I suppose we've also lost the "muscle memory" to plow a field with a team of oxen and to do laundry with a washboard down by the river ...

I booked Thursday and Friday off from work for some travel plans that fell through at the last minute, so now I've got a four-day weekend that's mostly free and unstructured. Feels great, honestly!

I should probably make a point of actually getting some shit done around the house, but on the other hand, drinking beer on the back porch sounds pretty good right now ...

It's more like "I wish my local coffee shop was open for more than 45 minutes a day".

I can easily log on to reddit multiple times per day and find fresh content every time. I log on to hubski once or twice a week and still see the same thing the last time I was here (case in point: I'm replying to a 3-day-old comment, which would be pretty unusual on reddit, but here it's near the top of my feed).

Granted, at this point I think reddit is too big, to the point that good content gets drowned out by silly memes, but there's a sweet spot in terms of content/activity/userbase/etc., and hubski is way, way below it at this point in time.

To what degree is this related to Stockholm's housing shortage? Stockholm is infamous for low vacancy rates and long waiting lists for apartments. Does that also make it difficult for tourists to get hotels and other accommodations during a major attraction like a Beyonce concert, or is the market for housing largely separated from the market for short-term lodging?

Oh no. I guess we'll all have to find some other sport that's somehow less boring than golf. Quelle probleme!

Americans vastly overestimate how deep their divisions are. It's actually pretty normal for countries to have real, viable separatist movements within them, and the US is nowhere near that.

Quebec almost left Canada in 1995, Scotland almost left the UK in 2014, Germany was split into two separate countries for almost half of the 20th century, Korea is still two separate countries today, Catalan may or may not be part of Spain anymore (it's been a while since I checked), and nobody is even really sure how many Chinas there are.

If anything, what's remarkable about the United States is how united you are, despite being a large group of people spread out over an entire continent. The vast majority of Americans speak the same language, follow the same religion, and -- perhaps most importantly -- identify first and foremost as "Americans". The fact that some of you vote for the "Have you ever hated the poor?" party and some of you vote for the "Have you ever hated the poor, on weed?" party is far less significant than the terminally online crowd would have you believe.

The Stratolaunch aircraft is a mobile launch platform that will enable airline-style access to space that is convenient, affordable and routine. The reinforced center wing can support multiple launch vehicles, weighing up to a total of 500,000 pounds.

Neat. So the idea is to fly this thing into the upper atmosphere and then use it as a platform to launch rockets into space? I assume the advantage is that the Stratolaunch can fly like a conventional airplane, using aerodynamics to gain altitude before the air thins out, whereas a rocket has to rely on jet propulsion for its entire journey. Being able to use both could save a lot of jet fuel.

Uh, yeah? Why would you do that to yourself? It's like saying "I tried cutting out the Big Four macronutrients from my diet, and I got hungry".

I disagree.

I learned piano as a kid, and then taught myself guitar as a teenager, so by the time I picked up a guitar I had already been sight reading on piano for 5+ years, and additionally I had very little access to guitar tabs at the time because this was before my family had internet access, so a lot of the material I learned early on was from piano-centric sources, typically sheet music, occasionally with some guitar chord charts thrown in.

So if the problem is that too many guitarists are exposed to tabs first and then are too lazy to learn to read sheet music, I should be immune to it. I knew how to read sheet music before I ever touched a guitar, and from the start I was attempting to learn guitar by reading sheet music on it.

Yet to this day, I find tabs far quicker and more intuitive to read than sheet music, when playing guitar. Even if I use a score that has both sheet music and tabs side-by-side, I find myself primarily relying on the tabs, and only glancing at the sheet music if I need a clarification on timing.

Now I definitely agree with you that it's possible for a guitarist to learn to read sheet music quite well, but it takes a lot of work, far more so than what it takes for a pianist to learn it, and it's because of the issue mentioned in the article: sheet music notation maps nicely to the keyboard, but not the fretboard. That's why there are plenty of mediocre, amateur pianists out there who can sight read competently, and many excellent, sometimes even professional guitarists who struggle with it.

The reason guitarists use tabs is because of the nature of the instrument, not the nature of the guitarists.

If I'm not mistaken, all those considerations are taken into account when they calculate caloric information on labels. If the package says 100 kcal, that means that eating it will give your body 100 kcal to burn for fuel, build into muscle or store as fat. Obviously if you did something like convert the matter into energy direct by means of nuclear fusion you'd get a hell of a lot more than 100 kcal out of it, but the label is meant to be understood as the amount of net energy the average human body can extraxt from the product.

In terms of strictly weight gain and weight loss, a calorie is a calorie. In terms of general nutrition there are other considerations (which basically boil down to: eat lots of vegetables and lean sources of protein, and get your carbs from foods that are high in fiber), but the number on the scale will directly correspond to the number on the nutritional information.