IIRC, 42 is around the age where the window closes, at least, that's what my physician told me. Regardless, if that gap has closed, it may be some consolation to bring this up to your friends and relations who are on the fence about having kids. Everybody's chuffed to tell others about how they made the right choice for them. Rarely, does one hear from another with the courage to say "I changed my mind, and wish I'd taken another path", particularly in the having-kids domain. When I hear your comments above and think "Is this suffering rooted in a desire to contribute to others?" If so, consider telling those you love and respect about your choice and its consequences. Especially tell those who have the potential to have kids - and be a support system in their lives.
Pregnancy success is women dependent (egg quality is the problem, and leads to increasing fertilitization and miscarriage rates) and start to drop at the beginning of one’s 30s and gets really bad in late thirties and near impossible in early 40s. Every women is different and some have earlier falloff in success rates. The moral of the story is don’t want until you are 30 to have kids. Have them young and it is easy. Wait and it gets really emotionally hard or impossible or expensive or a combination of all three.
So impossible that both I and my neighbour of similar age got pregnant within a couple of months of trying at 40...must be something in the water here.
Or maybe we are just healthy and have good hormonal status ;-)
Anecdotal success after 40 is real. But the statistical distribution means that you and your friend are lucky. My friend circle has a lot of couples in it who have had fertility problems. Often it isn’t spoken of.
For sure it's anecdotal, I just wanted to point out that at this age it is by far not next to impossible to have a child. I wouldn't rely on it, but it's also not a "1 in 100/1000" kind of situation. There are various sources that are extremely discouraging to women of this age, as if getting pregnant and having a healthy child at this age was somehow akin to winning the lottery, when it is not.
Of course, it all depends on the woman's egg reserves and general health; but there, like I commented in another subthread, personal biology definitely trumps statistics.
I agonized over my moonlander purchase, I really had my eyes on the UHK with the trackpad, but I got tired of waiting, my shoulder and wrist pain was getting to be too much, so I bit the bullet.
I regret not buying a keyboard like this earlier. Or building one. It's actually made me a better typist on regular qwerty keyboards, as I switch to colemak and basically relearned how to type.
This may be a bit of a different scale, but pay attention to how many lawyers are in the company. If the amount dramatically increases for some unknown reason, it's probably a good time to depart.
I left some famous startup, not because it reached 1000 employees, but because the motto changed from:
“Be the change you seek”
to
“We advance humanity”.
With a little legless girl from Africa, for whom we build the software that helps the doctor that helps the girl.
I still have the poster hanging behind me as a CEO. To remind people of what not to become. We’re just making fucking software, don’t stay late, go take care of your family, they’re the most important thing in your life.
I worked in healthcare robotics for a spell. The management fell 50/50 into these buckets. More than once I had to remind some self-important person that we, in fact, did not "save lives" and that that was firmly the business of medical practitioners.
The first time it happened to me, I thought it was a joke. A manager wanted my help to debug some non-critical issue with one of the devices in the field and I told him multiple times that I had a hard stop at like 4PM for a dentist appointment. As it was getting close to the time I had to go, I kept reminding him and he wouldn't acknowledge me. I finally stood up and said I had to go and he responded, "Fine, go. It's not like we're saving lives around here." If I had been more confident in myself and my skills I'd have quit on the spot. Instead I just made some comment about how I'd help him the following morning and left.
I committed to myself to not let anyone get away with it again, though, and thankfully my manager, who was engineer #1 in this org and at the time was an engineering director, felt the same and had the political capital to call people out for it after hearing story.
If the NDA was covering things beyond the legal requirements (you cannot tell about company secrets one tout leave, au least where I live) and you got extra money for that, why not?
People did actually start calling WW1 "The first world war" long before WW2 started. There is even few instances of that terminology going back to 1914.
Arguably, that honor goes to the Seven Years' War, which saw significant fighting both in Europe and in North America.
The French Revolutionary Wars/Napoleonic Wars were equally grand in scale, and conducted at a time when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers--all of the major ones got involved in those conflicts at one point or another; even the newly-independent US got peripherally involved (the War of 1812 is partially started due to the effects the Napoleonic Wars had on US shipping).
> when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers
The United States, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia all entered the war.
There were significant theaters of the war in Africa and the Middle East.
China was initially neutral in WWI but did eventually declare support for the Entente and sent 140,000 laborers to Europe. [1]
Brazil entered the war after losing ships to German U boats. [2]
Over a million Indian troops participated. [3]
Thailand, New Guinea, and Samoa were involved [4]
And I’m just scratching the surface. The very worst fighting was concentrated in the industrial meat grinders of the front lines in Europe but there was significant participation from all corners of the earth. It earned the name “World War.”
> when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers
Why though? I think even China alone had almost as large a population in 1800 (300M) as the US does right now so I'm confused what this is supposed to mean? Japan also had some 30M, Russia 35M. (I haven't checked other countries.)
We're defining "the world" in 1800 to be "European powers" so that we can claim the first world war was actually before World War I?
Sorry, I should have clarified further. This is "world" in terms of European political discourse--as far as Europe was concerned, if you weren't a European power (and Russia most certainly was a European power), you weren't really a country worth caring about, just fodder for imperialism and colonization.
Okay sure I guess, but what is this meant to imply? Even taking it at face value, this clearly still didn't cause Europe to call that war the first World War, so what conclusion are we drawing from this?
I remember seeing more The Great War or The War to End Wars in post-WWI docs and media. Wikipedia says yes, it was WWI soon after the war, but that wasn't common yet.
Yes! IIRC there was an Encyclopedia Brown[1] case where he unmasks a fraudulent Civil War relic that had the inscription "for the First Battle of Bull Run", on the grounds that no one at the time would have called it the "First".
[1] Kid-detective series where the titular character, Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, solves crimes by finding inconsistencies that require domain knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Brown
What worked well for me was pretty simple: If I got too chuffed with what I completed, I'd meditate for 5-10 mins to ground myself, then look for the next task. If I got really distracted and found myself unable to keep my attention, meditation also helped with that. To keep things on-track, I recommend a meditation app or guided meditations on youtube so you aren't relying on your own burnt-out self-discipline.
Any specific mediation or just the normal close your eyes and breathe kind?
So your solution is meditation? Could you elaborate. When you are finding yourself struggling to keep attention? What do you do? Meditate and then return to the task?
Was this the one where you started in a jungle, and you had to use a first-gen mindstorms kit to explore Inca-like ruins? If so, yes - and that game was epic. Loved it to bits.
Cool concept, but doesn't consider planets, or nebulae, or other space objects that can block light. I have no expertise to speak with authority on this, so please, weigh in on this consideration. But wouldn't this break the "homogeneity" assumption?
EDIT: Thinking about this further, could you make approximation rules about the things that block light, too? e.g. By the nature of a star's mass, you can assume that some opaque object is likely between Earth and any given star with some likelihood?
EDIT2: Thanks to everybody for the replies - this really helps clarify! Cheers!
Blocking light means absorbing energy. In an eternal universe, you have to reach thermal equilibrium eventually, so you have to shed that energy somehow, and for a constant amount of matter just hanging around in empty space radiation is the only logical possibility. At the end of the day, your absorber will reach the same temperature as the emitter and emit the same amounts of light that it absorbs on frequencies where it does absorb, though perhaps in different directions. This is the insight behind Kirchhoff’s law and blackbody radiation.
There's no "blocking light": anything that "blocks light" would get hot from absorbing that light and, then, reradiate. By this time (some point along the curve of "infinitely old universe") everything should be radiating a lot.
If you read the section on "The Paradox" in the article, it's basically using a simplifying geometric assumption to divide the universe into concentric shells, each of which contributes the same intensity of light to the observer. If space is sparse enough that any light reaches us from shell N+1, then you'll get the same amount of light from every shell, and so you'd have a fully-saturated bright sky.
So there are possible infinite/steady-state universes universes (very dense, lots of dust) where you don't see shell N+1. But since we can see stars from shell N+1 and other shells, we know that we don't live in that universe. Therefore our universe isn't a steady-state / infinite time one.
If you imagine a curve of the light from a star, the dip in the curve from a planet passing in between us and the star is actually relatively small. They don't block that much light (and what they do block heats the planet, which in turn will radiate lower energy light)
Casual project follower here: I really want to use this device for remoting into other machines, so I can use my work computer via Simula - does the native Simula OS allow for this?
It's just Linux and runs normal Linux applications, so yes. If you just use e.g. a VNC client your work machine's display would be in one window, but if you can find remote desktop software that displays remote windows as local windows I'd imagine that would work fine too with Simula.
(I seem to recall Citrix can do this, though I'm not sure if there are any FOSS/less enterprise-y options that do the same.)
EDIT: Actually I think Xpra does this? Not sure if it'll run on Wayland, or if X11 apps work in Simula via XWayland. If so though, that might work.
Sure, you can use Parsec or something, but you'll only get an Immersed-style "virtual desktop". Having full separate window transmission would be more difficult/impossible for non-Linux targets.
