On the past being a ghost, the best treatment of it I've encountered is the short story Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling [1]. It's so worth the complete read, so I hate to reduce it to a quote, but the critical bit is:
> We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.
It's not quite the secretary problem, but he does have the option to wait N years and see if someone else comes up with a technique, or if the technique eventually leaks.
Waiting 9 more years to unlock the drive for free versus taking 50% now is equivalent to investing at 8% annual returns.
You're not alone. I've even tried to dream up ways to "humanely" vaporize them so they wouldn't suffer being at the bottom of a trash heap with old food and what not dripping on them, their innards squeezed out, which is sure to be their fate if I donate them. And now I see the same illogical attachment tendencies in a couple of my kids. It's a burden.
I wonder how hard it would be to start a service like that. It would be large branding task (and a fun one!), but I imagine materials and labor cost would be super low.
Maybe you could send a nice box, something kind of evoking a coffin without being overly morbid, and present it as something like a funeral service. Maybe when you receive the "body" you could clean it up and take a nice photo to remember it by.
Upsell opportunity - 3D scan the beloved stuffy, so that it can live forever in the Metaverse.
Another upsell - cremation. Get a little pendant with the ashes, or spread them into a forest, or something similar.
Only half joking, although something about the idea felt a little gross as soon as "upsell opportunity" entered my mind.
I absolutely love these! I already take pictures of things to remember the memories that are evoked by those objects. A 3D scan would be wonderful imo. Maybe even giving people the ability to recreate the item should they truly want it back for some reason.
You could also provide some sort of bulk deal too, for people who have whole boxes of stuffed animals. Though I dont know how that would fit into the whole theming without it feeling like some sort of mass murder box lmao
Haha, right - as I was thinking about it I was feeling simultaneously sentimental and ghoulish.
Like, "aww, what a sweet idea, to respectfully retire and preserve someone's well loved toy," and then at the same time "yes, it would be easy to make money here by mass-cremating someone's well loved toys".
The line between the two feelings is apparently pretty thin. Perhaps I'll just stay out of the funeral industry lol
I too have benefited recently (since 3 months) from rowing, and started by simply emulating Dark Horse rowing on a laptop set to the front/side of the machine. I really like Rowalong channel now, because he gives effort instructions in terms of your best 2k pace. For example, he'll say "2k+18" for the next interval so if your best 2k time had average 2:00/500m pace, then row currently at 2:18 pace. Compare to Dark Horse who might say "Go at 75% effort" which suffers from subjective self reporting.
If you haven't seen it, https://rowinglevel.com has tables for various distances and ages. It intimidated me at first (these times are fast!) but reaching beginner and novice when they once felt completely impossible is a good feeling.
> It took months to get up to speed with a lot of initial back pain, but the strength gained has done away with back issues I used to have.
You might be interested in this, great fun and it'll get you rowing using FTP which is a better way of doing things than pace (standard in the cycling world, surprised it's taking so long to filter into rowing): https://exrgame.com.
There's also this for rowing form but I haven't personally tried it out:
> The most interesting result from this study was the change in the spread for HRV.
Did your HRV increase, indicating better health? How are you measuring it?
> I was able to break an 8 minute 2k row when I did it with cyclic breathing.
Can you explain more? Search results for "cyclic breathing" return many varied results. Are you performing it while during the row, or in preparation for it? I can get 2k meters under 8 minutes, but I'm gasping at the end.
> ...lets me write codeblocks in my notes and turns my note taking system into a literate programming environment. So I have for example a self-written plugin that applies transformations to existing pages to incorporate the sort of question templates suggested in books like How To Solve It or on websites like untools.
Do you have any posts or additional information on this in particular?
The key ideas behind How To Solve It are that for a lot of our challenges there are strategies we can use to tackle them effectively. How To Solve It expounds on how to go about understanding a problem, understanding the connection of the data you have with what you don't know, how to make problems more tractable, carrying out a plan, and evaluating the results.
- Untools
A site dedicated to listing various strategies for thinking, communicating and prioritization; they sell templates similar in nature to what I'm building, but I depart sharply from them in my desired document representation choice for templates - Zettlekastian graph continuations for me versus linear documents for them.
- My own tool
This is currently private and not yet ready for public consumption. I have a whole lot of philosophical backing for what I'm trying to build but it is still very far from generating utility at the level I want it too. Later today I'll see about moving some private notes into a blog post going into more depth about what I'm building and why.
This is very relatable :) A workmate and I have fun making variations of "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors!" and sarcastically suggest the other tries OCaml, Haskell, or Idris when something isn't going their way.
> We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...