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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • The traditional HBO model of being approximately 30 minutes or 60 minutes, more or less, was reasonable. Some episodes were long (Sopranos Season 4 finale was 75 minutes long, about 25% longer than its time slot), and some were short (Sopranos season 2, episode 8 was only 43 minutes). But they generally stuck around that time frame, and the majority of the episodes were between 50-60 minutes long.

    The Bear’s shortest episode was 18 minutes. Most of its episodes are between 30-40 minutes. But it has two monster episodes, season 2’s “Fishes” at 66 minutes, and Season 4’s “Bears” at 69 minutes. Those ratios are way off, and hard to plan sequential non-binge watching. At a certain point it’s disrespectful of the audience’s time.


  • I eat a legume for pretty much every meal:

    • Peanut butter on regular rotation for convenience foods
    • Peas or beans or snap peas as a component in pasta dishes or salads
    • Blanched peas or green beans as a vegetable side when I’m eating dinner with a main and sides separate.
    • Edamame with Asianish noodle dishes, including instant ramen
    • Snow peas or snap peas as a component in stir fries
    • Beans in salads (things like kidney beans or black beans)
    • Lentils or beans in fast casual rice bowls of a Mediterranean influence
    • Some kind of lentil or chickpea dish with South Asian food.
    • Beans with Mexican food because duh
    • Dried beans with my braises (cassoulet, chili, other random assortments of ingredients in a braising pot/dutch oven), only you gotta be conscious of how dried beans don’t cook properly in acidic environments.

    I personally don’t care for tofu. I’ll eat it when it’s a component of a dish I happen to already be eating, but I rarely seek it out to be the star of the dish I order or make, with only a few exceptions.

    But adding legumes/pulses to your meals is an easy way to get more protein, including amino acids (like lysine) that aren’t present in traditional grains like wheat or rice. And they’re generally a good source of certain types of soluble fiber good for gut health. I’m also generally less hungry (and get full faster) when I’m eating plenty of fiber and protein, so legumes help with both of those.

    I eat a lot, so I still eat a decent amount of meat overall, but as a percentage of my 3500-calorie diet it’s probably smaller than the average Westerner.








  • the flushing kind or the hole in he ground kind?

    Any kind. There’s further breakdowns in access to flushing toilets, dry latrines, composting toilets, etc., but this is part of a long standing project to get people to stop open defecation in places where untreated human waste will mix into drinking water, food supply, etc.



  • Throw it away once it’s cooled. If it’s a solidified fat, you can just scrape it into the trash bag. If it’s a liquid oil, then you can throw it into a disposable container (I have a million takeout soup containers on hand at any given time) so that it doesn’t leak everywhere.

    Oil is compostable, but only in proper ratios to the overall organic material being composted, so it’s fair game to put into compostable containers for industrial composting, or maybe small quantities in your backyard compost, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.



  • Around 10 years ago I switched to a specific big airline and started building frequent flyer status. Before that I was willing to do the regular budget airlines (Southwest, Frontier, JetBlue) for $100 savings or the ultra budget airlines (Spirit, Allegiant) for another $100 savings over that.

    But I’ve had bad experiences with Frontier (canceled flight, next available flight not available for 3 days) and Spirit (more time on the tarmac than in the air). Both resulted in missed events (and for the Frontier flight I needed to just buy a last minute ticket, out of pocket, with another airline).

    So now, when it’s important for me to be on time, I tend to prefer airlines that have multiple flights per day between my origin and destination, and have some redundancy and resilience against the unexpected. There are still network effects that provide some major value, to where I’m generally willing to pay $200 more for flights on my preferred airline.





  • For gases, volume is inversely proportional to pressure, which means as pressure approaches zero, very slight changes in pressure will make a big difference to the behavior of the gases.

    But for solids and liquids, the absence of pressure doesn’t make that big of a difference. Yes, vapor pressure means that water will boil at lower temperatures in a vacuum, but the way the actual liquids stay together, especially when enclosed in in a way that limits vapor pressure, remains the same in low pressure environments as they are in medium pressure environments.

    So when you go scuba diving, the doubling of pressure when you hit a depth of 10 meters is simply accommodated by you breathing denser air out of your tank. But nothing else about your body feels any different under that pressure. Go even deeper, and some things might start getting affected by the dissolved gases in your blood and other bodily fluids, but we’re talking about huge pressure differences from the surface, basically 1 atmosphere of pressure for each 10 meters you descend.

    In contrast, the difference between sea level atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space is only one atmosphere of pressure. The liquid and solid parts of your body will be fine. Your reliance on breathing might not fare so well, but see how militaries deal with it: pressurizing the cabin to some degree but making sure that the actual breathing mask is delivering the right amount of oxygen even when the cabin pressure is the equivalent of a high altitude.

    So when that blobfish gets yanked out from 900 meters deep up to the surface, that’s a sudden loss of pressure from 91 atms to 1 atm, a 90 atm swing. But for a human going from 1 to 0 atms, that’s just a 1-atm difference. If you open your mouth and exhale while it’s happening, maybe relax your eustachian tubes if you know how to do that, you probably won’t have any issues from the decompression, until you start to try to breathe.



  • One big advantage is that we can run while breathing out of sync with our steps. Four legged running pretty much requires each inhale and exhale to sync with the compression and expansion of the torso with each stride. Humans, on the other hand, can run full speed while taking multiple steps per breath, depending on terrain and fatigue, which gives more options for pacing.