Theophile Escargot @TheoEsc@mastodon.social

Compromised smartphones and computers used to plant evidence for a fake conspiracy:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/august/totally-concocted

Wonder if clothes retailers are regretting vanity sizing. Still can't try anything on, I'd be buying new trousers if there wasn't about a 6-inch range of alleged waist sizes that might fit me.

Feels like the Trolley Problem was supposed to demonstrate "my system of beliefs leads to absurd & horrific conclusions so I must rethink my beliefs" but has ended up "My system of beliefs leads to absurd and horrific conclusions, aren't I tough for sticking with it anyway"

TIL the "Trolley Problem" was invented by Phillipa Foot to demonstrate the flaws in Consequentialism and illustrate why we should not aways sacrifice the few for the good of the many
https://figsinwinter.medium.com/stoic-q-a-would-epictetus-save-his-mother-or-two-strangers-fd5edbc4eddf
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philippa-foot/#ApplEthi

American Cars Are Now Almost As Big As the Tanks That Won WWII
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxzg/american-cars-are-now-almost-as-big-as-the-tanks-that-won-wwii

On the train with kid to see my mother for the first time in over a year. Looking forward to it but travelling is stressful after so long. Especially when they only announce the platform at big, busy station 3 minutes before train is due to leave.

The ACOUP history blog is up to Part 4 of "The Queen's Latin":
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/
"Rome was diverse. It was ethnically diverse. It was religiously diverse. It was linguistically diverse. It was culturally diverse. And, yes, though this mattered much less to the Romans than it seems to matter to us, it was color-diverse."

There's a Harris-Benedict formula for your Base Metabolic Rate which is:
Women BMR = 655 + (9.6 X weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in cm) – (4.7 x age in yrs)
Men BMR = 66 + (13.7 X weight in kg) + (5 x height in cm) – (6.8 x age in yrs)
So even at the same weight I'm burning >100 calories per day less than I did in college.
https://steelfitusa.com/blogs/health-and-wellness/calculate-tdee

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It can't really be more than a few seconds per week, but feels like I'm spending a lot of time and mental effort deleting full stops/periods from the ends of short messages since apparently they freak out young people

Had a good 10k tempo run today. Nearly a minute faster than my disappointing recent race time, though this course is flatter. Still a lot slower than I used to be but at least I'm going in the right direction. #running

Neat hoax: When the Russians realised they wouldn't beat America to the Moon, they hooked up a transmitter to an unmanned probe and freaked out NASA by chatting as if planning a manned landing
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/07/17/ventriloquism/

AskHistorians comment rebuts the idea that the original Nazis paradoxically benefited from "restrictions on their free speech": https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/og7p07/weimar_germany_had_laws_against_hate_speech/h4ixh4q/

No more fake strikes: https://portside.org/2019-08-24/no-more-fake-strikes "It’s time to put some standards in place. These are incredibly weak standards, but standards nonetheless. The test of whether to promote a call for a general strike is whether you individually can get at least ten of your co-workers to commit to striking."

It didn't work, not sure if it was the wrong Zoom room or the teacher didn't notice. Fed up with scrambling to do multiple things at once and just doing everything badly.

Dammit, had to mute myself and jump out of a meeting to start a school Zoom call, but left it saying "The host will let you in soon" and no idea if it will start working.