I'm not Dr Ong, by the way. I'm Doctor Bongwater.
https://twitter.com/DrBongwater
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I'm not Dr Ong, by the way. I'm Doctor Bongwater.
https://twitter.com/DrBongwater
So is your mum happy now she didn't go on the cruise?
She's not dwelling on it. It's not all bad, it was pretty expensive and they've been refunded, so they have extra money. It's a shame for my Stepdad, his 60th birthday will be in lockdown.
Don't be such a drama queen. His 60th birthday would have been spent alive anyway.
It'd be a week or two before shit got real.
Another child star ruined by drugs and alcohol.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVy-64LW...jpg&name=small
South Korea and China have both dismissed claims he's gravely ill, but haven't denied he has had heart surgery. I would be more inclined to listen to those two countries where NK is concerned, rather than USA.
He's in his twenties though, no? What is he having heart surgery for? I know he's a big fat fuck, but stilll - smells like a coup to me.
Well this isn't the first time he's disappeared and people thought there was a coup. He turned up after 40 days with a cane, and people speculated that he had gout.
He's 36, by the way. Yes, quite young to be having heart trouble, but not out of the question, especially when we're talking about, as you so poetically put it, a big fat fuck.
Failed coup that resulted in him needing a cane? Viable.
How many circles in this image?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV8_1x9X...jpg&name=small
Guy is in a coma about to die and the world only cares about what is going to happen to his mostly dysfunctional nukes.
Ho Jack, hope you're well.
Source for coma claim?
Lots of speculation on Twitter but can't find anything solid.
China sent a medical team to help KJU.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-n...-idUSKCN2263DW
Well if Twitter is to be believed, they should send a coroner and an undertaker.
Chess is just a two player Rubik's cube; fight me.
1. e4
Both games are tedious and I don't have the patience for either.
Rubik's cubes are tedious, but chess is wonderful. Wash your mouth out.
Mouthwash is a marketing scam.
The word Halitosis was made up by the Listerine company to fabricate something that sounded bad. It means "bad breath." Then they marketed the hell out of their mouthwash as though bad breath is a medical condition. It's not. It could be the result of a medical condition, like tooth decay, but that's a whole separate issue.
OK, so what? It was marketed well, but what if it's actually beneficial?
Is mouthwash good for oral hygiene?
It's really hard to find good info on this. There's been enough of an internet argument about it that there are "expert" opinions on both sides of the debate.
As best I can surmise, rinsing your mouth after brushing and flossing is of obvious benefit. Whether there is benefit to using anything more than water to do so is a questionable claim. In some circumstances, like after oral surgery or any time there's an open wound in the mouth, dentists recommend not using alcohol-based mouthwash, but to use saline water.
(However, long-term use of saline water can weaken the enamel (?) or something. Sounds dubious. Salt is key to our diet. I'd like to see the data on that one.)
Mouthwashes love to claim they're anti-bacterial, but so is saliva, so it's a moot point.
Probably if you are trying to be healthy, there are better ways to spend your money than on mouthwash. If you are just trying to follow social norms and have minty breath, then there's no harm in using mouthwash.
My current understanding is that mouthwash is a scam too.
Saline water is a lot more saline than our saliva afaik. Not sure how it would erode enamel though. It's not like it's acidic. Maybe they meant brushing with it, where it can be gritty like baking soda? Dunno.
My grandpa took a shot of whiskey every night before bed. He lived to 92. He also had all his original teeth, though they were pretty worn down. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal though obv.
At the risk of poking a sleeping bear, some people would argue it's a fact that mouthwash has medical benefits. Some of those people might even be dentists. Poop you could very easily have not known better and taken issue with mojo's claim, citing "experts".
Mojo just presented us with a great example of how even "experts" can get it wrong.
Is there where I'm supposed to say everything I think I know about CV deaths and what works in slowing the spread of infectious disease in a population is wrong?
Well I wouldn't know if you're wrong or not, but even experts can get it wrong. So unless you're an expert expert, then you should at least consider the thought.
By "experts" I meant all of the various titles of dental doctors, oral surgeons, and other professional tooth people.
There are strong opinions on both sides of this one, by seemingly equally qualified experts.
Seemingly is the operative word here I think. Kind of like how many of the early global warming deniers were meteorologists. Experts on local short scale weather patterns, but with no expertise in climate.
I used to have gum swelling here and there and this stopped completely when I started rinsing my mouth daily with listerine about a year ago. I have other anecdotal evidence as well that it works, so it's good enough for me.
The wildlife taking over the exclusion zone at Chernobyl is mostly unaffected by the radiation there.
The effects of radiation poisoning in humans due to the substances still left in the exclusion zone today takes about 30 - 60 years to cause serious problems.
This is because the radioactivity left has half-life on the order of about 30 years.
Animals smaller than humans don't live that long, and die of natural causes before the radiation poisoning can kill them.
Surely it would be a great place to build a town for old people to retire to. If it's safe for regular people to visit for a day, tourism would be huge and would easily pay for the best retirement home on the planet.
Working there might be a problem. I guess you'd have to be 50+ and be well paid.
lol
I've started playing again during lockdown (I'm better than people that know how all the pieces move, but I'm very very not good), and I do enjoy it, but I guess the fact that it's essentially solved (at the highest levels) puts a damper on the fun. It's like Truman saying he wants to be an explorer when he grows up and the teacher pulls down the world map and explains that everything has already been discovered. Playing chess is like going off into a forest preserve and larping as an explorer-- it's fun, but, you know, you're still larping.
Chess is solved, whether mouthwash works or not is still a mystery.
Chess is solved? News to me.
Closed system game is solvable. Multivariate-based efficacy of minty alcohol on vaguely-defined health variable unsolvable.
I made a couple small imgur albums from my vacation.
Here's the lamp I had shipped home.
https://imgur.com/a/pYvmYPC
Here's a 7 picture album of some of the varied outdoor architecture and sights.
https://imgur.com/a/ZmCjRXJ
Oh ok. I mean solved and solvable are different things, but I see your point. Chess won't be solved until we have quantum computers, though. And AI might be able to solve the mouthwash problem one day, who knows? At the very least it will give us a mouthwash that is actually beneficial.
Dubai looks amazing, I'd love to take a walk around with a spliff and a woman showing her ankles.
That looks really cool; I'd love to have one of those.
That's pretty cool too. If you like whacky architecture, you'd love Barcelona.
https://www.barcelona.com/barcelona_...audi_barcelona
It would have to solve it differently for every person, and the solution would change over time due to physiological conditions of each person changing - e.g., diet, age, etc.. So, while it may be 'solvable' in some sense, it's not solvable in a practical sense. The best we could hope for practically is to determine some average and range of benefits/costs for a population.
There's only 7 billion people in the world. That number is so fucking puny compared to the number of potential chess positions. Solving mouthwash should be a walk in the park in comparison.
A future computer should be able to give a solution for every person on demand. Just add DNA sample and maybe a shit sample.
The number of variables that make up a single person's health profile, in small or large ways, is itself immense. Take blood clotting for example: being a 'clotty' person is good for you if you have a cut, bad if you have heart disease. How clotty you are depends on all kinds of things: genetics, short-term and long-term diet, smoking, how well your pancreas controls your blood sugar, how well your liver works at removing toxins, how well your digestive sytem extracts different pro- and anti-clotting nutrients out of the food you eat, and probably a fuckton of things I've never even heard of. And that's just one function your body has among hundreds or thousands.
Factor in the interactions between all these functions, the higher order interactions, and the even higher order interactions, and you get combinatorial explosion of thermonuclear proportions. It's basically unsolvable because even if you know all the numbers to input into the equations, by the time you calculate the answer, the input numbers and hence the answer will have changed.
tldr; it's complicated. Most medical research is not about finding out what works for you, Ong, but about what works for the average person and hoping it works for you too.
I guess, and I don't doubt you're right that it explodes into actual large numbers rather than numbers we can get our puny heads around, but believe me, chess does to. And while diet and all these individual factors play important roles, much of it is similar between person to person. Although chess has the same simplicity in that most of the "potential" positions are not actually likely, for example nobody will deliberately give up their queen immediately, so why even bother analysing the 10^whatever positions where that happens? Same with humans and all these factors, really. Maybe one person eats dog shit sandwiches and mouthwash won't be solved for them any time soon, but most people eat potatoes, or rice. So yeah I get that it might not be 100% solved for everyone, but for 99%+ it will.
Maybe you're right though, maybe chess is easier for a computer to deal with because despite it's insane complexity, it's really very simple.
yeah, chess has combinatorial explosion as well, but is still a limited system. Your possible moves on any given turn is limited unless you play on a board with infinite squares. And like you say, a lot of the possible moves are provably dumb.
But, you can eat a wide range of viable foods that won't make you sick right away, and it makes a difference to your health, because the person eating only 100g of (say) potatoes or rice a day is eating more g of other things than the same-sized person eating 400g potatoes/rice a day. If person A is just eating the potatoes as his main veg, and B is eating 300g of lettuce instead, and C is eating 300g of tomato sauce, they all differ in what vitamins/minerals they get as well carbs/fats/proteins.
And person D can eat exactly what C eats and be affected differently, because of genes, age, etc.. And E does it and is affected differently because he has diabetes, F has poor digestion cause he's stressed out over his bitch wife, G is lacking some enzyme or other due to a childhood fever that damaged his intestines, H is vitamin D deficient cause he lives in Iceland, I puts a lot of salt on his food and so has high blood pressure, but J does the same thing and his blood pressure is fine for some reason, K is a binge drinker and his liver is poor, L has a good liver but a bad cardiovascular system, M lives at high altitude, N takes a sauna everyday, O never exercises but P exercises every day, Q fries his potatoes in oil, R has them baked with sour cream and chives, S smothers them in butter, T coats them in vinegar. U eats kebabs three times a week, V eats a lot of bananas and has high potassium levels, W forgot to buy milk this week and is drinking water instead, X remembered milk and drinks skimmed, Y drinks it partly skimmed, Z never drinks milk at all.
That's all just scratching the surface.
The spliff would be difficult. I didn't see or smell any spliffs the entire week.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure where there's people, there are spliffs. It's just that I didn't see or smell any of them in any of the places I was.
I mean, there's no smoking indoors, and when outdoors, it's best to look for a designated area, but I spent almost all my time in touristy areas. You can't just casually stroll down the sidewalk with a cigarette, so doing it with a spliff would definitely stand out. However, if you stood next to an ashtray and did it... maybe.
The woman / ankles is no problem. Women in sandals was a common sight.
I don't have any pictures, really. We were cautioned that if we took a picture of someone without their permission and they reported it, we could have our camera (phones) confiscated. Almost all of my vacation shots look like there's no one within about 50 feet of us, but that wasn't the norm except when taking a photo.
That said, there was obvious anti-photo bombing going on. People would walk around instead of straight through the shot or stop entirely and wait until we were done taking the photos.
IDK. Do people do that in the UK? We don't do it in the US.
My gal and I were repeatedly warned not to hold hands or make affectionate physical contact of any kind when in public. BUT the more public the place, the more tourists there were, the more common it would be to see couples holding hands or linked arms or otherwise doing what we were told not to do.
It's a Muslim state, sure, but it's also a major tourist city.
They have the full range of American fast food restaurants. They sell hot dogs in gas stations.
I can see your point. But I read somewhere that the number of potential chess positions is so ludicrously large that there are more than there are atoms in the observable universe. In fact, there's a googol positions for every atom in the universe. Whether that's true or not, I can't know, it's a ridiculous concept. But a google multiplied by the number of atoms is the definition of an imperial fuckton. So the "scratching the surface" thing applies to chess, too.Quote:
That's all just scratching the surface.
In both cases, we're talking about such large numbers that we can't even begin to comprehend them, let alone compare them.
mojo, smoking spliffs is definitely a huge problem in UAE. I was perhaps being a little dramatic with the ankles comment, I appreciate UAE is a lot more western-friendly than, say, Saudi Arabia, but it's still very easy for a liberal minded westerner to get into trouble. I'd love to go, but I never will.
We're mostly polite, so if we see someone taking a photo, we try to avoid being in shot. But we also have a certain sense of humour, so photobombing is definitely a thing here too.Quote:
IDK. Do people do that in the UK? We don't do it in the US.
Regarding fake old buildings: Many European cities whose architecture looks hundreds of years old actually are ~70 years old. They were rebuilt after WWII in a concerted effort to "save" what was lost in the mass air raids.
Funny thing is, I found it in a cute little Egyptian souk where I was literally handed off from merchant to merchant like I was being introduced to my own distant relatives.
The first one of them sat me down and gave me a cup of tea and we talked for 10+ minutes about perfumes and herbal medicines before I could make it very clear that I had no interest in either. He got me talking about what I was interested in, and before you know it, I'm off to meet cousin Ahmed 2 shops down.
Ahmed sells other stuff that I'm about to learn all about before I realize he doesn't have what I'm looking for, either. Not before buying some chocolate made from camel's milk, first. Besides, Ahmed had baskets of colorful and pungent smelling spices sitting outside his shop that I had too much interest in for someone not buying, IMO. Kinda guilted myself into the chocolate purchase. (It tastes like normal chocolate, BTW)
3 merchants later, I finally find the guy selling the lamps. Lol. If I was in a hurry, it'd have been tedious, but it was actually really fun. I even had the nerve to haggle the guy over the price and talked him down from 1,200 to 1,100 AED from his first ask. I know it's nothing, but as a westerner who'd never haggled before, I was proud of my first go at it.
Here's the kicker.
On the last day we're there, we head to a big, touristy mall and into one of their kitsch shops to pick up useless tat souvenirs for all the awesome people we've been missing for the past week.
I saw my lamp.
Same one.
For ~$14 less than I'd already paid for it.
I thought I'd found this unique item, but no... it's available in the touristy mall kitsch shop.
*le sigh*
:lol:
Geez. If it's available in the kitsch shop, it's probably widely available. And whatever they're asking for in a mall is more expensive than elsewhere, so...
lol again.
Whatever. I truly love it. It cost me over $300 to buy it, and then I had to ship it home. It was stupid, but damn if it isn't just amazing. The metal is heavy and the globes are glass, so it's not like it's poorly made. (OK, the wire splicing is ugly, but not unsafe, and not visible, so meh.)
It still smells like the incense they burned in that Egyptian souk where I bought it and whenever I get close to it I am reminded of the whole experience.
That one building that looks like it's out of some Lord of the Rings elven village is cool, for sure.
This is mostly how it is here too, but I hate it. If there's foot traffic, then either be patient or pick a better spot that doesn't require strangers to participate in the dumb forced composition of your dumb photo. You're going to die, you're not posting new content, so people will never look at your Instagram again, and your cellphone is locked so no grandkid of yours will stumble upon the equivalent of an old leather bound album and take a walk down your uneventful memory lane. Go fuck yourself.
Yeah I mean my politeness only extends so far. I live in a touristy town, and we have people standing in the middle of the pavement taking photos of old buildings, while locals are trying to get about. Fucking imbeciles. And if you don't get out of shot, they look at you like you're the cunt. The best thing you can do is to pull a stupid face as you walk past in the hope it gets captured. It's not as fun in the digital age, since they can view the image immediately and delete it, but it's still amusing.
At sleep away camp when everyone had disposable film cameras, we'd grab kid's while they were sleeping and take a picture of our naked butts or our junk. It's the greatest punchline that you only got to enjoy in your imagination: some poor kid's parents develop their kid's roll of film expecting to see fishing and tug of war and archery, and instead they get a bunch of pre-teen cocks and butts.
Haha, yeah I had a similar experience in Istanbul where a young guy approached me in a plaza near the Hagia Sofia and started talking to me about it and then turned the conversation around to rugs and then took me to his uncle's rug store and blah blah blah'd me for about 15 minutes about rugs and I didn't want a rug anyways so I never bought one.
Probably get reported to the police in today's age. And the cops would probably arrest a 14 y/o boy for it and give him a good talking to at the station. I miss the 80's, life was so much simpler. I'm really glad I went to school at a time when everyone didn't have digital cameras.
I think it would be much worse than "a good talking to"
I'll admit, it's a supremely vulgar thing to do, but I also can enjoy the memory from my juvenile perspective. In other words, I think there are a lot of things people shouldn't do, but it's good that they can do them and mostly get away with them.
Pre-teens should be forgiven for acting their age. But nowadays, there's always at least one person going all arrrrrggghgh about anything even remotely out of line.
Ah, the good old carefree days when you could expose your junk in public.
Damn kids and their rock music.
I've been living in Dubai for several years and it exists but is very rare, because the UAE is basically a police state. The CID has snitches everywhere, to crack down on radicals but everything else too. But some Africans do manage to bring it in. Street value is about 500 dirhams or $135 per gram.
£135 per gram holy fucking shit, that's around £100 and is basically how much cocaine costs here. If I were to buy a gram of weed, I'd expect to pay £10, but if I buy in bulk which I usually do then it's cheaper.
You're paying that price in UAE for the massive risk the dealer is taking relative to the UK. The likely sentence here for small scale weed dealing is 6 months litter picking and a fine. In UAE you're doing years in prison. There was a drum and bass DJ from England who did a few months in prison for having a blim stuck to his shoe.
Also it's probably imported, most likely from Africa. That increase the price. But $135. Wow.
I don't think a 14 y/o will get prosecuted for taking a pic of his junk in the same shot as a sleeping teenager. Maybe if it went viral they might make an example out of him, but still, a 14 y/o shouldn't get a permanent record for it. But expelled from school might be a realistic punishment, which is worse than a talking to, so you're probably right.
Yeah. Kids going through puberty are naturally going to act in sexually weird ways. Even at 14 you know you can't force yourself on people, kids that age have to have this moral position enforced on them, but what we're talking about here is just inappropriate fun. Sometimes it does drift into serious behaviour, and that has to be dealt with, but you've definitely got to cut a kid more slack than an adult when it comes to this kind of behaviour.
NPR voice is worse than vocal fry, fight me.
Still no word on whether Kim Jong Un is dead or alive. Cue Shrodinger jokes.
Given that there is no credible news source out of NK, I regard all of that as tabloid rumors until something substantive comes out.
Even if he dies... he's not the president, he's the chairman of the party. The president is still Kim Jong Il, who is famously dead. Death isn't that big a handicap inside the hermit kingdom.
The fat fuck is back!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi...medium=custom7
Thank fuck for that, I haven't been sleeping well worrying about him.