Baryonic Musings

There has been a small development since I published my post " On Bullying among Young Boys. " Every year we ask the school to place our son Daniel in a different classroom than his two bullies, but this year there's a designated class for the advanced kids and both our son and his primary bully, Michael, are in it. The placement overrode our request, which we didn't know about until the start of school. At first we were worried, but Michael, being a cunning bully, learned long ago to not conduct his bullying in front of adults and so behaves relatively well at school. Daniel also tends to play inside now and so does not encounter Michael or Robert with any frequency outside of school.  But he did meet them at the nearby playground last month. I was there to watch, to be sure Michael and Robert didn't try to pull anything. Our son was playing with some other, younger children when the two of them showed up. They asked him and another boy to play a four-person base...

This is a link to a copy of Stirling Newberry's The Fourth Republic, outlining the different constitutional governments of the United States of America, from its founding to ~2001. The current year (2024) falls within the greatly overextended Liberal Democracy, which normally would have ended circa 2000 but has carried on, mostly because the population bulge of the baby boom is still around and in charge (and they're still around because people, on average, live much longer than they used to). The longer it extends itself, the more reactionary it gets, and the 2024 presidential election will decide if we get another four years of it with the possibility of a calamitous end to the cycle, or if we finally start whatever the next cycle may be. An excellent, and highly recommended read .

My suggested recipe (single serving size): ~62.5 g flour (heat treated for 5 - 7 min at 350F, flour temp must be at least 160F) 2 Tbsp sugar 1/4 tsp salt 1 cup whole milk** 1 cup plain full fat Greek yogurt 1/2 tsp vanilla extract 1 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit Add maple syrup to taste  About a week ago, @ygrene.bsky.social posted a joke about drinking a waffle batter smoothie to gross out a coworker. And my brain ran with it. I've made safe edible cookie dough in the past, why not edible waffle batter? Aside from taste, texture, and the general inhumanity of the idea, why not? So I did. I started with a solid waffle recipe from my favorite baking recipe website, Sugar Spun Run . The ingredients are as follows: 250 g flour 3 Tbsp sugar 2 Tbsp corn starch 2 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 3/4 tsp salt 2 cups buttermilk 2 large eggs 1 tsp vanilla extract 4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit To make this safer to eat raw: 250 g flour (heat treated fo...

My most recent attempt at the potato diet ended in failure*, but I still want to find a way to shed some weight while maintaining or possibly gaining muscle strength. After New Year's this year, I counted calories pretty strictly for about two weeks and lost some weight, but gave up and gained the weight back. After looking around some Reddit forums on how weightlifters "cut" weight, I came up with a plan: Calorie counting, but lead with protein, and reduce the variety of food initially so I can easily keep up with the calories. Over time, as I get a better sense for how much of what I can eat, I'll expand the variety of foods. Based on my size and activity levels, I probably need to consume ~3200 calories/day to maintain weight. I'm aiming for ~2,500 /day with this diet, with 200+ grams of protein/day. How? I'm starting out with a spreadsheet to track calories and protein consumption daily, expanding the entries based on what I eat: Each day starts out at bre...

My observations here are of early childhood bullying among boys, roughly ages 4 to 10, and may apply less for older kids/teens, among girls, etc. My observations also don’t apply to budding psychopaths or those with severe personality disorders, who may have some genetic predisposition to violence and bullying, or in any case are extreme outliers.  Veils of Silence “Oh, that’s right. You get to go through all that now.” –An elderly neighbor, when I mentioned our son was being bullied. When my wife became pregnant with our first child, she learned that there was a veil of silence surrounding many of the day-to-day aspects of being pregnant and giving birth, and this veil was only lifted for you once you became pregnant and were in the presence of other women who’d been through it. Then, the stories and cautions and warnings about the whole experience began. This wasn’t a coordinated effort on the part of every mother she knew, but a silent cultural expectation she didn’t know ...

 The following is a companion to the more general document titled “On Bullying among Young Boys,” and provides a description of the behaviors of my son’s primary bully and his sidekick. This is the best summary of what’s happened between Michael, Robert, and Daniel that I can assemble. Given what my wife, Lisa, and I have witnessed, confirmation of some events from a few others, and the physical and emotional toll it’s taken on Daniel, I suspect I’m quite close to the truth. My goal, as always, is to figure out the truth. These are all just kids involved here, and they need help changing their behaviors for the better.   Cast: There’s a lot of people, so I’ll try to write “Michael’s father” etc. as often as possible. All names are changed. Daniel. Our son. His parents are Lisa and I. His little sister is Erin. Michael Thompson. A cunning bully. His parents are Samantha and John. Robert Henderson. Michael’s sidekick. His parents are William and Caroline. His little ...