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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.


  • It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

    I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.









  • “Inconvenience” would be the verb for causing an inconvenience. So in the sentence you’re going for, “inconvene” would have to be replaced with the passive “be inconvenienced” (“we’ve gotta be inconvenienced and grovel to google a bit”). I don’t believe we have a separate word for “endure an inconvenience”, although it seems like the kind of thing some languages might have a single word for. Stylistically I’d probably restructure the sentence to “we’ve gotta put up with the inconvenience” rather than just using the passive verb, but yeah.

    I think you’d most often see this verb in the stock phrase “Sorry to inconvenience you”.



  • If you’re in a state that you know will vote exactly the way you would (by such a large margin that it can do it even if everyone thinking like you stays home), check what local candidates and propositions and such are on the ballot and whether there are any of those where your voice needs to be heard.

    Of course, the answer might still be no - I’ve sat out elections in the past where I could see that my vote on every issue would just be running up the score on the side that had already won (and this did turn out to be correct). But it’s worth checking just to be sure. There’s more to elections than just congress and president.




  • randomsnark@lemmy.mltoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldHow to recognize words
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    8 months ago

    Another commenter pointed out that if you induce this through repetition it’s called semantic satiation, but the more general case is known as jamais vu. It sounds like yours isn’t caused by semantic satiation. Brains are weird and often do things like this for completely benign reasons or no reason at all. Having said that, Doctor Google (who we all know not to trust) suggests causes can include epilepsy or migraine.

    In any case, it might be worth looking into, if it’s something that’s causing difficulties for you. In general if it’s some specific medical cause a neurologist would be the relevant specialist but your primary care physician or general practitioner would be your first port of call and might be able to recommend further course of action.






  • Talking to people and examining writing will usually drop references to a couple of other places to explore, or to unanswered questions that are worth looking into. Even if they seem minor, these almost inevitably lead to putting together pieces of the larger story, regardless of which pieces you start with. I don’t specifically remember what whistling guy talks about, but it sounds like that’s the only potential lead you’ve found so far. It’s certainly possible to make progress without ever talking to him, via all kinds of things that can be independently stumbled on, but if you haven’t found anything else I bet revisiting his dialogue will give you an idea on where to search next.

    (Okay, I checked the wiki and can confirm that, while Esker is not the richest source of new options in the game, his dialogue does include instructions that lead to new threads for you to pull on)