I'm not even sure who can afford just the Lego Set of Fallingwater.

We've learned pretty recently that almost all nutrition of plants and animals relies on symbiotic relationships with microbes with their own distinct genetic material and reproduction. The microbiome in animal guts or in the soil where plant roots live turned out to be really important for whether the actual cells in the larger multicellular organism are getting what they need to thrive.

even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.

It's more useful to model the genes as selfish, not the individuals. A queen bee/ant won't survive long enough to produce fertile offspring if her infertile offspring, each a genetic dead end, doesn't provide for the hive/colony. That genetic programming isn't altruistic because it doesn't help rival colonies/hives, only their own.

So no, the individuals aren't free riding on others' altruism. It's more that genetic coding for social groups is advantageous to the gene, even if localized applications of those rules might seem disadvantageous to the individual in certain instances.

Letting the eyeballs touch is the French kissing of butterfly kisses? If I understand the analogy correctly.

Night lights are like half a watt. You can leave a 0.5W bulb on all night (let's just say 12 hours), 365 days per year, and you'd be coming up on a total energy use of about 2.1 kWh per year, or about $0.35 per year in USD.

I attribute most of my success to luck, but also in finding a career path in my 30's that actually rewarded my neurodivergence. I took 6 years to finish undergrad, after changing majors a few times. I started and aborted 3 different career fields before finding the one that works for me and actually gives me an opportunity to use different knowledge and interests across completely unrelated fields. Now that I'm a lawyer in civil litigation, I only need to have knowledge and experience in court procedure, but most of my work is spent on research techniques and translating the real world messiness of whatever random thing has gone wrong into proper analogies for legal arguments. My tendency towards new rabbit holes to explore actually works at learning a new industry or new company just enough to be able to represent someone in it, and then getting out and starting over to do another thing in another case.

To extend your analogy, it's like I'm in thick brush where running fast on a flat surface isn't the most useful skill. If I were forced to fend for myself in an open field, I'd be fucked, but I thrive where I am because I'm good at the things that matter in this particular environment.

Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic "forever chemicals"? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

And look, I'm a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.

The highest priced iPhone, all max specs, is $1600.

If you get a new one every year, and trade in the previous year's, you'll probably get around $600 trade in value. So we're talking $1000/year for the highest priced phone.

On a monthly basis, we're talking $83/month. That's like a rounding error on rent, utilities, and food, much less transportation and health care.

And, more realistically, people are buying $800 phones once every 2 years, maybe seeing something like a $600 net expense spread over 24 months, for $25/month.

Phones are like the one thing that are cheaper in 2025 than in 1985.

In my opinion, cauliflower sucks unless it's been roasted/fried/seared with dry high heat to the point of being brown and crispy.

If it is overcooked, the rupture of the cell walls makes that cabbage stank run out into the dish.

If it's still raw or cooked at too low a temperature (which includes any temperature in which liquid water will exist on the surface), it's missing the delicious browning that happens at high heat.

That means it doesn't work as cauliflower "wings." The breading/batter protects the cauliflower too much, and it ends up steaming itself inside. Just batter up some firm tofu instead, those are great wings.

It can work as cauliflower "steak" I guess, but that doesn't really taste like it should fit the culinary role of a protein/main. I'm all about roasting cauliflower, and flat slices make it easy to grill or sear evenly, but that just doesn't fit that ecological niche that a steak does.

So I generally don't like cauliflower served with broccoli. They cook too differently to be able to actually cook them together in the same batch.

"Very little fiber", "Frequently have a lot of oil", and "Relatively high in salt and sugar" aren't a classification, they're vibes.

What you've listed aren't classification criteria. These are generally common characteristics within the category, and a basis for investigating what causes ultra processed foods to generally be bad.

I'm in this thread arguing that the scientists have the data to be able to just analyze correlations and trends of those characteristics directly, rather than taking the dubious step of classifying them into the NOVA category to begin with.

It's not pseudoscience or not science though. The models are the models, and I think they're bad models, but I don't think they're outright unscientific.

https://youtu.be/_hBH8Gy9kFE

Fried cheese...with club sauce

Popcorn shrimp...with club sauce

Chicken Tenders...with spicy club saauuce

So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?

Let's say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.

So let's have that conversation about bromate! Let's not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.

The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists' work) have completely over-weighted the value of the "ultra processed" category.

The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already "naturally" exists in any wheat bread, so it's not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.

But whole grain bread isn't as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery's white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren't more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.

If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don't throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).

And I'm not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.

The NOVA classification system is "real" science, but in my opinion the arbitrary and vague definitions make it so that it's not very good or very robust science.

The infuriating thing is that I believe that nutrition is more than just a linear addition of all the constituent ingredients (kinda the default view of nutrition science up through the 90's), but addressing the shortcomings of that overly simple model shouldn't mean making an even more simple model.

NOVA classification is the wrong answer to a legitimate problem.

Spit out a random e-mail address and record which e-mail address was given to each IP.

The author mentions it's a violation of GDPR to record visitors' IP addresses. I'm not sure that's correct, but even so, it could be possible to make a custom encoding of literally every ipv4 address through some kind of lookup table with 256 entries, and just string together 4 of those random words to represent the entire 32-bit address space, such that "correct horse battery staple" corresponds to 192.168.1.100 or whatever.

Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

Or, if you know you're always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you're not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.

The use of a "+" convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don't care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you're looking for.

It's not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It's that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren't designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn't really change the fact that an importer wouldn't be able to comply with vehicles that weren't engineered to those specifications.

Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:

That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.

In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they're not street legal: they didn't get bigger because they weren't subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they're 25 years old).