It’s been a few weeks since this comment. You still doing Tactical Barbell? I’m looking to switch to incorporate some conditioning work more formally after Labor Day (which will be my testing day to lock in my powerlifting totals before turning to other fitness goals).

What do you like or dislike about this program?

The different style guides are designed for their particular environments. Most American newspapers and magazines follow AP, but most book publishers follow Chicago. Academics in the humanities tend to follow MLA, while academics in the social sciences tend to use APA. Hell, IEEE has a style guide for electrical engineers.

So do whatever you prefer. I tend to use Chicago because that’s what I know best, but I have worked professionally in writing and editing publications that followed the Chicago rules.

Making houses out of wood.

This is fine. Lumber was historically plentiful in North America, and lumber houses last just as long as stone or brick.

Lumber has several advantages over stone/concrete/brick:

• Less CO2 impact from construction activities. Concrete production is a huge contributor to atmospheric CO2.
• Greater sustainability in general. Concrete is approaching a global sand shortage, because most sand in the world doesn’t have the right qualities to be included in concrete.
• Better energy efficiency and insulation properties. Brick homes need double walls in order to compete with the insulation properties of a wood framed house that naturally has voids that can be filled with insulation.
• Better resilience against seismic events and vibrations (including nearby construction). The west coast has frequent earthquakes, and complying with seismic building code with stone/masonry requires it to be reinforced with steel. The state of Utah, where trees and lumber are not as plentiful as most other parts of North America, and where seismic activity happens, has been replacing unreinforced masonry for 50+ years now.
• Easier repair. If a concrete foundation cracks, that’s easier to contain and mitigate in a wood-framed house than a building with load-bearing concrete or masonry.

Some Northern European and North American builders are developing large scale timber buildings, including timber skyscrapers. The structural engineers and safety engineers have mostly figured out how to engineer those buildings to be safe against fire and tornadoes.

It’s not inherently better or worse. It’s just different.

So you’re doing a 4 day cycle, and your rest days fall on different days of the week every week? That’s fine, if you can stick with that. I (and many others) base our workouts on the days of the week because it’s easier to stick to that way and fit it into our overall schedules.

You’re fine sticking with PPL. I would just recommend heavier complex movements (barbells usually involve more weight than dumbbells) to build up overall strength before you start fiddling with the isolated exercises that only target one or two muscles.

And if you’re OK with that many different exercises to master in your program, that’s fine, too. I just think that simplicity is easier to stick with, and that a focus on specific progress in the big lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press) is a good psychological boost for motivation.

The two dominant style guides in the U.S. (Chicago Manual of Style and the A.P. Stylebook) prescribe no spaces around em dashes. When I do professional writing I default to Chicago, so I learned to eventually omit spaces around em dashes. That’s still my main way of distinguishing myself, for now.

I think you’ve hit perfectly why I don’t like the “unalive” and related euphemisms for death. Death, especially violent death, is a big fucking deal, and trying to obscure that impact behind vague or even cutesy words, makes it seem mundane or routine and accessible.

Every plant named in this meme, not just the ones on the girl, is a nightshade.

Even if you pay for a product, your user data is probably still being monetized.

I’ll admit I’m biased in favor of simplicity in programming (fewer workouts, fewer exercises per workout), lower-rep sets (generally aiming for 5 reps per set unless I have a specific reason to do more or less), and complex barbell movements (I can move more weight when I use my whole body to move a rigid object rather than isolating each side).

I would consider greater simplicity in your programming. When I read your workout, it sounds like you’re spending more time lifting weights in lots of different ways.

Simplicity helps with the positive feedback of beginner gains. When you’ve got an alternating weekly schedule, you’re not getting that immediate reinforcement of constant improvement. With an alternating weekly schedule, you’re not progressing on any particular exercise more than once every 2 weeks. Sure it’s nice to be stronger than you were 14 days ago, but being a beginner means that you should be able to see concrete progress every 7 days or even 3 days. That’s the best part of being a beginner, is seeing proof that you are stronger than you were earlier in the week!

If you’re able to make it to the gym consistently and keep detailed logs of what you’re doing, great. I was never like that, so I needed workouts that I could just jump into and remember which of the main lifts were at which weights, without writing down logs or looking at my phone. Simplicity was helpful for me as a beginner, especially for building a new routine into a full habit. That’s something I’d recommend considering, too.

The actual exercises you’ve chosen also seem to have unusual ratios. You’re doing about twice as much vertical pulling than horizontal pulling. You’re doing curls 4 times more than you’re flat bench pressing. Is that the most effective use of your gym time, for your goals? How long is each gym session, and are you competing with other lifters for access to high-demand equipment?

Kettlebells are great for those with limited storage space and budget, to extend beyond what you can do with bodyweight exercise alone.

If you want to get as fit as you can and don’t have any equipment, simply adding a pull up bar to a doorway and having a kettlebell in the house can really open up a lot of options for building more strength and doing stronger cardio routines.

But if you have the space for it, traditional strength equipment (barbell and weights, rack, bench) is probably better for strength.

I liken it to a cast iron skillet: if forced to limit myself to one thing, it would probably be this thing, but in a well-equipped setting it would rarely be my first choice to actually use.

We have plenty of studies that exercise improves sleep, both in people with regular sleep patterns and those struggling with insomnia.

This particular study, which concludes that yoga and tai chi are even better than most exercise, seems to be based on more limited data.

Rather than chase after the type of exercise that has the best results in a particular study, it’s probably better to try for the type of exercise you’re most likely to stick with on a regular basis, for better adherence to the general idea of regular exercise. Then get the general benefits of exercise, including improved sleep, that have been broadly proven with many studies.

I do live in an expensive area, but didn’t mean to imply that the prices I’m describing are the lowest available. Some people choose to go to more expensive places, or order a more expensive option.

Most people I know don’t go to bars for an efficient alcoholic experience.

To reinforce what you’re saying, bartenders I know tend to only have stories about one-off degeneracy that happens over the course of one night. But liquor store cashiers have stories about their regulars destroying their own lives over the course of months or years.

Some of us might be drinking more than 6 pints (6 UK pints is about 7.2 US pints). That’s one way.

Another way is paying more than $15 per drink, yes, after including tax and tip in the US. That’s somewhat common in some places, especially if cocktails are involved. Or higher end wine or spirits. Or even certain craft beers.

You’re right that using geometry and ratios is only good for a few digits of π. Some ancient mathematicians used to draw polygons on the inside and the outside of a circle, and then use the circumferences of those polygons as an upper or lower limit on what π was. Archimedes approximated π as being between 223/71 and 22/7, using 96-sided regular polygons.

The real breakthroughs happened when people realized certain infinite series converge onto π, where you add and/or subtract a series of smaller and smaller terms so that the only digits of the sum that changes with each additional term are already way to the right of the decimal point.

The Leibniz formula, proven to converge to π/4, is 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 . . .

So if you have a pen and paper, you can add and subtract each one in sequence, and eventually they get really small to where you’re adding and subtracting numbers so small that it leaves the first few digits untouched. At that point you can be confident that the digits that can’t change anymore are the right digits.

Later breakthroughs in new formulas made much faster convergences, so that you didn’t have to make as many calculations to get a few digits. And computers make these calculations much, much faster. So today the computer methods generally use the Chudnovsky algorithm that spits out digits of 1/π, which can easily be converted to digits of π itself.

Except maybe Electrical engineers.

Yup, I can count just fine to the 10th number in a zero-indexed counting system: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white.

I learned in my 20’s that my ideal mix of interests with a significant other needs to include:

• Shared interests that we already loved before we met, that we can connect and bond over for that initial spark.
• Her interests that she introduces to me, and my interests that I introduce to her, so that we can build on something together and appreciate how the other has enriched our own lives.
• Some new interests that we can both pick up and grow in together, and further reinforce our enjoyment of spending time together and growing together.
• Our own individual interests that never really click with the other, so that we can each continue to do things that reinforce our individuality and self identity distinct from that particular relationship.

For me and my wife, we already loved food and dining and cooking before we met each other. Easy thing to build early dates around: “have you been to so and so restaurant, I’ve always wanted to check it out.” We also loved a lot of the same TV shows (mostly single camera sitcoms like The Office, Arrested Development, etc.), and had easy couch time for quiet nights in.

She introduced me to style and fashion, and I appreciate a lot of the things about clothing and accessories and even makeup that I never bothered with before the age of 35.

I introduced her to football, and we enjoy going to games together.

We both introduced each other to a lot of musicians, TV shows, movies, and other entertainment we now both like.

We both picked up an interest in wine, whiskey, cocktails, and learned about this stuff together (and have planned memorable vacations centered on the places where people produce that kind of stuff). We also really learned to appreciate architecture and interior design, going as far as to go on tours and visits to specific places and cities and museums for these types of things. We became really particular about silverware and dishes at some point, too, which was a bit of an extension of our love of dining and our love of interior design.

And we still like our own stuff. She likes golf and tennis. I like basketball. I like all sorts of techy nerdy things that she has no interest in. She loves certain types of books and movies that I just do not care about. Our fitness routines have basically no overlap (yoga and spin versus powerlifting and Crossfit-style functional fitness workouts). She likes home improvement and garden stuff and I barely tolerate occasionally doing a few things around the house.

And it works. Having both distinct parts of your life and shared parts of your life seems to strengthen the bonds overall.

There’s still a distinction between enjoying it in the particular moment versus enjoying the entire sum of all the moments, looking back.

In food testing there are different preferences for how much someone enjoys a single bite of something versus enjoying an entire serving of that same thing. So even if someone prefers a sip of Pepsi over Coca Cola, they may nevertheless prefer an entire can of Coke over Pepsi. Same with all sorts of other consumer preferences.

With online activity, there’s a lot of stuff out there that is the equivalent of digital junk food, where you may enjoy a specific moment but feel shitty about spending an entire day on those individual moments. The payoff that can come from some of the long term patience can sometimes be more satisfying than an endless stream of instant gratification.

Yup, 100%. Gotta acknowledge the mixed bag.

It’s almost certainly better today for anyone who is gay or trans than 30 years ago. We have a long way to go, and there may have been some backsliding in the last 5 years, but things are undeniably better today than in the 90’s.

Certain aspects of race are better today. As recently as 1993, a majority of Americans still believed that interracial marriage should be illegal.

Food is way better. Back in the 90’s, there wasn’t a ton of variety in restaurants available in all except the biggest cities, and a lot of food trends were still boring with flavor (plus we were still in the low fat craze that made things taste worse). Even groceries were pathetic in comparison: fresh produce didn’t have nearly as many choices, and was expensive, so most people were eating canned and frozen produce by default. Little things like being able to choose apples that weren’t red delicious, or potatoes that weren’t russets, tend to be taken for granted today.

Health and safety are better in most ways, but worse in some others. Obviously obesity and related diseases are worse today. So are some conditions like allergies, certain autoimmune disorders, certain cancers. But most cancers are less deadly today than 30 years ago. Traumatic injuries from workplaces and car accidents are down, and are better treated. And the huge diversity in the population for health means that a lot of people are living healthier than ever, even while a lot of people are less healthy than before. Life expectancy keeps creeping up in the cities, health expectancy seems to be up, too.

Air quality seems way better, with smog and acid rain pushed down with successful regulations. And people don’t smoke as much anymore, especially indoors.

We can pursue our diverse interests from anywhere. If you drill down on pretty much any hobby, people who are really into that hobby have way more opportunities to share in that interest with people worldwide.

There’s a bunch of bad stuff, too. But we should also appreciate the good things that have improved in recent times.

I appreciate the message, but I find this presentation style to be unbearable, like a shitty clickbait version of a TED talk: fast cuts with exaggerated audience reactions, playing hide the ball with the actual information being presented. And then they took what I imagine is a normal studio production designed for normal TV screens and cropped it into vertical video, published on Youtube as a short. Gross.