Small thoughts

2025-11-03

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Some thoughts I've had in the last month or so.

Throughout this month, I've had some political musings, but I am loathe to write about them, since they are not always left-aligned I suppose. This invites confrontation (thinking in terms of my friends), which I do not like.

But conversation and debate is good! If you find what I say disagreeable, I hope we can have a good faith conversation about them! I write with some convinction, but that is not to imply stubborness.

Also most of these are quite negative I feel. I suppose I don't like writing negative feelings, so they accumulate in my "thoughts" backlog and this entry was a means to clear that up, as it were. For this, I can only apologize!

The thoughts

Does my water bottle infinitely accumulate creatine if I don't finish it? Will I have super-creatine solution, if I'm lazy about finishing it?

Some baseline facts: My water bottle has capacity $b > 0$ . Whenever I refill my waterbottle, I add $a > 0$ of creatine to the water bottle and always refill it to capabity $b$ .

Actually, the answer to my question is obvious. If I never drink and always "refill", I will always be adding creatine and always making the solution more concentrated. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to prove this.

But let's refine our goal a bit. How much can I drink before I drop the concentration, for any given concentration?

Suppose my water bottle has some concentration $X_{i} = \frac{x}{y}$ . Note that $X_{0} = \frac{a}{b}$ .

Then suppose I do not finish it for that day, down to some amount $0 \leq z \leq b$ . Then the amount of creatine in the bottle is $\frac{x z}{y}$ .

So the next time I fill my bottle up to $b$ , and add the same amount of creatine $a$ , the new concentration is $X_{i + 1} = \frac{(\frac{x z}{y} + a)}{b} = \frac{x z + a y}{b y}$ .

Well, my bottle is increasing in concentration iff $X_{i} = \frac{x}{y} < \frac{x z + a y}{b y} = X_{i + 1}$

Simplifying we get: $x b < x z + a y \Leftrightarrow z > \frac{x b - a y}{x}$ .

So as long as I have $\frac{x b - a y}{x}$ much solution left, the concentration increases! I will ponder on how to interpret this result. But let's do a sanity check.

Firstly, if we drink a lot of the water for that day, $z \approx 0$ . Secondly, if we little water that day, $z \approx b$ .

If we drink a little water, then for accumulation to occur $0 < a y$ . As $a, y > 0$ , this is immediately true. And intuitively, this makes sense! If I drink very little of my water, I basically just add creatine without really adding any "pure" water to reduce the concentration.

If we drink a lot of water, then for accumulation to occur $x b < a y \Leftrightarrow \frac{x}{y} < \frac{a}{b}$ . This also makes sense! If I drink all the water, the only way for the creatine to increase if if the concentration I am adding ( $X_{0}$ ) is greater than the concentration originally. This makes sense, as I am basically refilling the bottle completely with $X_{0}$ water.

FYI, No CSS or JS for the above.

Baseline Widely Available, BTW
"I'm not part of demographic $X$ , so my argument on a topic very relevant (or even about) demographic $X$ holds less weight".

I find this ... piece of rhetoric to be so frustrating. I get it, you're likely not to have considered some elements that may be obvious to those with the lived experience ... but often times the above is coupled with a direction to some argument by someone from demographic $X$ .

So why can't you synthesize what you gather from their views and integrate it into your own, and then present that and drop the above.

If you want to share it or acknowledge it, do so! You are allowed to summarize and synthetize their points however!

If you are so unconfident in your views to basically forfeit some responsibility in your views, to just point in the direction of someone more knowledgable ... why don't you read up first and then share it.

Granted, such defensive posturing is fine in real life, sometimes you're poked on an opinion that you don't have all the answers to. But I see it in videos people have all the time in the world to research!

I suppose another perspective is that you cannot ever have as valid an opinion as someone from demographic $X$ , but this does not make sense to me. It's possible for you to have the same opinion right? Even by happenstance? If we are judging arguments by their merit, there is no way to distinguish your opinion from theirs, so I don't think the speaker's identity should play a role, as we are then judging opinions not solely on merit.
If I do not have dinner because I have snacked throughout the day, that is fine. Please do not tell me I "must eat my dinner". A healthy diet is like the climate, and not the weather.

In general, I do not like when friends comment on what I eat. I see that it's in good faith, so I refrain on chastising anyone. Shit, I do it too sometimes. But I find it grating.

Uhhh, if you feel like this is subtweeting you, it's not. It happens often enough that I would like to make a PSA about it.

I suppose I will do a bit of introspection here now. Why do I find this sort of comment grating?

I think I know what you're going to say

I have this very nasty trait where I hate the idea that someone thinks I don't know something I do actually know.

I think I hate hearing arguments I've already heard, I want to fast forward through them and rebut them, since if I've already heard them but did not change my opinion, I must already have a rebuttal.

I feel like I have a pretty healthy diet, so I just disagree with you

Perhaps it could be more varied / have more home cooked food. But I do think it's by and large, somewhat healthy, as of late.

I am very defensive about about what I eat, which I do not like. I think it's because I used to be quite overweight, and then lost a lot of weight. And I think I did so in a pretty healthy way, which I'm a bit proud of. So I think that's part of it.

That said, I think I did develop a bit of a toxic relationship with food for a while, but that was more related to self-image, not with how I lost weight. Even in this period, I didn't do anything crazy, my caloric deficit was always pretty minor. Just some serious frustration when I could not meet this.

In recent years however (I think honestly maybe for about four years now), I'm pretty relaxed about how my body looks. Sure, I wish I had washboard abs, but also like, I don't really care. It doesn't really impact my mood or how I eat.

I feel people are projecting their toxic relationship with their diet onto me

I think a lot of my friends who have this concern themselves have a difficult relationship / past with food, and their comments are a reflection of what they think is going through my mind, based on their own experiences and what they observe.

So I feel like they are trying to protect me, which I do not like. I suppose it stems from a bit of contempt, honestly. The notion that someone who is struggling could help me. Very ugly stuff, wow.

Yeah, so I have some things to work through ... but on the bright side, I think I eat pretty well still!
They recently added metal tongs at my local Jumbo. Very annoying, when I pull them out by placing a finger between arms, they trap my finger and bite real hard. Now I have to carefully pull them out.

I will try squeezing the handles and then pulling. Right now I'm doing a pinch manoeuvre on the side of the arms. But I'm not hopeful, I think the tongs will be too slippery to get good grip on the squeeze.
@ztereo made a funny comment regarding sizes and srcset in HTML:
"branches? in my html??"

@ztereo is very funny like that. He has good observational humor, and is very smart and engaging to talk to!
I have a preference to receive emails over direct messagess. You can also just talk to my face, instead of a direct message.

To find my email, please talk to my face.

I do not mind group chats or direct messages for organizing things, however.