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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I was raised religious, and fell for the whole “porn makes you unable to form real, properly attached bonds with another human” thing. Then I started reading the scientific background of that stuff, and - while you definitely can damage your ability to form strong relationships with porn (or just about anything else) - that made me far more porn positive.

    Maybe this is just me, but I actually watched/looked at far more porn when I felt deeply ashamed of doing so. Now that I’m OK with it, and it just feels normal, it’s comparable to a tool I have access to.










  • The moon is about 1.25 light seconds away from Earth. There are retroreflectors placed on the surface of the moon by NASA, some of which are still functioning.

    Given the number of people that stare up at the moon, it seems likely that someone has blinked twice with correct timing to be at the same time as their reflection.

    On the other hand, I have blinked with my face only a few cm away from a mirror, so my reflection blinked 0.00000000007 seconds after me, so maybe “at the same time” is doing the heavy lifting here in the sense that there is some minimal period of time between most events we would consider simultaneous.








  • The world trade center was required to be insured against terrorism by the banks in the leasing deal. That was an obvious requirement for the banks to include because of the recent (at the time…) 1993 world trade center bombing.

    Larry Silverstein got the insurance so recently before the attack because he signed a lease that included the insurance provisions, and he signed that lease in July 2001 because negotiations for the deal took from January 2001 until July 2001. Prior to that, the Port Authority was having trouble keeping the occupancy of the building high, and they thought private management of the building would increase tax revenue, and give them money for other projects. The plan for privatization began in the 1990s, and coincided with other revitalization efforts in the area, some managed by the Port Authority, and others stemming from the city government.

    I think in context there’s nothing surprising involved here, and the timeline of the attack was driven by different things than the timeline of the leasing deal. In other words, this is a coincidence.