Physics Girl breakfast pancake recipe (2025-01-29)
This page has moved to https://riceissa.github.io/physics-girl-pancakes/
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Latest posts
Why use Computer Modern for mathematical typesetting? (2024-10-06)
It fairly clearly distinguishes some similar-looking characters like the lowercase “v” and the Greek letter nu: v vs ν , lowercase “a” vs Greek alpha: a vs α . The parentheses are a bit taller so without any special effort (e.g. the use of \left(\right) it encloses subscripts and superscripts). e.g. see ( a 3 5 ) . It emulates the look of classical mathematics papers and textbooks. Perhaps math…
The irony of LaTeX (2024-09-12)
(taking some notes here; i want to organize this better at some point) The Computer Modern font was never intended to look so thin. But because the font program that Knuth designed (Metafont) was so complicated to use, almost no one adjusted the “blacker” parameter of the font to a suitable value for their printer (actually this is not quite right; if you take a look at modes.mf that comes with…
What I think about various chronic illness labels (2024-05-22)
There are quite a number of labels people use for the name of their chronic illness. On this page, I discuss some of the ones I encounter the most as well as some of my own. Why do I care about labels? For a few reasons: For better or worse, labels are used as a rallying cry to try to get governmental (and other) organizations to conduct research on the illnesses. I may still benefit from research…
Software I use (2024-04-30)
This page lists software that I currently use. Firefox for web browsing. I prefer Firefox because it does a better job of remembering pages I have visited in the past, which is important for me. (Chrome seems to have a short memory, and many things don’t show up when I type it in the address bar.) Anki for spaced repetition Windows 10 on laptop, and Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable on server KeePassXC…
How I take nystatin (2024-03-29)
Because of a swallowing problem that I have, I can’t swallow pills, even using the standard techniques people use. Nystatin was one of the few medications that is (1) extremely bitter, (2) I didn’t happen to get compounded (I think it’s covered by insurance if you just get the normal tablets, but otherwise I’d have to pay a bunch of money out of pocket), and (3) comes in tablet (rather than…
How I significantly improved my sleep schedule (2024-03-13)
In late December 2023, I finally figured out a system for maintaining decent circadian rhythm. The system has been working reliably for 2.5 months now. Previously, I had been going to sleep anywhere from 1am to 3am and waking up around 10:30am to 11am. Now, I go to sleep anywhere from 11pm to midnight, and wake up anywhere from 8am to 9am. (This is in winter at northern USA latitude.) On this…
What is the point of Lisp? (2024-03-02)
(originally written on 2023-12-27) i hate lisp, especially lisp-2, but even lisp-1, because my brain doesn’t want to understand quote . what follows is some introspection i did to understand quote better; by the end i had a deeper appreciation of what the point of lisp was, and some thoughts on how to improve it. i think the thing that’s weird about scheme is that in most languages, many…
My Haskell learning (2024-03-01)
This page documents my Haskell learning. I have been interested in Haskell for a long time but have not managed to really dive deep into it. I think I first became interested in it in 2013 or 2014. I don’t exactly remember, but what drew me to it is some combination of (1) my interest in abstract math; (2) hearing good things about functional programming and Haskell in particular; and (3) wanting…
Buteyko community and learned helplessness (2024-02-25)
I am still not super deep into Buteyko stuff, so my views could change, but I currently believe that there’s some learned helplessness going on in the Buteyko community, specifically in regard to the use of capnometers. Konstantin Buteyko himself extensively used a device called the “combine-complexator” that measured end-tidal CO 2 levels, among a bunch of other things. When the machines were…
Buteyko breathing in the West (2024-02-25)
This article is pretty interesting. It’s written by Buteyko’s wife, and basically argues that while in Russia the Buteyko method eventually came to be respected, in the West, randos stole the Buteyko brand and went off to teach their own watered-down stuff with garbled theory as a money-making scheme, so Western mainstream doctors rightly rejected the version of Buteyko that they saw. Patrick…
Quotes (2024-02-12)
This page keeps track of some quotes I’ve especially liked over the years (not all of the quotes speak to me currently, but I won’t remove any of them). It started out as the “favorite quotes” section on my Facebook profile, but I moved it to my website because I’m afraid Facebook will get rid of that section at some point (as it did with religion and political affiliation). In a useful…
Analysis of Howard Cooper air hunger videos (2024-01-31)
Howard Cooper has two videos about anxiety-based air hunger and how to overcome it. I think the first video is great (although it doesn’t mention all the details I consider essential), but the second video is pretty misleading (although it tries quite hard to fill in the details missing from the first video in a way that is not scary to non-technical people). On this page, I will analyze both…
Sequence of cumulative constraints of breathing practice (2024-01-16)
This page has been moved to https://riceissa.github.io/breathing/#sequence-of-cumulative-constraints-of-breathing-practice . See also perspectives on focusing on the breath
Perspectives on focusing on the breath (2024-01-16)
Warning: I’ve barely ever meditated in my entire life (I’ve maybe done like 10-100 hours total of focusing on my breath over my whole life, mostly during anxiety attacks where I am too anxious to actually do anything like what meditation books tell you to do), so everything I say below is just my own naive observations. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve encountered and adopted a few…
Anki templates (2023-11-21)
Here’s the main template I use in Anki . Below, “Notes” is just an extra field I like to use for extra notes (e.g. source of where I got the info in the card, or non-essential things that are still useful to have, or questions I have). Front: <div id="front">{{#Tags}}{{Tags}}: {{/Tags}}{{Front}}</div> <script type="text/javascript"> var fonts = ["Arial", "Helvetica", "Charter", "Georgia", "Times",…
How to wake up at a reasonable hour (2023-10-01)
NOTE: this page is wrong. it describes a method that kinda sorta worked for me but was swimming against the current so i kept failing nonetheless. fixing my lighting effortlessly fixed my sleep schedule in 1–3 days depending on which parts you look at. i hope to write about the new method soon. My sleep schedule has often been quite bad. Here’s a method I’ve been using in March 2023 that has been…
Anki prompt-writing links (2023-08-23)
NOTE: I’ve now created https://www.reddit.com/r/FlashcardCrafting/ which has many more links. Some resources I’ve found useful for Anki prompt-writing: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics https://www.patrickstevens.co.uk/posts/2020-10-23-anki-learning/…
Objective measures of health (2023-08-08)
What does it mean for a measurement to be objective? Basically, it shouldn’t depend on how awful the symptom feels . My memory isn’t great for remembering the intensity of bad experiences, and maybe my reactions will change over time as get better at handling the problem or if I’m in a psychologically vulnerable state. I’d like to come up with measurements that can help me compare across a span of…
Spaced repetition prompt lenses (2023-07-22)
In his guide on writing prompts , Andy Matuschak lists five lenses for writing prompts: Attributes and tendencies Similarities and differences Parts and wholes Causes and effects Significance and implications Here I want to brainstorm some more lenses, in line with my reflections on five years of conceptual Anki where I said I wanted to be more methodical about my memory practice. Having a list of…
Reflections on five years of conceptual Anki (2023-07-16)
It’s been about 5 years now since I’ve been using Anki in a pretty determined, conceptual way (not the kind of casual, vocab-centric approach I was doing back in like 2012–2014). What has happened in those years? I’d summarize my timeline as something like: mid 2018 – mid 2019: focus was on getting back in the swing of using Anki at all, and using it to learn math. Learning math was what I was…
List of things I have tried for my chronic illness (2023-07-16)
some overly specific tips that may help you if you have a chronic illness similar to mine. at the time of writing i don’t have any official diagnosis for my condition (other than testing positive on SIBO breath tests, testing positive on a bunch of environmental and food allergies, ), but i suspect it’s some combination of MCAS, Sjogren’s syndrome, POTS, SIBO, and maybe more. note: i moved this to…
Introspective feedback system (2023-07-16)
(terrible name; will try to figure something better out later) I currently have four software systems I use that all share a similar property: a goals spreadsheet Anki GnuCash alarm clocks on my phone that I use in a particular way (see how to wake up at a reasonable hour ) All four have the property that they are essentially “bookkeeping” in some sense. They help to track things for me, and…
Anki (2023-07-16)
Here are some Anki-related things I have written: Ramblings about my experience using Anki Resetting ease factor for a deck in Anki An implementation of the Anki scheduling algorithm Comment thread on LessWrong Imagining a world where spaced repetition is commonplace https://wiki.issarice.com/wiki/Category:Spaced_repetition https://github.com/riceissa/spaced-inbox A few technical fixes progress on…
Long-run Anki review load (2023-07-09)
(I like to think of the calculations done on this page as the “ curse of spaced repetition ”: if you keep adding a constant number of cards per day to Anki, your review load will grow (logarithmically) over time, meaning as the years go by you will have more and more work to do every day just to keep up with your existing knowledge.) Let’s say you add c cards to Anki per day. To simplify…
Morning routine (2023-07-07)
I wake up without an alarm after exactly 8 hours of sleep, feeling fully rested and excited to start my day. I immediately get out of bed, drink a glass of water, then go to the bathroom and pee. I then go to the kitchen to prepare a delicious breakfast (toast with eggs, oatmeal, and/or sliced fruits, depending on the day) and a cup of coffee. I sit at my desk and crank out some ideas in a paper…
Vision statement (2023-07-07)
Prompts: if i were to die today, what document could i leave that would allow people to implement the vision i had while i was still alive? what document could i write right now that would minimize the differences between (1) a world a thousand years from now in which i remain alive for all of those 1000 years, and (2) a world a thousand years from now but one where i disappeared from it tomorrow?…
Death planning (2023-07-07)
Where I try to figure out what I should do in case I don’t live for much longer. cryonics – possibly already fucked this one up will – need to do more research vision statement
Intuitive nutrition case studies (2023-06-09)
For what I mean by “intuitive nutrition”, see this fairly introductory post (see also here ). On this page, I try to collect case studies of people eating in this way and the ways in which it’s helped (or harmed!) them. Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s thread about MealSquares and V8 Qiaochu Yuan on electrolytes, see here for instance but he’s talked about this in a bunch of places. I used to get a lot of…
uBlock Origin filters for Tao Analysis Solutions (2023-05-02)
It probably goes against wordpress.com’s terms of service to give instructions on how to have an ad-free experience on my blog, Tao Analysis Solutions . But what happens outside of the blog is outside of WordPress’s control. So here’s my recommended uBlock Origin filters: taoanalysis.wordpress.com##.noskim.marketing-bar taoanalysis.wordpress.com##.site-header:style(position: relative !important;…