In conversation with multiple posts going around discussing technical literacy and typing skillsâŠ
I HAD typing classes: my typing speed is less than 35 Words Per Minute
I did NOT have typing classes: my typing speed is less than 35 WPM
I HAD typing classes: my typing speed is 36-45 WPM
I did NOT have typing classes: my typing speed is 36-45 WPM
I HAD typing classes: my typing speed is 46-55 WPM
I did NOT have typing classes: my typing speed is 46-55 WPM
I HAD typing classes: my typing speed is 56-69 WPM
I did NOT have typing classes: my typing speed is 56-69 WPM
I HAD typing classes: my typing speed is faster than 70 WPM
I did NOT have typing classes: my typing speed is faster than 70 WPM
I'm on mobile/ vanilla extract option
Remaining time: 3 days 4 hours
âĄïž Take a typing test here (and you need an actual, physical keyboard for this):
The industry-standard benchmark used by employers and typing certifications worldwide.
âĄïž 'Typing classes' refers to computer skills classes you might have had in school; you can also count games or other related typing training your parents might have had you do.
âĄïž Across 3 different typing test websites*, the (english language) world average typing speed is 40 WPM.
if youre in the US (especially the northeast + michigan) i would avoid bagged salads/greens and generally wash your produce very thoroughly unless you want the diarrhea parasite
Michigan is experiencing its largest outbreak of a parasitic infection that causes severe diarrhea. Nearly 1,000 people have been diagnosed
this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.
try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.
there are UNVERIFIED rumors that the greens have been linked to a company that sources to taco bell. some locations have been actively pulling fresh ingredients like lettuce, avocado, and pico de gallo to mitigate the threat, so i would avoid any products from them just in case. considering how vast supply chains are, i'd be wary of any fast food greens in general for now.
also note this is a PARASITIC infection. most diarrhea-causing pathogens you expect to contaminate your greens are bacteria (e.g. e. coli and salmonella), which are a different domain of organism altogether. cyclospora is a protozoan, which is bigger and more complicated than a bacteria (for reference, malaria is also caused by a protozoan). bacterial diarrhea can be dangerous, but you might also expect to weather it and survive unscathed. do NOT fuck with PARASITIC contamination. you should be scared of this one!
Only high temperatures will kill cyclospora. It resides in what is like a shell, which is highly resistant to water and most cleaning chemicals. The substance it uses to cling to food is so strong we don't even fully know what its limits are. It may be best to avoid fruits and veggies you can't cook. Scrubbing only works if done hard enough and on foods with no hiding places (Like cucumbers and grapes). Peeling the skin off is your best bet at avoiding it however, scrubbing is not guaranteed.
Thank you OP for posting! Usually washing does work on most sicknesses, just not this one.
Extra note: this parasite can only be found in human feces, this food was contaminated due to a lack of bathrooms and washing stations on harvesting sites due to loosening enforcement of food safety regulations. This was more than preventable, we used to prevent it.
You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?
I expected my cpap machine to make a dramatic difference right away but after waking up from my first night on the machine I think the experience can be described as I woke up and thought âwell I donât think I feel dramatically different but it also definitely feels like something in there has been uncloggedâ
According to my app which no is not called cpapp unfortunately I only stopped breathing 1.7 times per hour. Which might sound weird but during my sleep apnea test I stopped breathing 23.5 times per hour so as you can imagine breathing is generally better than not breathing
Iâm not talking about my health just to overshare btw. I think thereâs probably other young people out there with sleep apnea who might need to hear someone in their 20s discussing this.
Donât feel ashamed to get tested if youâre tired all the time or someone has told you that you gasp for air in your sleep. Get your shower drain unclogged.
I'm 35 and I got tested for sleep apnea in the fall and I was having OVER 50 EVENTS PER HOUR.
Got my cpap and holy shit the difference. I am actually rested when I go to bed at a reasonable time. I no longer need daily 2-4 hour naps just to function.
And I also suspect that it might be helping me not get as many colds, because that nightly airflow clears things out.
I'm really glad I have my cpap now and everything is better, but also wish I had got tested earlier, because maybe if I'd caught this sooner I wouldn't have developed some of the other health issues I deal with. But I thought I was so tired all the time because I'm a parent and autistic.
So yeah, even if you think you know why you're always tired, get tested just in case.
how manual wheelchair users move (explainer for non-users)
frequently when iâm out and about with someone walking, they canât anticipate what path i will take and therefore theyâre in my way pretty frequently. this is fine! i can politely ask them to step to the side. but it makes me think about how little non-wheelchair users understand the way wheelchair users move. as someone who used to walk everywhere, it was an adjustment period for me to figure out how to navigate the world in a chair. here are some things that didnât occur to me so that you donât cut off your friend right as theyâre building momentum to go up a ramp đ
for context, i use an active manual chair. the world is very different in a power chair. even among active manual chair users, there is a huge diversity in physicality and strategies for getting around. this is a general guide that i think will apply to most manual wheelchair users. iâm starting super basic and getting more complicated as i go.
âââ
1. manual wheelchairs are a momentum game. it is very easy to maintain speed and direction. but speeding up, slowing down, or turning, is hard. one thing this affects is if weâre on a wavy sidewalk or other twisty-turny walkway, that is a pain in the ass and i am taking as straight a path as i can.
2. wheelchair users also have to pay attention to the slope and condition of the pavement, so our path somewhere will be different than yours, even if weâre taking the same route to the same place. for example, i usually have to go down slopes straight, not diagonally, to avoid tipping over sideways. one area this affects is crosswalks. many intersections have one curb cut for both roads you could cross, which means i will go down curb cuts to a crosswalk as if i am aiming for the middle of the intersection.
your path in orange, mine in blue. to you it seems indirect, but to me itâs the path of least resistance.
i also will be building speed in the second half of the crosswalk. this is a much easier way to tackle a ramp. if i approach with momentum, i wonât have to drag myself up the slope once i get to it.
3. building momentum and maintaining it is only half of the job. the other half is stopping. manual wheelchairs cannot stop on a dime if theyâre moving with any kind of speed. if i tried to stop immediately when going downhill, i would fly out of the chair. so donât walk right into the path of a wheelchair in motion and then stop! i will have to turn to the side very quickly and hope i donât tip. i canât tell you how often parents pushing strollers will stop their stroller directly in my path and then get offended when i am alarmed and turn sharply to avoid hitting their child. from their perspective, i was being careless and going âtoo fast.â in reality, normal walking speed takes a few feet to slow down from and stop.
4. in terms of slope. see this street in san francisco?
i canât go down this street, itâs way too steep. i would give myself friction burns on my palms trying to control my speed. if i was in a situation where there was no avoiding this street, like in an emergency, i would be breaking my straight-slope rule and zig-zagging in the middle of the road.
this would require several zig-zags back and forth, more than the four that i drew. i also could not go up this road other than with this method. up or down, i risk tipping over sideways if iâm not careful.
4. in a similar vein, consider terrain. slopes with grass or carpet take huge amounts of energy to get up. this grassy hill isnât insurmountable, but it would take me like thirty minutes to get up there. honestly i would probably go backwards, because itâs easier to pull yourself up a slope than push yourself.
other types of terrain can be completely immobilizing, though. this decorative gravel pathway is beautiful, and inaccessible to me. my casters (front wheels) simply will not go through that.
5. in terms of walkways and obstacles. if thereâs a deep gap in the pavement lined up the way iâm going, and itâs, say, an inch wide, that is an obstacle for me. my casters are one inch wide, and my back wheels are an inch and a half. iâll get stuck in it like a train on a track.
i have to straddle this, even if it means being too close to the middle of the sidewalk and preventing us from walking side by side.
similarly, if a crack is greater than an inch high, iâm gonna wheelie over it. at two inches, i have to. a wheelie may require a change in speed, either faster or slower depending on the person.
i have 4 inch casters, so a lip as little as 2 inches will stop me in my tracks. a lip as little as one inch, hit with any speed, can knock my casters out of square. casters can get knocked out of alignment pretty easily depending on the chair. iâd rather not have to pull out an allen wrench and a level, so iâm gonna wheelie.
this happened when i hit about a 1.5â lip on a pavement crack when i was going downhill at maybe 3mph.
6. putting it all together. see how diagonal this crack is?
this is another situation where i have to go straight relative to the slope. because that crack is wide, it will probably also require a wheelie. if i tried to approach that straight relative to the sidewalk, my left caster would get up the slope, iâd wheelie, then my right caster would land in the crack. i have to go this way.
(also lol at the trash can blocking the curb cut)
these are just a few things to keep in mind when walking about with a wheelchair user! ofc the best strategy always is just to listen when someone asks you to move out of their way đ but i think being able to anticipate movement a little better will help it seem less random. feel free to ask any questions!
i literally love saying "ON IT BOSS!!!!!" whenever someone asks me to do something like i'm some sort of henchman. it doesn't matter if they're my boss or not for real even because in the moment they are, and whatever they requested of me i'm on it
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But Iâm a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So Iâm posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet â it just poured straight out of my fingers â so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but youâll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. Itâs often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you donât know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film â when you hear a word you donât know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things youâve already learned. Thatâs why itâs best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go âHey! I recognize that!â This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think itâs not that important⊠because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just donât worry if you donât understand everything thatâs going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you canât 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of whatâs going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but youâre not actively studying when youâre doing passive exposure. Remember the two things youâre trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff youâve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You canât learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesnât need to be the âActive Learningâ kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the âPassive Exposureâ kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you donât enjoy, because you wonât benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you donât understand at the beginning. But A) thatâs good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but Iâm not sure if itâs still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess whatâs going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (Iâve written a whole post about the latter here.) You donât need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a âYMMVâ piece of advice, but: if youâre having trouble memorizing stuff, just donât. Donât bother trying to remember anything. Remember that âpassive exposureâ bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again â but youâd be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so thereâs nothing wrong with it. But I notice that itâs often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once youâve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge youâve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone whoâs a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Donât underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether itâs narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess thatâs not technically âtalking to yourselfâ), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, itâs actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And thatâs about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
Chronic illness sucks because youâll catch yourself thinking shit like âI wish it was possible to bathe regularlyâ or âthey should invent a digestive system that doesnât hurtâ and then realise⊠thatâs actually the case for most people. Thatâs the norm. Not only do most people have that, they donât even think about it
The other day I told a friend of mine that I never forget to take my ADHD meds because I fucking love my ADHD meds. I'm in my late 30s, I didn't finally get a diagnosis and meds until less than two years ago, and they have changed my entire life.
And he raised his eyebrow at me. We'd been discussing addictive medications a few minutes before, like the Tramadol I finally got from the pain specialist to take once a week or so to give me a break from my chronic pain, so I reassured him that methylpenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) is not addictive (at least not in people with ADHD).
His response? To raise his eyebrow even harder and say "Well it sure SOUNDS like it's addictive!"
And I had to explain to this man - who works in a healthcare related job by the way - that just because medication makes you feel good and helps you, just because you look forward to taking it, that doesn't make it addictive or dangerous. And he wasn't convinced.
The simple fact that I was excited to take a daily pill that has literally changed my life, after decades of fighting to get that medication, made him think I shouldn't be taking it so often. That it must inherently be dangerous.
I'm not even in America, but I'm pretty sure this attitude began there and then spread over here to Europe. This Puritan idea of "if something feels good, you must beware of it. Pleasure is dangerous, it is sinful, it is addiction, it is evil."
I know too many people who subconsciously believe that pleasure = addictive = dangerous = bad. Joy is a slippery slope to hell.
So here is your reminder for today that you don't need to be afraid of feeling good. If something improves your life, use it. Even if it is addictive - learn what that addiction means, whether the addiction is inherently dangerous or not, and whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and risks.
My ADHD meds are, in fact, not addictive. But I will take them every day because they make my life orders of magnitude easier. I will enjoy them every time I take them.
My tramadol is addictive. I will still take it. I will keep it on a schedule to avoid becoming addicted, primarily because addiction in this case would mean reduced effectiveness. But I am not afraid of my painkillers. They are life changing.
Take your meds, everyone. Don't let anyone scare you away from doing something that improves your life.
There is something so sinister about the idea that a medication made to improve your life cannot be trusted if it improves your life so much that you like taking it. Bleh.
It puts this weird moral obligation on suffering. Like if youâre actually comfortable with yourself and your treatment youâre somehow failing. That you need to be ashamed somehow that the medication helps you and need to be looking for alternatives.
But you donât. You found a solution that worked great and then you moved on to something else.
