You guys are getting diagnosed?!?

Maybe I’m not up to date on my porn slang but “BBC micro” sounds like an inherent contradiction.

It’s immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it’s like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it’s a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.

I’m a human! I’m a human male!

In both of those examples, the actors played characters of their own race, pretending to be another race as the plot of the respective movies.

I feel the same way about the first and second Terminators, and the first Rambo and its sequels.

That paper reads like it was written by an undergrad going through cargo cult motions of sounding like a scientist. And the evidence is still weak: many of those studies being summarized are studies where they poisoned rats and investigated whether onion juice has some kind of protection against the poison, as measured by testosterone levels.

I’m not even sure who can afford just the Lego Set of Fallingwater.

We’ve learned pretty recently that almost all nutrition of plants and animals relies on symbiotic relationships with microbes with their own distinct genetic material and reproduction. The microbiome in animal guts or in the soil where plant roots live turned out to be really important for whether the actual cells in the larger multicellular organism are getting what they need to thrive.

even selfish and thus fitter individuals which are helped by altruistic ones usually carry some altruistic genes which they propagate.

It’s more useful to model the genes as selfish, not the individuals. A queen bee/ant won’t survive long enough to produce fertile offspring if her infertile offspring, each a genetic dead end, doesn’t provide for the hive/colony. That genetic programming isn’t altruistic because it doesn’t help rival colonies/hives, only their own.

So no, the individuals aren’t free riding on others’ altruism. It’s more that genetic coding for social groups is advantageous to the gene, even if localized applications of those rules might seem disadvantageous to the individual in certain instances.

Letting the eyeballs touch is the French kissing of butterfly kisses? If I understand the analogy correctly.

Night lights are like half a watt. You can leave a 0.5W bulb on all night (let’s just say 12 hours), 365 days per year, and you’d be coming up on a total energy use of about 2.1 kWh per year, or about $0.35 per year in USD.

I attribute most of my success to luck, but also in finding a career path in my 30’s that actually rewarded my neurodivergence. I took 6 years to finish undergrad, after changing majors a few times. I started and aborted 3 different career fields before finding the one that works for me and actually gives me an opportunity to use different knowledge and interests across completely unrelated fields. Now that I’m a lawyer in civil litigation, I only need to have knowledge and experience in court procedure, but most of my work is spent on research techniques and translating the real world messiness of whatever random thing has gone wrong into proper analogies for legal arguments. My tendency towards new rabbit holes to explore actually works at learning a new industry or new company just enough to be able to represent someone in it, and then getting out and starting over to do another thing in another case.

To extend your analogy, it’s like I’m in thick brush where running fast on a flat surface isn’t the most useful skill. If I were forced to fend for myself in an open field, I’d be fucked, but I thrive where I am because I’m good at the things that matter in this particular environment.

Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.

The highest priced iPhone, all max specs, is $1600.

If you get a new one every year, and trade in the previous year’s, you’ll probably get around $600 trade in value. So we’re talking $1000/year for the highest priced phone.

On a monthly basis, we’re talking $83/month. That’s like a rounding error on rent, utilities, and food, much less transportation and health care.

And, more realistically, people are buying $800 phones once every 2 years, maybe seeing something like a $600 net expense spread over 24 months, for $25/month.

Phones are like the one thing that are cheaper in 2025 than in 1985.

In my opinion, cauliflower sucks unless it’s been roasted/fried/seared with dry high heat to the point of being brown and crispy.

If it is overcooked, the rupture of the cell walls makes that cabbage stank run out into the dish.

If it’s still raw or cooked at too low a temperature (which includes any temperature in which liquid water will exist on the surface), it’s missing the delicious browning that happens at high heat.

That means it doesn’t work as cauliflower “wings.” The breading/batter protects the cauliflower too much, and it ends up steaming itself inside. Just batter up some firm tofu instead, those are great wings.

It can work as cauliflower “steak” I guess, but that doesn’t really taste like it should fit the culinary role of a protein/main. I’m all about roasting cauliflower, and flat slices make it easy to grill or sear evenly, but that just doesn’t fit that ecological niche that a steak does.

So I generally don’t like cauliflower served with broccoli. They cook too differently to be able to actually cook them together in the same batch.

“Very little fiber”, “Frequently have a lot of oil”, and “Relatively high in salt and sugar” aren’t a classification, they’re vibes.

What you’ve listed aren’t classification criteria. These are generally common characteristics within the category, and a basis for investigating what causes ultra processed foods to generally be bad.

I’m in this thread arguing that the scientists have the data to be able to just analyze correlations and trends of those characteristics directly, rather than taking the dubious step of classifying them into the NOVA category to begin with.

It’s not pseudoscience or not science though. The models are the models, and I think they’re bad models, but I don’t think they’re outright unscientific.

https://youtu.be/_hBH8Gy9kFE

Fried cheese…with club sauce

Popcorn shrimp…with club sauce

Chicken Tenders…with spicy club saauuce

So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?

Let’s say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.

So let’s have that conversation about bromate! Let’s not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.