s going to apply to just about anything that even remotely substitutes for THC. Heavy exercise plus eating unhealthy food plus media binge

I’m not sure how long a panic attack lasts… if you are willing to wait a half hour or so gabapentinoids would probably be a good alternative to benzos, doctors have yet to catch on to how addictive they are and give them out like candy. The rc benzos are still extremely good despite the DEAs efforts, brominated and florinated ones are very much available in the US. If that’s too scary I do believe you’ll get a script if you’re persistent enough and willing to shop around for doctors, may be a long haul project but you could also get lucky.

It’s been a while but I want to say this is not a topological concept. Topologically the band with no twist and with a full twist are both just a disc with a hole, they’re homeomorphic meaning topological tools can’t tell the difference between them. A half twist (Mobius strip) is distinct though…

Still the argument I used is partly topological, cutting things apart and glueing them back together is very much of the subject. Anyway I believe there are math people on the sub who cracked a book more recently than 12 years ago, please chime in!

Edit: And now I’m realizing this is almost certainly wrong, for example knots are just circles no matter how convoluted but you can still study them with topolgy by looking at their complement, which would be the whole of 3d space but with the knot cut out, probably you can do the same with these bands. So correct answer would have been: I don’t know

Yes, odd numbers of loops can always be made to work. If you glue a strip of paper so it makes a loop with a single turn you can twist it so it wraps around twice to lie flat. Notice that when you use a regular loop and pinch it you’ve basically recreated that scenario, you could glue it together at the pinch and cut off one side (see picture) and you’d just have a single loop with one twist, and you could repeat that process any number of times, each new twist crosses over in the opposite direction, undoing the twist previously created.

Digital release next month apparently, immediately there will be torrents https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/dune-2-digital-release-date

Yeah but more like 15 years, it’s not great

From when the movie came out to four days ago I’d been unable to muster the motivation to rewatch deadwood for the first time but I found the time to try and watch every Star Trek show I haven’t seen, fucking idiot!

This isn’t likely the cause of your issue, think it was a previous version of windows, but a few years back Microsoft patched a bug that caused checking for updates to take exponential time in the # of updates to check, causing some previously offline PCs to literally just grind until theyre turned off or the sun expands to engulf the inner planets. Anyway bad performance on not freshly minted installations of windows is I can only assume a feature to them

I comfort myself with the fact that eternal torture is impossible because the number of distinct quantum states your brain can have, given that it can only occupy a finite volume is, while very large, technically finite. Eventually the torture will just loop around to the beginning so it’s not really an eternity. The devil could try to just continually expand your brain so that you can experience more intricate types of pain but eventually your head will grow so large that it collapses into a black hole. They could try to make it very long and thin rather than roughly spherical to avoid this, but eventually the expansion of the universe will causally disconnect one half from the other.

There wasn’t much going on in the world, we passed the time posting about a subreddit about a podcast about the 2016 us election

Norm only eats kale and barley and runs every day they wouldn’t even be able to flee

We merely tried to buy their land, kick off the freeloaders and put a state there, and they attacked us! Mom and dad said we could put a state there, said we could if we shared, do you know there wasn’t even one there before! And the people we were trying to move didn’t even own the land they were living on, freeloaders, what’s the harm I ask? It’s just the Arab disposition, they won’t even negotiate when we tell them nicely they’re no longer allowed to be in their homes, totally adversarial, and this same behavior you see it to this very day, you merely build a large wall around them, what do they do, attack.

Yeah I’m only 44 minutes in this is painful why am I going watch the whole thing

I don’t think anything is purely innate, even anatomy is to some extent malleable. But I also don’t think there are any purely environmental attributes either, even something like whether you chew gum is to some extent going to be affected by innate biological factors. It’s a spectrum, with talent at music being somewhere in the middle of these two examples.

I think maybe we actually somewhat agree? Talking just music here I think most people who truly excel have at least 2 of these: some kind of innate ability, rich / extremely attentive parents, a desire so strong that it becomes an obsession starting at a young age. I’d say having a knack for music is quite common, followed by being rich, then long term personal obsession is a distant 3rd. Since you probably need 2 of these most who reach the highest levels will have 1 and 2 and will be rich

20 years and from age 6, no I’m actually uniquely bad like some people have dyslexia, I have that for sheet music. Really I think this is most obvious in the field of music, I also spent a lot of time in the classical world, piano and vocal, there were rich kids who had all the resources they could ever need and ended up really good, there were also those kids siblings who had the same teachers and were terrible. And there were a lot of poors who got really far with virtually no help until they were older. Way more good rich kids I admit, it’s a huge factor but not the only huge factor

I’m sorry this is just implausible. I spent 20 years seriously studying the piano and became pretty damn good at technique but I still can’t sight read for shit nor can I play by ear, frankly I’m not a very good overall musician, despite thousands of hours of effort devoted to these very skills and help from multiple teachers. One of my children, autistic, developed perfect pitch by touching the piano just a couple of times and me just telling him the notes he was hitting. I also spent countless hours as a child trying to draw and I’m absolutely terrible, like imagine that “delete this” drawing of Elon musk combined with how Biden would probably draw a clock. Another child never tried to draw anything but fonts and when we asked him to produce a dog at age 10 he drew one perfectly from memory, literally first try and much better than anything I’ve ever produced.

I’m not saying talent is entirely inate, or that pack of aptitude can’t be overcome, but it’s obviously easier for certain people to develop certain skills even in very similar environments. And this is exactly what you would expect given that everyone starts out as a different person!