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It's Potato Time Again!

I last tried the potato diet in September 2022 and it worked great, losing ~23 pounds in 21 days. Here I go again. For those not familiar, the diet was "formalized" in a sense by @mold_time on Twitter as a means to explore the causes of the obesity epidemic in Western countries. Sporadic reports of people who ate a diet consisting mostly or solely of potatoes indicated notable weight loss without ill health effects, and a number of possible causes have been hypothesized. From my own experience, I strongly suspect this diet works entirely through calorie and salt restriction. Lower calorie burns fat, lower salt releases retained water, though most of the water weight changes seem to occur in the first week or so. I believe this diet is high satiation, low temptation, and low calorie, which is why it can work for many people. That said, it's probably not a sustainable diet in the long term. My body: My body plan is best described as heavy mesomorph. I'm 6'1", h
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Making Great Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've become known among friends in our neighborhood as a great baker, though restricted to cookies and pies so far. The last couple times I made chocolate chip cookies I was been told by multiple enthusiastic people that I should open a bakery. This bragging isn't to puff me up in your eyes, readers. I'm building myself up a bit to let you down, to let you know that there's no magic to it and that I just use good tools, a good process, and follow the recipe, with one or two tiny modifications. Yes, you too can make amazing chocolate chip cookies! Now, how? If you bake, you probably already have some or all of the tools. Here's what you need: Item 1: Get the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies recipe. It's available here . Yes, we're using the recipe on the bag. Item 2: Acquire four medium-sized cookie sheets or shallow baking pans. You should ideally be able to fit two of them in the oven side-by-side. This is just to keep the assembly line moving faste
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Late 2023 Ignition on Exoplanet Project

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Finally got back to my exoplanet generator project this past week after a ~six month hiatus. I'm still on the galaxy generation portion, and am ready to abuse some tables and figures from the literature. But in a responsible way. Quick digression: There are broadly two ways to approach generation and simulation of physical systems such as galaxies, stars, and planets. The first, more rigorous and scientific approach, is to define the starting parameters, equations of state, and environmental influences and run a time-evolving simulation of the system itself. This is what real scientists do and get published in real journals. This is the domain of dark matter and galactic hierarchical merging simulations, of detailed simulations of planetary interiors, and of climate models. A mostly bottom-up approach that allows the simulation to take on a life of it's own, with some tweaking of parameter and modeling choices. The second way varies from "rigorous enough" to all out h
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