health – Jenneral HQ

Lumenators: They’re Really Good

Lumenators are a piece of folk technology from the rationalist subculture. In short, it is 10+ lightbulbs on a string, to make your living space much brighter than it would otherwise be. The lights are generally cooler toned than your regular yellow bulbs, to emulate sunlight better.

I first made one in January 2019 (I have a pic in this old post), after a disastrous first term of third year, in which I’d failed half my courses and narrowly scraped by the other half due to a really intense bout of antidepressant-resistant SAD.

I’ve had them for 3 years now and my opinion is that literally everyone should own one.((related: that post about shower chairs!))

Listen, when I first made the lumenators, I lived with two guys who were completely functional human beings who weren’t depressed in the least. Idk how to convince you how non-depressed they were – they were doing sports, taking insane courses that required like 40 hours of labs a week, going to, volunteering at, and running major hackathons, putting effort into steadily improving at competitive video games and then road tripping out to tournaments… Living their best university lives, tbh.

These dudes thought that it was overkill that I was shelling out $400 for an assload of bright lightbulbs, command hooks, wiring, and other shit instead of just buying like, two more floor lamps from ikea. Which, fair enough tbh, if you haven’t been lumenated, you probably would think the same.

Two years later we graduated and went our separate ways, and then within like a month of moving into their new apartments they were constructing lumenators of their own because they had SEEN THE LIGHT and realized that standard lighting sucked fucking ass.

Lumenators are good mostly because for 4 accursed months out of the year, the sun sets at a ridiculously early time. When you have lumenators, that sucks a lot less. It genuinely helps, a lot, to have the space you’re in be really bright for an additional 3 hours a day, and make your “sunset” 8pm even though it’s been dark outside since 5.

It also is a great supplemental source of lighting on days where it’s raining or snowing or just heavily overcast. The days where it’s day but the light doesn’t make it into your windows anyways. When you have lumenators, those days become vastly more cheery. When I turn my lumenators on on those days, I get a jolt of happiness.

I actually turn my lumenators on every day. Even when it’s fully sunny outside, my lumenators still manage to brighten up my space appreciably, and I think that’s incredibly sexy of them.

Some miscellaneous tips for creating a lumenator setup for after you read the linked article, if you’re interested in building one:

Bulb Notes

If you’re dripping with cash, get zigby/hue bulbs or other programmable bulbs! It’s a lot more convenient to control them through your phone.
Look for high CRI bulbs – they emit a broader spectrum of colours which is what sunlight does. Cree bulbs are high CRI and available at home depot online. Don’t get them on Amazon – they have sketchy bulbs that are old. Get them directly from home depot.
A more optimal bulb ratio that has been suggested to me for traditional bulbs is 3:1 for 5000k bulbs to 2700k bulbs. Unfortunately I do like the warmer 1:1 ratio, although I’ve also had a good time with 2:1 ratios.
25 or 30 bulbs is ideal, but I think 15 is sufficient for a basic setup, and that’s what I started with. I have a setup of 10 bulbs in my bedroom that wake me up in the mornings by blasting my face with light, but I think it’s a little dim for everyday use.

Setup Notes

It’s a lot better when you can hang them up a lot higher than eye level. I was living in a low-ceilinged basement apartment for a while, and the lumenators did not work super well in that space 🙁
You can make them look a lot nicer by buying some fake vines on Amazon and draping them around the wires and stuff
Ideally, you want the lighting to be fairly well distributed across the ceiling, so that the shadows are more diffuse and it tricks you brain into thinking that it’s daylight better. Practically however it will look a lot tidier and be much easier to set up if you do line them up against a wall. If you’re someone who owns your place and can do more permanent things, recessed recessed br20 or br30 lights spaced at regular intervals across your ceiling is the way to go.
There are apps you can download to check the lux of your space, and they give readings consistent with physical lux readers (if you have an older phone, you may get a notification that your phone isn’t supported). You want it to be at least 1000 lux (for comparison, a normal office is around 300), but really the goal is to get it as high as possible without hurting your eyes.

Anyways, in conclusion, lumenators are great and you should make one. Here’s some pics of mine:

Links Retrospective, March – April 2020

Links Retrospective is a bi-monthly post on the five or so most interesting things I’ve read during the titular two-month time-frame. The intent is for there to be a few weeks of “lag” time between when I first read the articles and when I curate this collection, so that my selection isn’t biased by ongoing hype or sensationalism.

The articles aren’t necessarily published during this period, although many of them are – I choose my collection from what I’ve bookmarked over the two months. Of ~200 articles that I liked enough to bookmark during this period, I shortlisted 15, and now here are my top 5 picks for March and April, 2020 in no particular order:

Hyperobjects and the End of Common Sense – Timothy Morton, 2010

We have created things that we can hardly understand, let alone control, let alone make sensible political decisions about. Sometimes it’s good to have new words for these things, to remind you of how mind-blowing they are. So I’m going to introduce a new term: hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are phenomena such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.

I think that this could be a really useful term. Go take a look at the plutonium, really look. Because I felt a new emotion when I did.

Reiki Can’t Possibly Work. So Why does it? – Jordan Kisner, 2020

To note that touch-based healing therapies, including Reiki, simulate the most archetypal care gestures is hardly a revelation. Several scientists I interviewed about their work on Reiki mentioned the way their mother would lay a hand on their head when they had a fever or kiss a scraped knee and make the pain go away. It is not hard to imagine that a hospital patient awaiting surgery or chemotherapy might feel relieved, in that hectic and stressful setting, to have someone place a hand gently and unhurriedly where the hurt or fear is with the intention of alleviating any suffering.

I’m generally very, very anti-woo. But honestly, this doesn’t even feel like woo. This just seems like a pretty reasonable thing for humans to respond to.

Zeroth Person Writing – Tumblr thread, 2020 (archive)

Anyways, what I’m trying to talk about here is: there’s this thing that… I guess philosophers talk about sometimes which is, how certain kinds of information can’t really be transmitted via just, text, in the generalized sense (like, not necessarily writing, also images, sound, etc) and the point is usually that like, those are the things that you Just Have To Go Through. And math has a specific construct which, in effect, lives kind of in the middle of that gap.

Exercises.

No solutions are ever given, though; the strictures of the genre are strong enough that when you find a solution, you’ll know it, and the author can just give you the challenge and expect you not to fuck it up.

A delightful but rambly discussion thread that goes in many directions.

I Don’t Know What These Food Videos Are, But I Can’t Stop Watching Them – Scaachi Koul, 2020

Chefclub recipes are pure id — an expression of the most primal desires of someone who enjoys food, taken to an extreme no one asked for. Bread good, cheese good, meat good. Me like big food tower. Me like when cheese go in bread hole. If you were to claim that none of Chefclub’s videos are enticing to you, you would absolutely be lying. Imagine you went to a party — do you remember what it’s like to be at a party? — and saw the host made finger sandwiches in the shape of flip-flops. You’re telling me you’re not going to eat one? You’re telling me you’re not going to eat eight?? And that for the rest of your life, you wouldn’t tell everyone you know about the insane foot-themed party where you ate shoe sandwiches??? Come on, bro, grow up.

Can’t wait until quar is lifted and I can host a garden party and serve finger sandwiches in the shape of flip flops B’)

The Asshole Filter – Siderea, 2015

When you set up a situation in which other people’s choices are between, on the one hand, respecting your espoused wishes and being significantly disadvantaged, and, on the other hand, transgressing against your wishes to be effective, you have essentially posed a test that discriminates against those who are less willing to transgress against your espoused wishes: an asshole filter.

If you tell people “the only way to contact me is to break a rule” you will only be contacted by rule-breakers.

Another very useful concept.

Articles of Interest, December 2018-January 2019

Articles of Interest is a bimonthly post on things that I found on the internet that are interesting. The intent is for there to be 2-3 weeks of “lag” time between when I read the articles and when I review them, for hype to die down on any given hot topic. This is why this post is being published near the end of February. Featured articles aren’t necessarily published in the titular two-month period; that’s just when I read the pieces for the first time.

I’m going to do something slightly different for this edition. Instead of looking at the articles that are the most “interesting” per se, I’m going to use them mostly as a proxy to talk about what’s going on in my personal life. Cool? Cool.

Gwern on nicotine

When someone or something says that “nicotine” is harmful and you drill down to the original references for their claims, the references often turn out to actually be talking about tobacco rather than nicotine gums or patches… Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties.

This is actually a piece that I first read in November, but to be fair I’ve reread it half a dozen times between December and January. For a while now, I’ve been idly thinking about experimenting with nicotine for a) being a more alert and competent student in 8:30 classes and b) positive habit formation, and this is the post that made me start to do more research on it in earnest. I won’t bother summarizing all the interesting things about nicotine here because it’s not worth the effort when Gwern’s writeup is so stellar. But here are some more personal insights:

Even though now that I’ve done enough research to be entirely convinced that nicotine lozenges are incredibly safe, and resolved to take them in an incredibly responsible and safe manner to reduce the already minuscule chance of addiction (never two days in a row, maximum 3 times a week), I still haven’t worked up the courage to buy them on Amazon. This is weird, because I didn’t have nearly the same amount of reservations when it came to starting caffeine, alcohol, and more exotic substances. I think that this is the case because of two main reasons.

One, the anti-tobacco lobby did a pretty good job. What can I say, the experience of having to design a poorly researched anti-smoking poster in fourth grade must have really stuck with me. The second thing is that tobacco is low-status to someone in my social class, moreso than coffee, alcohol, and weed. I remember getting super defensive about trying it out when I first broached the subject with my friend group. I literally think that some of them would have reacted more positively if I told them that I was contemplating starting up a coke habit. And, well, status and class is a very powerful reinforcer of norms, who would have thought.

How To Build a Lumenator (And some other articles on winter illumination)

Once upon a time, a friend was sad. Specifically, they had seasonal affective disorder. They tried to fix it by adding lights to their room during the winter.It didn’t work.They tried adding a LOT of light.It worked.They called the giant bundle of lights they assembled a Luminator. Other people wondered how they, too, might summon a sun into their living room. The task was not exactly complicated or hard, but it was a little confusing and inconvenient. Instructions were passed around by word of mouth, and individuals cobbled together luminators in their own homes. Some of them has seasonal affective disorder, and some just liked their rooms to feel line sunshine all the time.Bit by bit, people’s lives grew brighter.

Aaaaaand, now I have a lumenator!

It pumps out around 10,000 lumens, and it’s bright enough that when you turn it on in the middle of the day with the windows open, it still manages to make the room significantly brighter. I’ve had it for a month now and while I can’t say for sure whether or not it’s made my SAD go away, it does make me ridiculously happy and I will enthusiastically LUMENATE the rest of my house bit by bit.

I first came across this concept in Eliezer Yudowsky’s book Inadequate Inequilibra, which I highly recommend.

[NSFW – cw for female breasts] Posts wrongly purged by Tumblr’s NSFW ban, like this one

Another one:

I’ve been collecting these posts as they come up with the intent of writing a post-mortem after the dust settles, and I’m up to 30ish. I’m very glad that I did, because there were some important pieces and criticisms that are now gone.

There were shitposts, and people talking about their mixed feelings for this platform that they grew up and into themselves on, and informative pieces on the broader implications and why tumblr did this in the first place.

I’ll start on that soon, it’s been a while since I did any sort of interesting longform.

“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor, Jess Zimmerman

We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”…Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.

Since I’ve moved back to Waterloo for my school term, I’ve started hosting some bi-weekly salons to try to mitigate the damage academia is doing to my sense of intellectual curiosity. We started experimenting with doing readings before the meetups and this is the one that I picked to go along with our topic, emotional labour. In a more ideal universe I would have assigned the metafilter thread instead, but we’re all tired students and no one really has the time for 50 additional pages of readings.

I was thinking that everyone would agree with Zimmerman at the beginning of the session and I could then lead people to a more nuanced “actually maybe what Zimmerman is promoting also isn’t that great” state, but what ended up happening was that people were dunking on the article right away. At first I felt a bit put out by this because oh no I couldn’t flaunt my intellectual superiority, but honestly being surrounded by really smart and critical people is cool af, so I got over it pretty fast and now I basically don’t come to salon with any sort of agenda in mind and I just bask in everyone’s conversation. It’s probably an even better thing for my mental health than the lumenators are. If any of my salon members are reading this, sorry for thinking that you were dumber than you actually were 🙁

[NSFW – cw for blood, and graphic bodily harm] Welcome to Hell World

In January of 2005 in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, Samar, five years old at the time, was riding in the back seat of her parents’ car as they returned from bringing her young brother to the hospital. It was getting dark, and nearing curfew, and her father, likely aware of this, was driving faster than normal. Fearing that the driver was a suicide bomber, an army patrol in the area that evening were given permission to open fire and so they did because that is what army patrols do.

I understand if based on the excerpt you already feel tired and don’t want to click through; if I didn’t know the author I would feel the same way. Luke O’Neil’s newsletter is always gut-wrenching and never fails to ruin my day, but I never fail to click on it the instant in appears in my mailbox. He’s got a writing style that hooks me in the belly and he’s good at humanizing the people who aren’t being humanized enough, cutting through the bullshittier parts of the culture war woven by those in privileged coastal enclaves to tell you about the blood and the sweat and the suffering of those actally being crushed by what’s happening in the world today.

If I had to choose only one newsletter to subscribe to, hell world would be it, and I’m so happy that I’ve found it even though it only ever makes me sad.

Thus concludes this ed of articles of interest, hopefully I’ll have a “real” blog post up before the next one hits!