I'm not sure I can justify why I think this (although presumably I'll have to in this thread or else I'll be ignored) but this kind of argument really carries no weight with me. I mean, yeah, okay, there are advances that are helpful and advances that are pointless, but I'm not at all sure that it's so easy a priori to disambiguate them, let alone solve the resource allocation issues necessary to have people specifically working on the useful ones.
I can kind of buy that. There are lots of things that I think are stupid or pointless to work on. But I don't think there's some kind of conservation-of-brilliance thing going on, and if the people working on building better click-ads, or more privacy-invasive social media tools weren't working on this, they'd be curing cancer.
I mean, the bionic pancreas, that's cool and seems super handy, but it seems like it would evidently be the case that Type I diabetics would have to keep on top of their blood sugar regardless, in case something goes wrong with the machine, so it's really sort of an incremental benefit.
On the other hand, it definitely seems to be the case that real-time feedback and logging can help people improve their diet, so I could imagine that the Vessyl (maybe not in its current form, but something like it) could be a super useful tool for people who are trying to reduce sugar intake because they're at risk of Type II diabetes, for instance.
Okay, that seems like a little bit of a stretch, but nonetheless.
Clickbaity ads are obviously terrible to justify but at least from an infrastructural perspective some of that energy has gone into making the web more of a robust applications platform, which is at least plausibly a good thing.
Also, of course, the idea that the best minds of that twenty-something Harvard twit's generation are all working at ad-supported tech companies is not particularly true. And even if it was true, Facebook and Google are pretty big drivers of some fields (specifically machine learning and "big data", if you call that a field) that might be evil or might be good, but definitely aren't banal.
3: I wouldn't call it an incremental benefit even if it required just as much effort on the part of the person with diabetes. Even if, say for some licensing reasons, you still had to stick yourself with needles just as often as before. Because it is continually monitoring and adjusting, it will be doing a better job at keeping blood sugar in the proper levels. That's a huge gain for health and avoiding the negative consequences of diabetes.
Only tangentially related, I played soccer with a friend who more-or-less committed suicide-by-negligence over how badly she mismanaged her diabetes. She was one hell of a soccer player, though.
I played with her for about five years. It was pretty common for someone else on the team to force her to eat something sugary, and by that point she was having seizures pretty regularly and had to move back in with her parents. I asked her how the seizures wrap up if she's on her own, and she said that they don't - someone has to find her and give her some sugar. She told me that when she was 16, she'd had a seizure that lasted for something like eight hours and left her with brain damage, which was sort of detectible in conversation.
The whole thing was sad and strange, but jesus she was a monster on the field.
I have no idea if it will work as advertized, of course. But it sounds like something that might. They already have insulin pumps, but I'm not aware of any of those that monitor and adjust.
Damn, I'm off to swim, but I just can't agree with you, Tweety. Yes, it's hard to know what will lead to what, but that doesn't mean we just ignore the issue of incentives and priorities. It's still ok to think that incentives for making ads will lead to more ads and less stuff that isn't ads. This discussion happened around finance a few years ago, too.
I mean... I don't think we should ignore incentives and priorities either. I would much prefer vast, general funding for science to inordinately rich nerds working in the finance/facebook nexus. But all things considered the tech boom is probably better than, say, the housing boom as far as directing capitalist energies in a possibly-maybe-sometime useful direction. When was the era when big business (or little business, or rich capitalists, or whatever) was oriented toward the greater benefit of the people? Don't say "Bell Labs".
If lots of research is going into making luxury techno-gadgets, that seems like a waste. The 20th century model, where luxury techno-gadgets didn't actually work, and therefore Brookstone, The Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer didn't need to put a lot of effort into R&D, worked fine.
Say FONTANA Labs!
Is this just handwringing, o-face, or is there some resource shifting mechanism that's non-terrible?
12.last is essentially my question.
I mean, yes, one of the things we should spend our confiscatory wealth tax on is robust funding of scientific research. But short of that, same as it ever was, right?
I mean, really, the prior model we're all dancing around is the cold war, where you could get money for space lasers and then get the peace dividend of drinking glasses with included space lasers. Would it really be better for the best minds of whatever generation to figure out how to get people to (not) click on missile launch sequence initiate buttons?
I mean a lot of things. I have meanings.
That cup is going to change people's lives!
I'm only .6 kidding. Some grad student spends six years making a magic cup, who am I to judge? What did I do?
Obviously, somebody needs to get two girls and see just how discerning the cup is.
Could we incentivize some Harvard twits to figure out a better way of allocating capital to socially beneficial innovation?
21: Isn't that what sausagely is doing?
Anyway, soon we'll reach Peak Attention Mining, when every visible surface is covered with context-sensitive ads and KandyKrush, and a bunch of Millenials™ will go back to creating financial derivatives, or will just be unemployed.
essyl's greatest potential lies in its Pryme display. What person wouldn't appreciate a simple indicator of how much water they should drink every day?
Me? If I'm thirsty, I drink something. This sentiment baffles me. I mean, I can think of some useful applications for this device (and many more for the underlying tech), especially sugar intake measurement, but assessing hydration level wouldn't even be on the list. Not least because it will in practice be dependent on things it can't measure.
I bet 24 is pretty universal here.
In honor of Kevin Drum, may peace and healthy lungs be upon him, I will mention that people being dehydrated but not knowing it is not the most common or pressing problem we face.
If I had to rank based on a not-very thought out system, I'd say the following incentive structures seem to have worked best in the 19th and 20th century for driving technological innovation, in this order:
1) intense military spending directed by a government
2) (big gap) spending by large regulated utility or gigantic monopolist
3) social spending by governments for non-military use
4) (big gap) small start-ups financed by venture capital hoping for liquidity events
It's not really clear in the abstract why (4) shouldn't be better than 1-3, but I'd say "spending time on figuring out how ads work" and "liquidity event" probably get you most of the way there.
Sounds kind of silly, but sounds kind of neat, too. I'm crap at counting calories, although it's usually easier to do with liquid. Hydration level is interesting because, while I do drink when I'm thirsty, I suspect I'm under- hydrating. There's space between "I feel thirsty" and "I'm sufficiently hydrated", most of it occupied by mildly grumpy people.
The "this is what our best and brightest are working on" is a strange argument to me. For ads, okay, sure--but this seems like it could have been a fun passion project (read the entire article? hardly.). Seconding 16.2--what the hell have I done?
venture capital hoping for liquidity events
Exactly what this device solves.
There's space between "I feel thirsty" and "I'm sufficiently hydrated", most of it occupied by mildly grumpy people.
No, there really isn't. Your thirst is an amazingly accurate indicator of your dehydration. Studies show!
I'm not so sure this isn't vaporware. Nutritional devices tend to be very popular for crowdfunding, like this almost-certainly-scam, or this likely one. How does something the size of a cup that costs $200 or less measure nutritional content? And why will the developer give no details about how it works?
32: I was wondering about that myself -- I have no technical sense of how this should work, but 'able to identify the nutritional makeup of your homemade smoothie' sounds pretty damn impressive, to the point of implausibility.
1) intense military spending directed by a government
2) (big gap) spending by large regulated utility or gigantic monopolist
Essentially the same thing in practice, since the large regulated utility/gigantic monopolist actors owed their freedom to experiment on their perceived strategic role.
4) (big gap) small start-ups financed by venture capital hoping for liquidity events
Are you basing this just on the dotcom boom or do you lump the prior few decades of venture-funded startups in here as well? Because, I dunno, I think personal computers (among other things) are pretty neat.
Which is to say I don't think your ranking is per se ridiculous (and I know it was essentially the concluding premise of the Bell Labs book) but I think it's very easy to underestimate the innovations produced by venture-funded enterprises, particularly if the exemplars you have available are, like, Facebook.
Also it's impossible to disambiguate the four in many cases; a huge number of venture-funded startups began as government-funded research projects, just to point out one link between the four.
I don't think a 13 ounce cup can keep you effectively hydrated.
Also, specifically when it comes to software, it really is not the case that incentives structures (1) and (2) (and certainly not (3)) have done a better job than (4), even in cases like large scale, fault-tolerant data distribution and management where they would seem to have an edge. In cases like consumer-facing software for accomplishing business tasks, needless to say, they hardly rate. (Although again disambiguation is hard, and presumably Walt or somebody will want to say "Xerox PARC!")
35: Not without something in it, at least.
... it occurs to me that I fell for Halford's trap and excluding what's probably the single most productive avenue for innovation, which is fucking around with something as a hobby. The reason that 1-4 actually work is that they are able to enable people to hopefully continue to eat while messing around with whatever side project they aren't actually supposed to be working on.
Never underestimate the power of somebody with access to resources they're supposed to be using for something else taking a flyer on something goofy that nobody seems likely to pay for!
30: the science of sport blogger guys have written a bit about it. Turns out, as you say, thirst is generally a very good indicator that you need water; "if you wait till you're thirsty it's too late" seems to be 99% marketing.
39: Melvyn Bragg points out sometimes on science episodes how much was achieved by people just working on their own, for its own sake, without expecting any commercial applications. Of course now with all the expensive equipment required that might not be as feasible, even if we had a minimum income (which was my first thought).
Of course now with all the expensive equipment required that might not be as feasible
I'm sure this is true in some fields but it is obviously not the case in software (which maybe is why working on things just to work on them is so productive in software).
I dunno, that cup would be pretty useful if you forgot whether the pellet with the poison was in the vessel with the pestle, and that the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true.
Maybe cheaper 3-D printing has move robotics into something where a hobbyist can make a real advance. Or maybe the plastic-printed bits are too weak to make even a useful prototype part. I don't know, but I want a 3-D printer and I can't imagine what I would use it for.
44: Would have ruined the iocane power scene in "The Princess Bride."
30/41: Huh! Now I'm trying to find real research on that, but there doesn't seem to be much space between incomprehensibly dense papers about blah blah ion uptake blah blah intercellular pressure and Huffington Post articles on this.
How does this hold with regard to caffeine consumption? If I don't balance out my coffee drinking with water, I do tend to feel grumpier--is there some other cause to that besides dehydration? Perhaps when I drink water I'm slowing down my coffee consumption, but I haven't measured that so I can't really say one way or another. (If only I had some sort of device to make this easy.)
42: One can only hope for a glorious future where we'll have a guaranteed minimum income and a guaranteed minimum lab time.
34 last -- I was thinking mostly of the relative rate of technological progress since, say, 1980, when the startup/VC model started to dominate over the others. And, the decline in that rate may have to do more with hitting technogical frontiers than incentive systems per se.
I do think (based only on profoundly simplified second or third hand reading, but still) that the declining rate of innovation is a real thing. And it's not like the VC model has done nothing; the personal computer is indeed pretty goddamn great, I use Facebook, I might use that cup if I ever drank anything other than water coffee wine and bourbon, etc., it's not nothing. Just that it pales in relative terms to the kinds of things governments militaries and gigantic private monopolies and near-monopolies were financing and developing between say 1875 and 1980.
44: Let's not forget the chalice from the palace.
46: Enh, cell phones have already ruined every other plot device. I guess in the future the switch-the-cups or poision-the-bottle trick will have to be replaced with a hack-the-vessyl scene.
I want a 3-D printer and I can't imagine what I would use it for.
Mine's good for collecting dust. Most temperamental machine I ever had to deal with. Also, the outputs aren't particularly useful, unless you have a thing for somewhat warped brick-bats made from weakly adhering plastic. I should have gotten a CNC router instead.
My cow-orker is obsessed with finding some way that 3D printing is a solution to one of our problems. It simply is not, but that does not prevent him from trying.
The coolest thing I've seen 3D printed is a 50 lb thrust regeneratively cooled rocket engine made by a guy I know through a mailing list. It's done in a copper alloy using selective laser sintering and only runs about $1000 per piece. With easy access to CAD software it's quite plausible to design complex parts and have them printed and shipped to your door. I think that's much more practical than having a printer yourself.
48: yeah, that's reasonable. My instinct is that we're too close to it to really be able to know; I feel like maybe people in the '70s thought the same thing about declining rates of innovation. But who knows.
it occurs to me that I fell for Halford's trap and excluding what's probably the single most productive avenue for innovation, which is fucking around with something as a hobby.
My general objection to the "the best minds of my generation . . ." complaint is that it considers incentives but not feedback loops, by which I mean this -- people want a variety of things in their life; money, social status, feeling of accomplishment (and getting to have their name on something cool), being able to work with interesting co-workers, being able to take time off and do interesting vacations, hobbies, etc . . . Any time a particular field becomes identified as the best way to pursue one of those goals, it's going to become crowded with people who value that goal above all others, and it's going to change the field.
If everyone thinks that finance is the best field for people who want a reliable way to make lots of money, then everybody who wants a reliable way to make lots of money will go into finance and that's just going to intensify the "we only care about making money" part of the culture.
If everybody thinks that government jobs are the best way to find a job which is boring but has great job security then the people who most care about boring jobs with good security will go into government work and it will make the culture even more risk averse and conservative.
Etc . . .
I don't think you're ever going to get away from having some (major) part of the economy be identified with self-serving greedheads, because there are always going to be greedheads, they have to go somewhere, and odds are that they will end up congregating in some sector.
Which is just to say that the challenge is to make it easier for people to do research, not to make it more difficult for people from Stanford to go work for banal start-ups.
Totally unrelated, but I want all of the it-feels-like-there-are-1-billion-of-them people from Pittsburgh to take this test. I scored "Tom Corbett" which seems pretty high since I only lived in the Pittsburgh area for six months 20 years ago.
With easy access to CAD software it's quite plausible to design complex parts and have them printed and shipped to your door.
This is part of the problem with the expectation that desktop 3D printing has a future.... CAD software is freaking expensive and the freely available options suck. You would think the makers of 3D printers would catch on to this and recognize that high quality, free design software is crucial to their ecosystem and its development needs to be subsidized if they want to have a viable market for their gizmos. But, so far, nothing.
Also, its true that the print and ship model is just better in terms of providing a useful end product. Glorified ink jet printers that spew plastic just don't compare in terms of print-quality and consistency.
30: the science of sport blogger guys have written a bit about it. Turns out, as you say, thirst is generally a very good indicator that you need water; "if you wait till you're thirsty it's too late" seems to be 99% marketing.
Since we inherently can only detect it in ourselves, I wonder if different people have different notions of the word "thirst". I often realize that the reason why I feel uncomfortable and sleepy is that I haven't been drinking enough water. Generally this is after I spend the last couple hours at work in a dreamlike state, and then go home and drink two glasses of water and feel much better. Maybe this is a feeling that some call "thirst", whereas to me it's just "Oh, I was dehydrated". My notion of "thirst" is something that only appears after an afternoon doing work in the hot sun.
59: Agreed. I've tried to make decent models in Google SketchUp but found it pales in comparison to something like SolidWorks.
Also 61 is me. I spend way too much time dehydrated just due to not recognizing thirst. I blame caffeine abuse.
Thirsty is when you have a headache and star seeing stars, right?
Do all you people work in offices without watercoolers? I mean, I drink water all day because it's an excuse to stand up and go get something.
Yeah, I've banged my head against SketchUp (which I believe is no longer a Google product) for far too long, only to have it produce output that is basically incompatible with the slicer software for my printer. Apparently there are some crazy plugins that you can use to change the output format to whatever the 3D printing standard is, but I couldn't get them to work and I shouldn't have to.
The water cooler in this place is a good 40 feet away.
Also its in the kitchen, where people hang out, and I'd rather not be around people if I don't have to.
39 is an excellent point. Doing what I do, I'm pretty limited to knowledge of software. But Linux, which now dominates Internet-facing machines and has a large and growing share of embedded device market, was an itch to scratch. FreeBSD and relatives thereof originally came from the Bell Labs code, but is now almost entirely unlike it. (It is true that the bulk of code submitted to both come from companies now.)
Large chunks of infrastructure software (SQL and noSQL databases, server daemons, version control, integration/change management/testing, configuration management, etc.) were built by individuals or small groups because they wanted a fix to a given problem. Of course, there is a life cycle to them; the ones that beat commercial competitors end up going at least optionally commercial, and I fear the world will never be rid of Oracle.
It is also true that there are limited domains wherein this works. I suspect a garage-biochem hacker is more likely to go to prison than go public, and amateur hacking on personal electronics currently seems to be in a bit of a count-footsteps/calories/turn on my lights pit.
58: 48/100, also Corbett, sadly. (And really, the stress in "Carnegie" is on the second syllable.)
61: Yeah...I was kind of wondering that. I don't know if "thirst" means "parched" or "meh i guess i feel like drinking water" or what; I often have that dreamlike state issue you mention.
and I fear the world will never be rid of Oracle.
As long as there are islands for a man to own there will be an Oracle.
I'd call myself thirsty if I'd drink water if there was a glass in front of me.
64: Thirsty is when you have a headache and star seeing stars, right?
Or that you've wandered into an old Warner Bros. cartoon.
65: We have a fridge with water in the door. I probably drink a glass of water every hour or so.
This is more generally about priorities because I don't have anywhere else to rant, but I had no idea McDonald's required 70 questions of "Does THIS or THIS describe you better?" in addition to your work history and supervisors' names for the last four years to be able to apply to be a cashier. I spent three-plus hours letting Rowan dictate to me so I could get him through some online applications and it would have taken him unbelievably greater amounts of time if his literacy was even up to being able to puzzle it all out. All this to work the cash register maybe someday!
(He also had me leave some food out for him to pick up last night and then texted to ask what it was. I just confirmed that nothing needed a fridge or stove/microwave since I know those aren't options, but I thought were were going to get into an ogged-like cheese placement request in which I'd have to explain that the thing about beggars and choosers does in fact apply, but he just got the food and left and I assume lived with it.)
I often have both water and coffee in front of me, as I do now. I usually drink the coffee, whose fluid-like properties might be tricking me.
wevs to studies show. Are all those studies done when people are distracted from the sensation of thirst by doing something else? I can easily get tired and depressed in a way that is always rectified by getting up and drinking some water (or, when appropriate, like if I've done more than an hour of sweaty exercise that day and then spend a lot of time sitting in the sun, some kind of electrolyte-containing drink).
I didn't post this and then was pwned by everyone else. So I guess I'm joining the chorus.
I'd rather have a glass in front of me than a frontal colostomy.
48: I do think (based only on profoundly simplified second or third hand reading, but still) that the declining rate of innovation is a real thing
This so massively triggers my "hey you kids who say 'hey you kids get off my lawn' get off my lawn" instinct that I don't even have words.
I wonder if different people have different notions of the word "thirst". I often realize that the reason why I feel uncomfortable and sleepy is that I haven't been drinking enough water. Generally this is after I spend the last couple hours at work in a dreamlike state, and then go home and drink two glasses of water and feel much better.
No, that's "boredom".
I used to drink from the fountain every time I got up to go to the restroom which would occasionally result in a feedback loop, but now they've installed these water conserving fountains and I have to wait with my mouth open for a minute before it's worth swallowing so I'm less well-hydrated these days.
I think the Renaissance showed that having massively corrupt city-states attacking their neighbors leads to the bestest innovation of all.
80: So it takes about a minute to filter out the bad parts of the pee?
78: well, it is true that we don't know, right. We'll only be sure that we've been continuing to innovate when the Singularity hits.
which would occasionally result in a feedback loop
Am I hallucinating, or did neB once post that he had contemplated the question of whether it was possible to drink continuously at such a rate so that one could also pee continuously?
I often realize that the reason why I feel uncomfortable and sleepy is that I haven't been drinking enough water. Generally this is after I spend the last couple hours at work in a dreamlike state, and then go home and drink two glasses of water and feel much better. Maybe this is a feeling that some call "thirst", whereas to me it's just "Oh, I was dehydrated". My notion of "thirst" is something that only appears after an afternoon doing work in the hot sun.
This seems backwards to me. If you realise you haven't been drinking enough water because you're having a physiological reaction, you are thirsty by definition (assuming, I suppose, this does actually make you want to drink water). There's no such thing as "I'm not thirsty, I'm just feeling dehydrated"*. Dehydrated is more severe than thirsty. Drinking is what you do when you're thirsty to avoid becoming dehydrated (and to assuage the feeling of thirst, obviously).
* Unless, I guess, you have some weird synaesthesia thing going on where you mistake thirst for something else like hunger.
* Unless, I guess, you have some weird synaesthesia thing going on where you mistake thirst for something else like hunger.
I know I'm thirsty when it feels like my ear is covered in ants.
85: At least for me, deciding I should drink water is often an after-the-fact thing. I don't have much desire to drink water, but I don't feel great. If I happen to drink water, because I eventually remember that this is something water sometimes fixes, I feel better, but it might not be for a very long time of being in that state (despite having water available). Is that thirst?
85 is what I was going to say. Aside from thirst-induced depression, 76 is how it's supposed to work.
85: I think people are talking about having a physiological response to being mildly dehydrated that for some reason doesn't motivate them to drink water -- the 'this set of sensations means I should drink something' response doesn't kick in until they're really, really dehydrated. I find this sort of peculiar, but people work how they do.
87 pwned by 85, and yes, that's thirst, you're just bad at it.
I got only slightly higher (55/100) but it was enough to tip me into the "Smithfield Street Bridge" category. It was pretty stupid. (Shockingly, why can't we innovate better online quizzes?)
If you get a headache because you haven't had enough to drink but don't feel parched-throat thirsty, I don't think most people would call that headache thirst.
People talk about 'low blood sugar' as distinct from hunger in the same way -- a malaise that's fixed by food, but doesn't make you spontaneously want to eat. I find that one mystifying too.
(The only response I have that's like this is caffeine craving. I drink coffee as a habit, and because it's pleasant, but if I don't get my morning coffee on schedule I'm hostile and headachy by eleven, and I have to deduce/remember that coffee is the problem. But the idea that real physiological needs would act that is strange to me.)
I must be pretty dense (like liquid water) to be pwned by what I was responding to. The "this actually does make you want to drink water" criterion isn't fulfilled.
As I recall from previous discussions, heebie is objectively anti-water.
I meant 89 pwned by 87. I was hypothesizing that you existed, and then you announced yourself before I commented on you as a possibility.
97: Ah, yeah. I haven't had much water, so reading between the lines is hard for me right now. Maybe I should go drink some.
97: Some people's thirst for rapid commenting is insatiable.
92: That's exactly my perspective. And it might not even be an absolute deficiency of water, but a relative deficiency of water in the presence of caffeine (or some other state change due to caffeine.)
96: It's kind of true! My vanity at not peeing myself while exercising exceeded my fear of dehydration, while doing ostensibly very dehydrating things in very hot weather, which then made me suspect the whole thing was a house of cards.
That said, I'm a very thirsty person and always go through several cups of water while I'm eating, so it's probably that I'm one with my super-zen-nonlinear-knowledge.
that's thirst, you're just bad at it
I love alt.unfogged.lifehacker.
Getting to a somewhat dehydrated state before everyone-would-call-it thirst kicks in seems fairly common with cold-conditions sports, at least judging by the advice I heard back when my response to cold weather was something other than sitting indoors doing nothing.
96: See this post and thread for instance. She can get real grumpy about it.
I guess what Dalriata, Tia, Togolosh and the rest of us view as "thirsty" is actually what professional athletes like Heebie would call "incredibly extremely thirsty".
The advice being to keep drinking even when you don't feel thirsty at all.
Anecdata, but my experience from a few backpacking/hiking trips where water availability was limited is that water is essential to life.
yes, that's thirst, you're just bad at it
Thirst describes for me the feeling of wanting or feeling like I need to ingest liquid. The state of dehydration people are talking about, where you identify the need for water from other symptoms, is a step removed from what I'd call "thirst." In that state I wouldn't say I drink water to quench my thirst, I drink water to stop being sleepy.
I'd call myself thirsty if I'd drink water if there was a glass in front of me.
By this definition, I'm not sure I've ever not been thirsty. I will always drink water if there is a glass in front of me, no matter how many I've already had to drink.
As one of the superior life-forms here who successfully gets mildly thirsty and drinks water because of it, have any of the rest of you desiccated piles of dust tried to purposefully interpret the physiological signals that you need to drink something as thirst, in the hope that your body will rebuild that connection? I mean, if you're sitting there feeling headachy, and the concept of a glass of water crosses your mind, does it sound good to you, or would you have to choke it down?
In conclusion, the greatest minds in tech should work on the what is thirst? problem.
Finally we learn urple's weakness, in case he ever goes rogue.
As a follow on to 109, I don't drink much (because glasses of water aren't often sitting in front of me), and am usually a bit dehydrated (if urine color is a reliable indicator of that).
109: Always thirsty! A man to my own heart!
110: Yes, I have tried. I would probably need to choke that glass of water down. At best I've been able to make a bit of a habit of it, but even that has been inconsistent.
I will always drink water if there is a glass in front of me, no matter how many I've already had to drink
Anyhow, I'm like the weirdos in that I have to semi-intentionally note that feeling sleepy or otherwise bad might be because I haven't had anything to eat or drink, but I am unlike the weirdos in that I tend to consume vast quantities of whatever, so I have generally had plenty of water and food at any given time.
So, for instance, my water cup here next to me is I think 32oz and I generally fill it up and immediately chug it a few times a day.
110: speaking only for myself, I love to drink water when it's available, but I can't reliably keep it available in sufficient quantities. If I could moderate my drinking, maybe it would work, but instead I just quickly drink whatever is in front of me and then I'm out again. I just drank 44 ounces (prompted by this thread, which made me think: huh, I haven't had anything to drink today, maybe I should go get a drink). When I'm done typing this comment I'll go drink 44 more ounces. Ibises have a secretary bring water, but getting up myself to get it is too hard to remember to do.
117: It's not unpleasant, it's just something I have to make myself do.
117: It's not unpleasant, it's just something I have to make myself do.
Ibises have a secretary bring water
Do they now.
120.last: They spend most of their time standing in water! How lazy can they be?
Is this breaking along gender lines? Count me among those who only has a very hazy sense of what "thirst" feels like. My water consumption is event and time-driven. Just exercised? Drink water. Been two hours since drinking water? Drink water. I mean, I can vaguely explain what hunger feels like: your stomach might growl, and it feels like acid is building in your stomach, or like your stomach is constricting around nothing, and it might be accompanied by fatigue, or a headache, or, more likely, frequent homicidal urges. Thirst? Yeah, sluggish, maybe headachy, but it's not an urge in the way hunger is.
Count me among those who only has a very hazy sense of what "thirst" feels like.
Has no one here been hungover?
Back sort of on topic, or at least on a topic discussed upthread, this book which discusses the IP issues relevant to the development of the torpedo is interesting and on point.
Look. Right here. This thing that I am pointing at. Bring me some.
127: If you eat enough grain products while drinking you don't get hungover. Didn't you know that?
I wonder if I'm incredibly in tune with my body (in that wanting water seems to me to be a reliable signal of when I need to drink something), or incredibly out of tune with it (in that I'm just failing to perceive the sluggishness and headaches that the rest of you interpret as signs of pre-thirst dehydration).
Doesn't matter, I suppose. Either way, I'm better than the rest of you.
hungover
This is a good point. I mean, I haven't been hungover in probably twenty years, but I do remember the feeling of being desperate for water. So maybe we're just so well hydrated that we've forgotten what thirst feels like. That's kind of amazing.
It turns out back-to-back refills of my water bottle, which I don't usually do, actually did make me not want to go back and fill it up a third time. (Although: I bet if it were filled up again and put down in front of me, I would still drink it.)
(Although: I bet if it were filled up again and put down in front of me, I would still drink it.)
One way to find out.
Just tell the Ibis's secretary to keep 'em coming.
One of the reasons I drink diet soda is that it's sweet and fizzy, so it's enough of a treat to motivate me to get up and obtain liquid. Water is not a treat. If I could get my act together I would make lemon cucumber water, which is a treat. In general, at work I drink enough soda/coffee/snapple/tea that I don't get dehydrated and depressed (in part because getting up and fetching it is a pleasant distraction). But if I'm in a place with no diet soda around, and I don't want to be distracted from what I'm doing, I can very easily get to the point where I'm then depressed enough that I'm too unmotivated to get up, and too addled and possibly feeling too bleak to rationally connect my feelings that I am sad about everything to the fact that I just need water. Eventually I remember, but I might have started crying before I do.
For extra motivation, maybe drop a hamburger in there.
137: it's a water bottle, not a fish tank.
136: Since artificial flavors seem to be what I crave the most, I've taken to using Mio* to spruce up my water.
*Five different flavors in my collection here at my desk!
Is this breaking along gender lines?
Doesn't seem like it, for once. It might be breaking down on athleticism/activeness lines.
Okay, in the name of science I filled it up again. I drank about half, but I'm not gulping the rest down; it's sitting on my desk and there's still water inside. I don't feel any more or less "thirsty" than usual; my stomach just feels uncomfortably full. I'm still taking sips mostly out of habit. I'm worried that I may make my self vomit if this continues much longer.
136: Huh. I wonder if habitually drinking non-water confuses people's thirst response. I pretty much drink water, coffee, and alcohol -- seltzer sometimes, and I'll have a soda or fruit juice a few times a year, but literally probably not once a month (this is a combination of being lazy, cheap, and snobbish in some idiosyncratic and badly defined way. Water comes out of faucets for, essentially, free). Maybe associating the feeling you get of quenching mild thirst with an interesting flavor makes it harder to recognize in general, or something?
136: If you don't get enough water, you break down crying? That's an addiction. You need to quit cold turkey.
Actually, if " thirst" is defined as a desire to drink water, then I do feel more thirsty than usual, but I'm feeling too full to drink much more, which is making me feel unhappy, like my thirst is unsatiated. I think I'm conditioned to feel thirsty in the presence of water and basically forget about it at other times.
141: Don't throw up or urinate. If you do, you'll get dehydrated.
142: I've always drunk a lot of plain ol' water, but recently this other crap has appealed to me over it. The diuretic portion of the BP medicine I've been taking since last Fall has led me to be bit more considered in continually slugging down the liquids. My BP may or may not be being effectively controlled but that part of it certainly seems to work as advertised.
Count me among those who only has a very hazy sense of what "thirst" feels like.
And he calls himself a Persian!
58: 68/100, Smithfield Street Bridge
2.5 things about water:
I drink water all day because I'm what AB calls a "recreational drinker"; when I'm at my desk or driving, I drink more or less constantly. Back in college, I drank at least 2 liters of soda a day, not for the caffeine, but to sort of pass the time. Now I strictly limit soda intake (I pay extra for those silly 100 calorie cans, because I can't stop at a single serving) and drink about a half gallon of water a day. As a result, I don't feel much in the way of thirst, and I almost never get hung over, because the baseline amount of hydration is ample to most any amount of drinking.
BUT, when I do drink a lot, that first sip - literally, just a sip - of water feels as if its instantly seeping into every dried-out cell of my body. By contrast, after, say, a long, hot bike ride, I want to guzzle some water (or sports drink), but it doesn't have that rehydrating feel. Therefore, I'd argue that the second feeling is what "thirst" means and the first is dehydration.
The other thing is that, according to this book I'm reading on the whaleship Essex, standard provisions for a sailor in the 19thC included 3 quarts of water... per week. Now, maybe these are quarts based on some other measure (the one that says pints are 20 oz?), but that's 96 oz. of water for 7 days' hard labor, mostly in the sun, and with salted meat as a major caloric source. That seems nothing less than insane (granting some amount of grog as well, but surely that was a few ounces a day at most). When I was a kid I probably drank at least a quart of liquids a day.
71 I'd call myself thirsty if I'd drink water if there was a glass in front of me.
By this definition I'm not sure I'm ever not thirsty.
urple-pwned. I should stop paying so much attention to writing a grant proposal and get more involved in this thread.
That seems nothing less than insane (granting some amount of grog as well, but surely that was a few ounces a day at most).
Nope. According to Wikipedia (with citation problems, but other web sources too), the rum ration from 1740 was a half pint a day, mixed with a quart of water, served half at noon and half at night, reduced further to a quarter-pint in 1823 (not sure how much water - one book says by then they could keep water fresh much longer) with tea and cocoa added to rations.
I know what it feels like to be thirsty, because I have travelled and lived in Europe where american standards of liquid intake are essentially impossible.
148.last: I don't know about whaleships, but on the ships of the Royal Navy in around that time, there was also a massive beer ration. (Rum was not normally issued except on West Indian service, where you could get hold of it a lot more easily). In home waters, you got, per day:
1lb ship's biscuit
4 lb beef
2 lb pork
2 lb peas
1½ lb oatmeal
6 oz sugar
6 oz butter
1 gallon (yes, 1 gallon) of beer.
4 pounds of beef and 2 pounds of pork per day?
No wonder they conquered the world.
The problem with headaches from being slightly dehydrated is they don't go away when you drink a big glass of water. I'm always mystified by people who say "oh, I don't take aspirin. I prefer to figure out what's giving me the headache" (no, seriously, lots of people say this.) Headaches go away under exactly one condition, which is taking a goddamn headache pill, in my experience as a slightly headachey person. I mean a person who gets headaches, though the other reading is possibly also true.
Anyway, if I were going to wrap everything up in a grand explanation, I'd go with: for all sorts of socio-cultural reasons, we tend to be pretty disconnected from our bodies' needs, and so we don't do a great job of "hearing" what our bodies want, whether it's water or protein or some specific nutrient. Part of my evidence is the cravings of pregnant women, some of which (allegedly) tie pretty directly to things that are useful for pregnancy. I know there's a lot of EvPsych and What To Expect BS around this, but I think the underlying premise - that our bodies tell our brains to crave things they need - isn't a big stretch.
In a society of abundance, it's hard to correlate our desires (junky snack X sounds good right now) with our needs (maybe junky snack X contains the thing our body craves, or maybe it's just associated with that thing).
152: Ugh, yes. I tend to go to convenience stores at least once a day to buy giant water bottles when traveling.
In China it seemed like one was supposed to get a large fraction of one's hydration from soup consumed at meals.
I had soup dumplings yesterday. They were delicious, but I still needed a drink with it.
151, 153: I went back and checked, and I misread the passage. It's a quote from an older book, and the phrasing is awkward:
The average allowance, in merchant vessels, is six pounds of bread a week, and three quarts of water, and one pound and a half of beef, or one and a quarter of pork, a day, to each man."So the 3 quarts is daily, only the bread is weekly. Infinitely more sense.
To 155, the author elsewhere notes that, in the late 19C, sailors were estimated to burn 3800 calories/day.
153 needs to be made into a fad diet. Or at least a Vice article.
The problem with headaches from being slightly dehydrated is they don't go away when you drink a big glass of water.
Probably the best hangover cure is preventative: go to bed only after a big glass of water and some Advil. In theory you'll out sleep the effects of the Advil, but better safe than sorry.
4 pounds of beef and 2 pounds of pork per day?
Ah. No, sorry. Per week.
Sample menu:
1 gallon beer and 1 lb biscuit per day, plus:
Sunday 1 pound pork, ½ pint peas
Monday 1 pint oatmeal, 2 ounces butter
Tuesday 2 pounds beef
Wednesday ½ pint peas, 1 pint oatmeal, 2 ounces butter, 4 ounces cheese [known as a banyan-day after the high-caste Hindus, who didn't eat meat]
Thursday 1 pound pork, ½ pint peas
Friday 1 pint oatmeal, 2 ounces butter
Saturday 2 pounds beef
162: so pretty much what the Royal Navy got, more or less, minus the beer.
161 I had soup dumplings yesterday.
Wait, are there decent xiaolongbao in Pittsburgh? If so I might have to start an active "please hire essear and his girlfriend" campaign at the universities there.
I don't know what xiaolongbao is, but there's this new place. Maybe it's not very new anymore, but Sunday was my first time there. It's BYOB. Anyway, it was great dumplings.
167: Everyday Noodles has a menu almost entirely comprised of freshly in-house made noodles and dumplings. You sit there and watch the noodle chefs stretch and cut them; it's awesome.
When they make the noodles, they have to beat them against the counter. Your sitting there eating and all of a sudden, "Whap!".
168: the first character for what they call "Pork Soup Dumplings" is definitely "xiao" (little). So I think so. They have four characters there so I'm not quite sure what it says but I think it must be the right thing.
Is "xiaolongbao" Chinese for "whap"?
Anyway, about twice a year, something in my neighborhood closes and reopens as some type of Asian restaurant. I'm still waiting for one that does General Tso's Chicken with fries on top.
171: Theirs is 小籠湯包 Xiǎo lóng tāng bāo, where tang means soup.
173: I'm curious to what Curry on Murray (Thai right now) will become next. Something I forget -> BBQ -> Israeli -> Thai. I would guess Vietnamese, given the general eastwards advance, but there's already a pho place across the street.
Tang is a sweet, orange-flavored instant soup.
Actually, that block has Chinese (two places), Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian of some sorts, and Burmese/pan-Asian. Korean's the next block up, and that place used to be Thai/Filipino fusion. Maritime Southeast Asia and Laos need to step up their game.
161 well then why didn't you order the Ramos Gin Fizz dumplings, too?!
They don't have those, probably because of not having a liquor license.
176: And a used bookstore, as of last week.
179: Woah! I'll have to check that out, we've been bookstoreless (and particularly used-bookstoreless) for far too long.
The bookstore keeps Orthodox hours. Don't go on a Saturday.
Seriously, I've been really pleasantly surprised by what little I've seen of Pittsburgh.
That makes it sound like you're relieved that you've dodged the rest.
If essear and essearetta got Pittsburgh jobs, I would be back in a heartbeat for a meetup. Hell, we could do a meetup at each of the places dalriata and Moby just mentioned and I'd be game. Possibly I'm hungry, but doing okay on the thirst front.
Have you see the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle? It's been featured in a Buzzfeed quiz.
184: Not a BYOB place. I have standards.
183: Uber drivers don't take you there.
New drinking game for me: every time someone mentions thirst, drink. It's helping.
186: Didn't you almost BYOArby's when I was there? I'm sure you do, though, and that they're reasonable ones.
A meetup at a BYOB place would involve an impressive amount of BYO. "Where can I stash this case of bitters?"
Oh, and what's the Burmese/pan-Asian place?
Moby, congratulations for successfully making another thread about Pittsburgh. Up for taking on the World Cup thread tonight?
190: Zaw's. (I supposed I should have also mentioned that it's a greasy spoon and highly Americanised, but.)
Ah, I've never even considered going in Zaw's.
I think the Curry space was a high end Kosher bakery before the BBQ (separate from the subsequent Israeli place). But it's been a lot of turnover to keep track of.
Zaw's is pretty good. Just have somebody else get carryout and bring it to you if you're the sort who get picky, aesthetically-speaking.
It's run by a Burmese family that I think has been in Pittsburgh for decades. Their coconut chicken curry is pretty good, and their regular Americanised Chinese food is good for that niche. But yeah, if you have more highfalutin tastes, makes sense to stay away. The inside is coated with a permanent layer of congealed wok smoke.
It would be great food for when you're drunk, except that it closes before most people get drunk.
The best minds of your generation can't figure out if they are thirsty. Also can't decide where to go for dinner.
136: Huh. I wonder if habitually drinking non-water confuses people's thirst response. I pretty much drink water, coffee, and alcohol -- seltzer sometimes, and I'll have a soda or fruit juice a few times a year, but literally probably not once a month (this is a combination of being lazy, cheap, and snobbish in some idiosyncratic and badly defined way. Water comes out of faucets for, essentially, free). Maybe associating the feeling you get of quenching mild thirst with an interesting flavor makes it harder to recognize in general, or something?
As an anecdatum, this definitely isn't true for me. I drink almost no water, qua water, but I drink a pint or two of milk a day, a pint of fruit juice, and three of four cups of coffee. And I drink when I get thirsty, well before any symptoms of dehydration kick in.
I drink a pint or two of milk a day
And I just assumed that someone named Ginger Yellow had to be Asian.
Did you know that "Ogged" backwards is almost "Diego"?
204: We all know that "Ogged" backwards is a dated slur for Italians.
Unfogeid backwards is Diego Fnu. Which makes no sense, because "Fnu" means "first name unknown", not last name.
Alternative view; if someone is spending all day on click bait ads, then in all probability, click bait ads are likely to be their level. Even if they did get a fancy degree. It used to be investment banking where the missing cure for cancer or gravity wave detector was hiding and nope, not there either. People like Michael Lewis want you to believe that only the most godlike of geniuses can run a magic stock trading "algorithm" but actually no, they're generally reasonably competent telecoms programmers who happened to be in the right place at the right time and to be able to learn a set of stock exchange order matching conventions off by heart.
If these assholes are such mediocre minds, why do they get paid so much money by the other assholes?
Also, Wall Street is almost entirely staffed by Ivy Leaguers (IIRC this has always been somewhat true, but the effect really intensified during the '00s). Granted, not every Ivy Leaguer is a potential cancer curer, but is Wall Street so discerning that they only hired the worst and the dimmest? Should the bottom 10% of Harvard students* simply be set adrift on open rafts for the betterment of mankind?
*as determined by desirability to Wall Street recruiters, obvs
Granted, not every Ivy Leaguer is a potential cancer curer, but is Wall Street so discerning that they only hired the worst and the dimmest?
I think it's perfectly feasible that almost none of the qualities of a good Wall Street banker are also qualities of a good cancer curer. Human intellects are multi-dimensional - there isn't a linear scale from godlike beings who can compose symphonies and cure cancer and understand the rules of cricket and engage in witty conversation at one end, right down to insanitary protoamphibians at the other.
I would like to be a leaping frog or a powerful Komodo dragon, if we're ordering humanity that way.
How about a lord a leaping? How would you feel about that?
I don't know how to say this in terms of pet store metaphors, but Lee just accepted a job at the most prestigious university around us. She still hasn't settled her lawsuit, but this gives her the means and opportunity to do so. I've been carrying so much stress since she lost the job two years ago and suddenly I feel so much better.
That's fantastic! Congrats to here and you!
Wow! Congratulations.
I've been carrying so much stress since she lost the job two years ago and suddenly I feel so much better.
I can imagine. That's a rough situation.
215 is fantastic news. Must be a huge load off both your minds.
Woohoo, Lee! I'm bad with ranking your local universities by prestige, but is the difficulty with the pet-store metaphor that the relevant sports mascot is some kind of nightmare ursofelinoid horror?
220: It's the place that you'd think would be in FL but isn't, and we both correctly remembered their dull-but-no-longer-racist mascot.
222: It was a university before that place was a state.
Also to 220: There's a relatively cute(/uglycute) baby ursofelinid horror at the zoo, but I wouldn't want to spend time with a bigger one.
Congratulations, Lee! Congratulations, Thorn!
Ooh! That uni's most famous alumnus is a famous football player/unindicted rapist! Also, a good colleague of mine went there, but I think he's less famous by most standards.
222: Lee is working for Apostropher?
230: I'm still racist where it counts.
229: An actual president of the United States is an alum. Granted, not a very famous one.
208: I never said they were mediocre minds; an average quality telecoms developer is a bloody clever guy. But it's not an industry that rewards creative geniuses. It rewards people with a capacity to absorb and process a huge amount of detail, quickly, and then reproduce and apply it, accurately. Which is why it recruits from top universities. The kind of people who do well in banking have exactly the skill set of people who are good at passing exams, plus the interpersonal skills of purple who are good at interviews. But creative geniuses at things like physics and chemistry do, by and large, physics and chemistry, because they don't have the tolerance for slog and grind that we do. The scientists you find in banks are the builders of experimental equipment and preparers of purified reagents, not the eureka types.
Re: 235
That almost exactly describes the skill set of the better academic devs, too. Except not as good, as the academic world pays (much) less, and the work is less challenging. But the basic description rings true.
235: Fair enough. FWIW, I never really thought that Wall Street was stealing the Jonas Salks, but I still think it's likely that, given how little net value financial innovation has created for society, it's probably a suboptimal application of resources to have so many of the best and brightest in it. We've discussed the same thing in terms of corporate lawyers - brilliant minds, vast expertise, mostly engaged in a stalemate race against each other, and the only time they're not engaged in essentially positional competition* is when they're screwing over the little guy or the commonwealth.
Krugman always talks of the good old days when being a banker was boring; paid well, and you had to know your stuff, but it was basically a workaday kind of job. Is that a false ideal?
*that is, Apple v. Samsung could be argued by a bunch of mediocre lawyers, but once Apple hires better ones, Samsung has to as well, until they've bought the cream of the crop, none of which affects the underlying facts. I'm not arguing that any moron with a JD could litigate the case, but simply that hiring better lawyers is about keeping up with the competition, not with any absolute value added
creative geniuses at things like physics and chemistry do, by and large, physics and chemistry, because they don't have the tolerance for slog and grind that we do
It was all sounding really plausible right up to the point where you suggested that scientific research didn't involve years of painstaking effort. If anything, I would guess, you need more of an attention span and tolerance for grind in research; there aren't many bankers who spend years of their lives putting together a single deal.
Sorry if this is already in the thread, which I haven't read...
What was the name of the bond from The Bonfire of the Vanities?
