It's likely to be a quiet day of posting as I'm planning to spend the day boardgaming with some friends. We'll see if plans change or not.
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This is a test of making posts from my blog to both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Edit:
Success!
I intend to give myself control over which to post to, but right now it defaults to both. I'm not bringing the bot posts over to Bluesky because I feel strongly about being able to delete them automatically, but we're on our way.
The base PHP came from James Cridland's blog. It's rudimentary for just posting text for now, but we'll get there for the rest.
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"Better Ways Than BMI to Measure Obesity"
There is a reality to data and that is that most commonly a data point is meaningless without context. Whether that context is historical (the data is going up! the data is going down!) or context of additional variables. For example, someone telling you a weather forecast is useless without knowing where they are forecasting. Usually the answer is locally based, but if you turn on the news and hear about the blizzard that is coming, but you look outside and it is sunny with no clouds in the sky and no snow on the ground, well, this might need some clarification.
BMI is another example of this. The basis of the ranges were determined from white men, and then extrapolated to other genders and races. And also without context to underlying causes of obesity. The AMA is attempting to get physicians to decrease their usage of BMI as a standalone measurement and instead put forward other things, such as direct measuring of body fat, etc.
But now BMI should be given much less importance, the American Medical Association (AMA) says. Last month the leading physician's group recommended that practitioners de-emphasize BMI because it can get weight-related health risks wrong, especially when used as the sole diagnostic tool. The policy announcement also noted that BMI, originally developed from data on non-Hispanic white men, has played a role in perpetuating "racist exclusion" and causing "historical harm" by misidentifying the weight status of people in many racial and ethnic minority groups.
In discussing what to use in place of BMI:
That's essentially a tape measure around the waist. And the American Heart Association uses it to classify abdominal obesity at 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men, right?
Correct. But we should avoid repeating past mistakes by relying on waist circumference instead of directly measuring body fat. Like BMI, the standard cutoff values for waist circumference are based on white populations, so they may not be universally applicable. Waist circumference does not consider variations in height either, which is why incorporating additional measures such as waist-to-height ratio is important for a comprehensive assessment.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach for diagnosing obesity. It's a complex disease and should be assessed using multiple measures.
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So apparently this blog's newsletter has been flagged and is under review for abusing the system. I'm fairly confident it will be cleared and something in how I generate it has gotten it flagged. It's not like this is a mass mailing, the newsletter subscribers are still in the single digits.
It might be the final straw which forces me off tinyletter though. I've been planning to move to a new platform for the newsletter, but I just haven't taken the time to do it. What I had worked and it was just something I could do for some added tools and API access, etc. If they do decide I've broken their rules somehow, well - that would be motivation.
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Opened my Threads account, and poked around on it some. Nothing that made me immediately fall in love with it. We will see how it goes I guess. I'm @trickjarrett over there.
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Founder of Mastodon answers questions about Threads
The finishing paragraph outlines his stance on it:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
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To Delete your Threads account means Deleting your Instagram account as a whole
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I'm currently listening to 'How to be Perfect' by Michael Schur as an audiobook, and he mentioned this resource as one they used during The Good Place.
How to Be Perfect by
Automated Archives for July, 5th 2023
This post was automatically generated
Chess For the Day
Record: 1-0-1
Net Elo Change: 0
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- 2022-07-05 (10 posts)
I realize this means I am not the target demographic, but the fact Threads has no desktop access right now guarantees I won't be making it my primary platform yet.
Syncronizing between Ebooks and Audiobooks
One feature I dearly wish existed outside of the Kindle/Audible system was how they syncronized your reading an ebook and listening to an audiobook. Most of the time, this isn't a thing for me. If I listen to an audiobook, I don't also read it as an ebook. And in fact, usually, I don't want to.
But "How to be Perfect", which I mentioned earlier, is an audiobook that I do have the epub (ebook file) for, and I wish I could have that syncronization.
I've been thinking if there is a way to do this, using AI transcription from the audiobook to point to the ebook sections. I definitely don't have the time or skill to delve into it, but it seems like something which we're on the cusp of being able to solve quite easily.