We rode a birch log powered narrow gauge steam train and it was absolutely splendid. There was some smoke but it was nice and adding to the experience. Mostly it was steam clouds. Open and closed carriages were available. It was very slow mind you.
I'm thinking of the Ottomans capturing Constantinople. Very much paraphrasing: Since Ottomans had a massive cannon made with new technology. Since Constantinople hadn't hired the cannon inventor. Since Constantinople was poor. Since it was sacked by other christians in the crusades previously. So it was self afflicted by christians.
One can see the climate crisis like that. Only global accords work, otherwise self-limiting CO2 is mostly sacrificing one's economy while others do better. USA will block all international climate accords. Because the president and half of politicians acts like climate change is not real. Because a whole party thinks that. Because voters think that. Because the media tells them that. Because the media treats fossil company propaganda like science. Because it's so cheap for a handful of companies to corrupt media or politics.
What is the epistemology of the majority of voters... scandals, conspiracy theories, UFO:s. What shows on TV or on your feeds. I assume it's child's play for some non-western actor to cause constant infighting in the west, causing billions in economic losses or destruction of alliances. For whole planetary level issues, who's the opponent, working in the shadows? Maybe, after all, the aliens are already here...
Ah, but minutes (or an hour) don't have any context to a person. "A bomb dropped every two thirds of the duration of a football game, excluding breaks". No, that sounds too mathy. Perhaps "three bombs per two games".
In FPS maps like Quake you only realized how much invisible clip blocks the map makers put in once you play an amateur map that doesn't have them. You hit things, get stuck and can even get crushed and die. Or you can try and play an early version of some popular multiplayer map that doesn't have them and it's way less playable.
A lot of new creators of course will not believe you if you tell you have to do these affordances. I once tested a person's multiplayer map where a door had a central lip that crushed you if you entered off-center. I told them that it should be fixed, but the answer was "you should always go through doors through the center". It's some sort of very enticing idea of purity. "My map will only have real architecture and no affordances." In the end it will self correct.
A lot of other modern furniture looks like it was just the default in CAD. Ie completely rectangular arm rests with sharp edges etc. I get that a car like Ford Sierra looked featureless and too simple in its time, I guess it seemed like lazy design. Where were all the trims and grilles and fenders and in general the "borders between things"? But I think it didn't hurt its usability.
Thought experiment, not completely serious but something worth considering.
This would be 5 h per week, or 250 h per year, or over 10 years, 3.5 months of continuous 24/7 exercise. This is a large amount of training. 4% of your waking time would be spent on exercising. Or 6% of free time. At what point does it turn net negative, ie as time that it eats away from life. You can't attend events or hang out with family since you're always at the gym. I have understood smoking reduces your life span 8%. On the other hand, if you replace watching reels with gym, maybe it's also positive time otherwise.
I totally get your thought process, especially with the dry exercise description in the comment you responded to. That’s maybe an approach for some people but it also doesn’t seem that sustainable.
My view on exercise is that it should give me something in the moment. That also helps keep me motivated.
So arduous hikes and bike tours aren’t something I do for the exercise, that’s just a nice side benefit. I do those because I want to get to exciting places or explore the world at a pace that makes sense.
I ride my exercise bike to keep in form and be able to do those hikes and bikes tours, even to go further and enable me to reach new places and do new things. Same with swimming, though that also helps me to clear my head and think about stuff. Both of those can potentially be boring, but at least I always feel amazing and energized afterwards.
Strength training is admittedly something I do almost exclusively for its long-term health benefits (and struggle the most with), though I also like feeling stronger and seeing my body change at least a tiny bit. Oh, and it’s an activity (as well as some Yoga and flexibility exercises) I do together with my partner, so it always has that social component.
Bouldering and badminton (both of which I absolutely suck at) also have that social component: it’s something I do with other people.
Oh, and then I don’t own a car, so my bike is my only means of getting from a to b and transporting things. So I automatically get moving that way and it never feels like wasted time or even exercise to me.
That’s much more than five hours per week spent exercising and very little of it is boring or feels like empty time that is merely an investment into my future. I do think that’s the trick to being and staying active. At least for me.
Counterpoint: you can't replace Reels/TikTok or smoking time with exercise and you _have_ to displace something meaningful to do dedicated exercise.
Phone activity time is almost irreducible because it's not dedicated or de-fragmentable by design. It's almost always concurrent with something else, or in the "in-between" periods where your alternatives are limited.
One successful strategy here is to offload exercise into "snacks" that compete for this time. And that might buy back time you spend at the gym. Strength training and mobility work where the emphasis isn't on getting your HR up can easily be squeezed in here. So you might go to the gym, do your pressing exercise in 20 minutes, then come home and do pushup press variants as your accessory work in small increments over the day.
The one area this does not work on is CV training, where you need a dedicated amount of time in target zones to get the benefit. For that, you need to treat it as a first-class obligation, find some protocol that meets your constraints, and hold it sacred to get it done.
5 hours per week is very little training. How much time do most people spend scrolling social media or watching TV? There's your 5 hours. It doesn't have to detract from any other life activities.
The logic of exchanging 3.5 months every 10 years to be as healthy and able as possible for as long as you are alive seems to me to be absurdly compelling. Who wouldn't take that deal?
You will feel better and be in hospital at the end of your life for a lot less time on average so yes it’s a lot but potentially the chances of being a fit 80 year old could be worth it.
The ad doesn't show me how the device works, there's just a person talking and making promises. I guess the device's resolution and contrast are so low and it looks a bit underwhelming in general that they didn't go with that first...
The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
It’s even worse than nobody having seen the Newton: it was actively ridiculed in the press, so a lot of people had never seen it but knew it as a joke.
This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton:
One of the more interesting corners of history is the Palm guys settling on honesty as a reaction to that.
You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.
PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.
One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.
I suspect it was rather the combination of cost (around $1000 1990's dollars), weight (>500g) and battery time (apparently only 30 minutes) which was the problem.
reply