In a very traditional Afghan restaurant I used to frequent, if you ordered something really spicy, they’d bring you these small mint drops afterwards to chew on, no extra charge. Worked very well for me.

Yeah, I’ve had a realization a few days ago when I checked out about a dozen songs that had north of 10 million views on YT, but I’ve never heard of them, at all, or of the artists behind them. And all of those were from some 10 years ago. So I guess my taste in music is kind of frozen in time and I’ve been trying for a while to complete collections of “old” artists rather than getting to know new ones.
I do get occasional inspiration from the folks at I Love Music, though.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to look on helplessly as everybody else repeats it.

This fantastic opening quote must have also been Marx’s weirdest flex.

Solé’s fantastic and extremely recommendable book “Phase Transitions” covers this as well. Quoting Janssen et al.: “even when the group is faced with negative results, members may not suggest abandoning an earlier course of action, since this might break the existing unanimity.”
“More generally, the underlying problem here is why complex societies might fail to adapt […]. Even if there is some social perception of risk, short-term thinking often prevails when facing long-term vulnerabilities. Such undesirable behavior is often favored by a combination of incomplete understanding of the problem, together with the misleading view that all changes are reversible.”

• Don’t be afraid of loneliness; don’t be afraid of too many people around; don’t be afraid of sharing your life with an SO you think you don’t really know. As you age, these phases tend to blunt and blend together, like the seasons. The only thing you really have, in the end, is yourself.
• Adult life is a lot more about compromising than fighting. Don’t make other people’s life shitty on purpose, neither allow them to make yours shitty.
• Get your regular medical check-outs.
• Leave a place if you positively can’t stand it any longer, and start from scratch. It’ll be okay.

• Get a fire extinguisher for your home.
• Get legal expenses insurance.
• In both private and professional affairs, be fair and honest.
• Don’t waste too much time with shitty partners or in shitty jobs.

Join some Whatsapp group that piques your interest and meet with them IRL. I wouldn’t have thought that drinking beer and shooting the shit with total strangers could be so much fun, but here we are.

Geez, that reminds me of a former colleague that, when asked for “the numbers,” would just send screenshots of tables in the ERP system instead of exporting them to a spreadsheet. What’s even worse, usually a lot of values were plain wrong, on one occasion more than half of them.

he Beak Too Big For He Gotdamn Head

Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.

* See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”

Found the mathematician that contributes to Urban Dictionary in this free time.