I don't know about the guy in that specific incident, but in my case he was apparently healthy with no health complications, having had regular checkups on top of the mandatory ones (to be able to frequent a gym). This is the scary part for me.
In his late 30s. If he was, say, in his 50s or 60s this wouldn't have weirded me out as much. Could have been an anatomical defect or something like that, not caught by the regular checkups? Who knows...
Something similar happened at the gym I went to years ago, although I wasn't there when it happened. The poor guy collapsed while lifting weights. WEIGHTS. I kept reluctantly going for a few days before stopping. Then on the radio I heard about a guy collapsing while running on the treadmill, just like your fellow gymgoer, and it was the last drop in the bucket that kept me from doing any exercise other than slow to moderately paced walks. The prospect of collapsing from something that should make me healthier terrifies me.
It’s well known that exercise is beneficial for overall health. Sure, some people die doing it just like some people die doing literally anything else.
Consider he was in his late 30s, which makes this even more absurd. For all I know, as you suggest, he could've also collapsed from doing heavy house chores or renovation, and it's something I've been careful not to overdo as well for that same fear.
1. Spite/damage a community for perceived or effective injustice/discrimination. I remember this happening on Reddit and Stack Overflow circa 2010-2014.
2. Actually a neurodivergent person mistaken for a troll. I remember this happening on HN. Remember him being either schizophrenic or autistic. Another example might have been the creator of Temple OS.
Annoying that I have to wait to get accepted before seeing details about the files. I'm not planning to download them but was just interested in knowing their size.
Maybe it's because I am experimenting with improving my posture through small and gradual optimizations, but I expected the article to be about small optimizations in your life, rather than code.
I've noticed the same thing but I don't remember it being so prevalent up until a few years ago. This is sad and as you rightly suggest it stifles curious conversations. I had to self-censor myself a few times already.
Isn't there a theory that writing medium effects scripts? IE the angles of Runes lended themselves well to carving. And something about left-to-right scripts was to avoid smudging.
So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel.
Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.
I don’t think it’s a myth at all. Arabic was written with a reed pen or ‘qalam’ [0], and that can certainly be seen in the modern script (e.g. [1], to take the first random example I found). But its ‘joined-up’ nature seems to have been a regional style — it’s also found in scripts like Syriac, Avestan, Mandaic, Manichaean, and even the delightfully bizarre Bactrian Greek (there’s some nice samples in [2]).
There might be some stretches of imagination there, but the base is solid - cuneiform writing was definitely formed by the medium (pressing a cut reed into clay).
Agree with you except that the value in studying ancient thinkers and intellectuals is also in recognising patterns and seeing how they probably recognised patterns too.
Yes, I totally agree. I'm just saying that one should be skeptical about their conclusions because they didn't have access to much of the knowledge we have today. (William James in particular I have seen cited by religious people in support of religious arguments. He may have been a really smart guy, and there might be a lot to learn by studying him, but he just didn't know the things we know today -- no one did in his day -- and so it's not surprising that he got a lot of things wrong, including his answer to the titular question. We are in fact automata. Very, very sophisticated automata, but automata nonetheless.)
