All of those may be correlated to the rise in obesity. I see no evidence that any of them is causal. I don't even think all of them are correlated, honestly. The rise in the number of calories available certainly is, but cars and suburbs have been around longer than that. And the rise in calories may just be a response to increased demand.
What evidence do you have that it is a cultural shift, rather than, say, a chemical in the environment that wasn't there before, or a difference in the food supply?
If you're not vegetarian, I recommend looking into heme iron. It's a lot more bioavailable, even more than iron bisglycinate, and in my experience it's much easier on the GI tract.
Yes, exactly. I don't object; it's salutary to find out you don't know anything about topic X. It's just disconcerting after having read and understood an article purporting to explain topic X.
Do you mean “simpler” or do you mean “more accurate”? I’m quite willing to accept your explanation as more accurate, but it is not simpler, at least if you don’t know much about modern cryptography. To understand the article, all I needed was some algebra. I think my 13-year-old could mostly get it. To try to understand your second paragraph here, I’ve spent about fifteen minutes so far looking things up (starting with the definition of “block cipher” and ending somewhere about halfway through the Wikipedia article on AES) and I have a sense of its meaning in the abstract, but if there’s a quiz tomorrow I’m in trouble.
If you really were going for “simpler” rather than “more accurate” then I regret to inform you that you have joined the “monoid in the category of endofunctors” guy in room 2501 of the xkcd building.
I read and understood the article, including the math in it, then came here (I know, that’s the wrong order) and read your comment, and promptly decided I knew less than I did before I started. It was very much like learning to use a monad in Haskell without knowing category theory, and then reading an article about them. Just because you understand an article written for the educated general public doesn’t mean you have the vocabulary to understand experts speaking to other experts.
I have a decent intuition for what a hash function does after twenty years of encountering them in the wild. I don't even know what a block cipher is. I understand hash functions less after reading this than I did before. My conclusion is that a hash function is just a block cipher in the category of endofunctors.
I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.
There's a reason AI uses things like em dashes and parallel structure and groups of three (catch me doing it here too). It's good writing. (Also varied sentence length.) AI trained on good writing uses the outward structure of good writing.
Hm. Well, congratulations on being the first man to mansplain menstruation to me. Somebody already knocked out breastfeeding years ago. Pregnancy is still up for grabs, if any men out there want to take a whack at telling me what that's like.
I appreciate that you've educated yourself about these issues, but let me assure you from decades of personal experience and conversations with other women that it is useful to be notified when your period is going to start.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. It's important enough that she has it set up to share that data to both of you, but it's so unimportant she doesn't need a notification for it?
This is a strawman argument. Nobody is arguing that period apps are a necessity. Women have been tracking our periods without computers since prehistoric times. Women were doing rocket science calculations before computers, for that matter. Of course we can do without period apps. But they're more useful than any other health tracking device or app that I can think of.
I've never used Flo specifically, so I don't know what kind of data analysis it has available, but period data is the #1 most useful health data to have an app crunch for you, and "your period starts tomorrow" is a pretty darn useful notification to get.