James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Don’t drive when it snows.

Okay, that’s not realistic, so it’s really more like Always check the weather before you go on a four-hour road trip in the dead of winter to see your friend Jen in Bend, Oregon, during the height of the pandemic.

But let’s rewind a bit since there were other ways to die on this long journey to reach Jen. You first flew across the country from New York to Oregon. You could have died then, too, gambling with your life with that five-hour flight, breathing the same stuffy plane air as everyone else.

Remember when you were advised to stay at least six feet away from people, or else risk getting COVID? Then possibly dying? That four-hour car ride on the final leg of your trip, then, was both a foolish and fitting thing to do.

Because it’s on this drive from the coast of Oregon to Bend that your car slips on the snow and crashes into the highway barrier. You find out later — see, this is why you should always check the weather before you drive — that that day was the first heavy snowfall of the season, and you’re in one of many car accidents around town, just half an hour away from Jen and her husband, who put all their belongings in storage and decided to rent an Airbnb in town indefinitely. (People did that during the pandemic, in that uncertain time between the fear of succumbing to the disease and the boredom of staying at home.) 

You have photos of this carnage and general mayhem and, much later — after all this is more or less over — gleefully show them to people who ask, while watching kind of sadistically as they squirm and wince and gravely tell you they’re glad you’re alive.

.

Stock art by David Malan/Getty Images. Image by CLR.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

If we were to draw one key lesson about longevity from the centenarians of the Blue Zones regions (places that are home to the longest-living folks on Earth), it would be that it doesn’t come from fad diets or overwrought workout routines, or really any practice that’s bound to fizzle within months. Rather, people with extraordinary longevity “live in environments that nudge them unconsciously toward healthier behaviors, like moving more and eating plants,” says Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life. And those environments start within the spaces of their homes, which include elements of design and organization that facilitate healthy habits.

In essence, the set-up of your home can play a role in your longevity because of the often passive ways in which we make everyday lifestyle decisions, like what to eat and when to move. “For example, Cornell found that up to 90 percent of the food choices we make each day are unconscious,” says Buettner. “So, even if I were to convince you to make good conscious decisions about what you eat, and get you to remember to make those decisions for the next 30 years, that would only cover a fraction of the total number of food decisions you’d be making daily.”

.

Photo: Getty Images / Westend61

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.wellandgood.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Over the last few years, you may have noticed that the dairy section at your local grocery store has grown to feature far more than your run-of-the-mill milk selection. Nowadays, there are tons of brands to choose from, and yes, most of them are plant-based.

The move to plant-based milk has been a long time coming, considering an estimated 68 percent of people worldwide are lactose intolerant (30 to 50 million adults in the U.S. alone) and research shows that nearly 1.3 percent of the total carbon emissions produced in the United States—which is one of the main drivers of climate change and a harmful greenhouse gas for our environment—is due to the dairy industry. Comparatively, plant-based milk emits far fewer emissions and requires far less land use than the dairy industry.

Aside from the positive outcomes for the environment, plant-based milk options have been shown to offer tons of health benefits, too. But with so many options to pick from—oat, soy, almond, rice, and the list goes on—which one is the best one, at least in terms of digestion? We recently caught up with Will Bulsie wicz, MD, a gastroenterologist and New York Times bestselling author of The Fiber Fueled Cookbook, who spilled the beans milk on the number-one type of plant-based milk for gut health—his answer may surprise you.

.

Photo: Stocksy/ Martí Sans

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.wellandgood.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

This way you’re not stacking one dumbbell on top of another, but stashing just one pair. After all, your living room or garage is meant to have other furniture.

“Before quarantine, I bought so many weights that I basically have a full gym in my spare bedroom — but they take up a ton of space that I don’t have,” says Gerren Liles, CPT, master instructor at Equinox and founding trainer of the Mirror. “Adjustable dumbbells present a great convenience when it comes to smaller workout areas.”

.

Most of today’s adjustable dumbbells allow you to change the weight by simply turning a dial. Image Credit: LIVESTRONG.com

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Most of us use ChatGPT wrong.

We don’t include examples in our prompts.
We ignore that we can control ChatGPT’s behavior with roles.
We let ChatGPT guess stuff instead of providing it with some information.

This happens because we mostly use standard prompts that might help us get the job done once, but not all the time.

We need to learn how to create high-quality prompts to get better results. We need to learn prompt engineering! And, in this guide, we’ll learn 4 techniques used in prompt engineering.

Few Shot Standard Prompts

Few-shot standard prompts are the standard prompts we’ve seen before but with examples of the task in them.

Why examples? Well, If you want to increase your chances to get the desired result, you have to add examples of the task that the prompt is trying to solve.

Few-shot standard prompts consist of a task description, examples, and the prompt. In this case, the prompt is the beginning of a new example that the model should complete by generating the missing text.

.

Image licensed from Shutterstock

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Of all the great mysteries out there in the Universe, perhaps the greatest one of all is the question of our cosmic origin, “where did all this come from?” For countless millennia, we told one another stories: of a fiery birth, of the separation of light from dark, of order emerging from chaos, of a dark, empty, formless state from which we emerged, or even of an existence that was eternal and unchanging. Some stories involved an active creator; others needed no intervention from anything other than nature itself. But despite our propensity to believe in one of these stories or another, in science, we don’t settle for belief: we want to know.

Today, we talk about the Big Bang as though it’s foundational and taken for granted. But that wasn’t always the case. So how did we get to this point? What critical scientific steps occurred to promote the Big Bang from just one among many ideas to a scientific certainty? That’s what Muhammed Ayatullah wants to know, as he writes in and asks, simply and straightforwardly:

“How was it proven that the Big Bang actually took place?”

It’s a story that started long before it was proven. Let’s go back to when the idea was first conceived: nearly a full 100 years ago.

Back in 1915, Einstein shook up our understanding of the Universe by publishing his theory of General Relativity: a radically new conception of gravity. Previously, Newton’s law of universal gravitation was how we conceived of gravity, where space and time were absolute quantities, that masses occupied certain positions in space at certain moments in time, and that every mass exerted a force on every other mass, inversely proportional to their distances. This explained most observed phenomena very well, but fell short under a few physical circumstances: at speeds that began to approach the speed of light, and in very strong gravitational fields, where you were only a short distance away from a large mass.

.

At any epoch in our cosmic history, any observer will experience a uniform “bath” of omnidirectional radiation that originated back at the Big Bang. Today, from our perspective, it’s just 2.725 K above absolute zero and hence is observed as the cosmic microwave background, peaking in microwave frequencies. At great cosmic distances, as we look back in time, that temperature was hotter dependent on the redshift of the observed, distant object. As each new year passes, the CMB cools down further by about 0.2 nanokelvin, and in several billion years, will become so redshifted that it will possess radio, rather than microwave, frequencies. (Credit: Earth: NASA/BlueEarth; Milky Way: ESO/S. Brunier; CMB: NASA/WMAP)

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://medium.com

.

__________________________________________

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In February 2012, as Vladimir Putin was gearing up to steal the Russian presidential ‘election’ that year, the performance art group Pussy Riot staged an audacious and provocative work inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Dressed in colourful outfits and balaclavas, several members of the group burst into the church flashmob-style, dancing in front of the altar and singing expletive-filled ‘punk prayers’ in protest against Putin. Three women from the group were subsequently arrested and later sentenced to two years in prison on the charge of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’. They had, the judge said, ‘plotted to undermine civil order’.

In a moving interview with the historian Simon Schama in December last year one of those young women, the artist and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova, talked about what happened to her during her time in prison. After being transferred to the notorious gulag IK-14 in the remote region of Mordovia, Tolokonnikova was forced to work in slave labour conditions for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, sewing police and military uniforms. She described the effect this kind of punishment has on people’s sense of self: within a short time it stripped her of her identity and made her lose any hope, agency or motivation. Her life became meaningless. It’s an experience she has not fully recovered from more than ten years later. Of course, Tolokonnikova’s real crime was to express her thoughts publicly about Putin’s corruption, mocking him in the process.

Our right to political protest is something we take for granted here in the UK. Amusing protest placard expression is like a national sport. But these rights are not set in stone and citizens of democratic countries must always be vigilant for their slow erosion — witness, for example, the current regressive laws on women’s reproductive rights in the USA at the moment.

.

Pussy Riot perform at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012. Photo: Philip Cosores

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In post-World War II Britain, national records began to reveal a concerning trend. Deaths by suicide were rising in the war-battered nation, an increase that

would continue from the end of the war into the early 1960s. Then, in 1963, that trend mysteriously reversed. The graphs began to teeter downward. Experts puzzled over the reasons behind this drop in the suicide rate. Was it the birth of the Samaritans counseling services in 1953? Was it better psychiatric services offered under the National Health Service? But the reality turned out to be something entirely unexpected.

In the early 20th century, domestic gas that was used to warm British homes and cook people’s dinners was made almost entirely by heating coal, which created a gas mixture imbued with a hefty dose of carbon monoxide. Consequently, ingestion of carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas oven became the most common method of suicide. In the early 1950s, new and cheaper methods of gas production were brought in—with a carbon monoxide content hovering near zero.

Suicides by domestic gas poisoning in the UK began to fall rapidly, bringing down the national suicide rate. Between 1963 and 1970, deaths by suicide fell by a quarter. By 1975, suicides by gas poisoning had pretty much disappeared. The experts were not quite sure what to make of this; could it really be that simple? A 1976 paper on the topic pondered how “the removal of a single agent of self-destruction can have had such far-reaching consequences.”

This question gets to the heart of what’s called “means restriction”—reducing access to methods people use to take their lives. Across the world, means restriction has had a huge impact. Over the past three decades, suicide rates have slowly and steadily dropped; between 2000 and 2016, the global mortality rate from suicide dropped by about 33 percent. So while it may feel like the world is crumbling into a war-torn, authoritarian shit show ravaged by rising temperatures and politicians who stand idly by, we can take solace in knowing that we’ve become better at preventing suicides

.

ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.

“I don’t have any meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” Leaning a little closer, as though she was telling me a secret, she continued:

Shall I tell you what I am? I’m strong. I can admit to myself and to you that there’s nothing left for me here. I’m more than ready to leave when it’s my time. In fact, it can’t come quickly enough.

I’ve interviewed many older people for research. Every so often, I’m struck by the sincerity with which some people feel that their life is completed. They seem tired of being alive.

I’m a member of of the European Understanding Tiredness of Life in Older People Research Network, a group of geriatricians, psychiatrists, social scientists, psychologists, and death scholars. We want to better understand the phenomenon and unpick what is unique about it. The network is also working on advice for politicians and healthcare practices, as well as caregiver and patient support.

Professor of care ethics Els van Wijngaarden and colleagues in the Netherlands listened to a group of older people who were not seriously ill, yet felt a yearning to end their lives. The key issues they identified in such people were: aching loneliness, pain associated with not mattering, struggles with self-expression, existential tiredness, and fear of being reduced to a completely dependent state.

.

mrmohock/Shutterstock

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________