The one that had the most distinctive effect for me is zhan zhuang. Song Gao has a really excellent instructional video on YouTube about the basic method:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCVUojtpS80

Remember that the people who teach this type of stuff (when they aren't fraudsters) put a huge amount of time into learning the technique well and need to find at least a few people that interested to pass on the technique but if you aren't working towards doing that you can get a lot of benefit in much less time. Song Gao recommends in a different video doing zhan zhuang for at least 30 mintues a day, but I would say (agreeing with the tai chi instructor whose blog pointed me to these videos) that just doing it once for 15-20 minutes (it may take some time to work up to that) provides a lot of benefit (in my case including both a distinctive feel of enhanced perception and eliminating, for at least a couple of months until it came back less intense than previously, the fairly minor pain I would get in my shoulders when I end up standing at a computer for a few hours nonstop, though of course I still try to move around more often). I started doing it a bit more often a few months after that first time so I can't say how long the pain reducing effect would retain some effect not doing it again but it is clear to me that you don't need to do it anywhere near daily to have major positive effects. While doing it I've noticed both muscle soreness in a number of places and had mild panic attacks but unless it gets too severe it seems like the brain can work through it just by holding the pose (I have a couple of times needed to stop due to increasing pain). I didn't the first time but since then often listen to music which I suspect like with qigong is not offically correct (though the videos I watched didn't say one way or another that I noticed) and likely reduces the meditative aspect in some ways but makes it easier and I enjoy it.

The article mentioned how we have a tendency to want to move on to the next thing even when doing something we enjoy, which I have definitely found to be the case (though I am disabled and have more time available than most people and already do almost everything more slowly than most people). One potentially impactful form of mindfulness would be to just focus on this part and try to be more present in the moment when doing whatever it is you enjoy. As I understand it this is a major focus of tantra (where the thing it is know for in the US is just one possible application, nothing intrinsic or even common). I haven't tried any formal methods around this but have found it valuable to intentionally be more mindful and at times consider and untangle the related ideas of satisfaction, fun, enjoyment, etc.

https://haven-game.bandcamp.com/album/haven-original-soundtr...

Floating around listening to music is nice once you get the hang of it (took me a while). With a bigger budget could have been one of the best games ever; as it is there are some significant limitations but I recommend it:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/haven

I'll add Lueur Verte:

https://lueurverte.bandcamp.com/album/crystalica-ep

If you look at the pictures of the plates the one with cold brew and where the full tea bag is added to the plate seems to have a good bit more growth than the others (there is a larger image of this one). So it doesn't seem like the spores are necessarily unaffected by the boiling just that some survive (or maybe they all survive but only some decide to start growing?). The thing I find strange is that the tea bag that was directly added without any brewing doesn't seem to have much growth at all. Actually, also that in the one with the tea bag added after cold brewing that has extra robust growth much of that growth seems to happen away from the visible pieces of tea.

I agree that the author has great style and I find it interesting to think about where and how bacteria (and fungi) like to grow.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...

I have recently been taking those with .3mg DR melatonin and 8-9mg diphenhydramine and it still has some effect the next day but much less than the higer doses of magnesium. The diphenhydramine is for my Non-24 and does not help me sleep but can improve my functioning some the next day when part of my body wants to be sleeping during the day (unfortunately like many things it seems to quickly lose effectiveness so I am going to try taking it less often). My thinking is that for long term use for sleep it is imporant that the medication or supplement be cleared from the body quickly, though too early and it may be hard to stay asleep.

Sleep doctors have told me that waking up at the same time every day is most important. It doesn't look like the paper tried to differentiate between irregularity waking up and irregularity going to sleep but I suspect trying to wake up as close to the same time every day as you can reasonable manage is the best thing most people can do to improve their sleep quality (getting to sleep earlier some days if needed). My sense is that the most obvious part of what we consider to be sleep quality is actually waking up quality. Sleep deprivation affects memory in subtle and eventually not so subtle ways but not feeling awake seems in my experience to be based on how waking up happens and sleeping less when relatively well rested often has a positive effect on feeling awake (at least for a while, getting tired early is another effect of not sleeping enough). There is a particular thing that I notice maybe a couple of times a year that feels like rapidly cycling between being asleep and awake multiple times when I am waking up and I always feel much more awake the day it happens.

https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/

I do still like progress indicators when you might be waiting on a longer task (and when it actually indicates liveness, which too often it doesn't :( ).

Games I can sometimes appreciate the new user benefits and affecting the pace can sometimes have an artistic intent or relaxation effect that tools should not normally have. I have stopped playing games for excessive animations and will usually quickly (but not always immediately) disable anything that can be disabled. It is so common that I distinctly recall the free game Strange Adventures in Infinite Space intentially doing the opposite to great effect (it has been a bit but I think it was not only instant transitions but on mouse click instead of release).

https://rich.itch.io/strangeadventures

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497817

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471477

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Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

https://rubenerd.com/weird-al-had-100-gb-of-ram/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32734840

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318873

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Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.

For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Declaration_on_the_Doctr...

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/events/event.dir...

I think attitudes vary regionally and by congregation and an ecumenical focus doesn't necessarily translate to a positive perception of the pope but it can and not just all that recently.

https://mullvad.net/en/servers

They also have a document that lists some of their practices around the servers, such as not using shared servers:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/server-list

I noticed that the website of one of the two providers they use near me was over a decade out of date :/. DAITA is Mullvad's anti-traffic analysis framework, without it a single hop can likely be easily deanonymized by logging by a single party (it isn't clear if multihop uses fixed packet sizes between their servers).