So many memories... Thanks !

Wikipedia defines snack as a small portion of food that is eaten between meals. The way I think about it, that is the only distinction between a meal and a snack. That "in between meals".

This, as far as weight goes, carries with it an inherent quality that makes regulating weight harder. If not impossible, depending on your sleep patterns (the etymology of the term breakfast indicates exactly how this is relevant to what I am saying here). It's nearly impossible to find snacks that have zero insulin response in your body. Insulin not only promotes energy storage, but it also prevents the body from using energy already stored. Making a habit of doing that, even when you don't face weight problems (which are related to health issues), is essentially making a habit of preventing your metabolism of using energy already stored from previous meals.

This is also probably the most important reason why people speak highly of intermittent fasting or low carb diets. Most of them, through these two approaches, regardless of the other positive/negative aspects, completely eliminate the habit of constantly spiking their insulin levels, effectively allowing the body to regulate energy levels through both the energy still available from a meal and the energy stored from previous meals.

Sunflower plant here.

I feel like a cannibal munching on sunflower seeds while reading the description of my type of plant XD

As someone who grew up with a (quite) younger sibling in the most disabling end of the spectrum, witnessing all the development from infancy to adulthood, I am very reluctant to recommend for/against any specific approach, because I think that what matters most is the people who actually practice it. So, I absolutely agree with the last sentence of your comment.

The negative aspects of ABA are not entirely in the past. I am not in a position to verify the information I will quote, but this is mentioned in the third of the linked articles:

Mandell says ABA needs to renounce that history — especially the early reliance on punishments like yelling, hitting, and most controversially electroshocks, which are still used in a notorious residential school in Massachusetts called the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center.

To be clear: I am not arguing with your experience here. Rather, I am pointing out how important is the kind of practice of whatever theory and what the focus of the practice actually is. It's really very difficult to find professionals who are actually both able and willing to care properly for autistic people. At least in the place I live.

Beyond that, I have to say that there are many things that now have positive effects on people's lives that weren't exactly positive in their original forms.

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don't know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

So what is it with Anakin's picture? Javascript is the dark side of the, web development, force? XD

Seriously tho, valid points.

It's nearly impossible to pick one, I find beauty in each kind.

I would go with Platanus. They exist near rivers and get really big. I like everything about them.

Then all the wild versions of cherry trees, if not every single stone fruit tree. Most wild versions of them, exist across multiple human lifespans (platanus too), so beside their amazing flowering season, I like the idea that some of them have been standing there for centuries, marking memories of many human generations with their beautiful presence.

Hey have you ever been to https://www.neocities.org? It’s reminiscent of geocities and kind of cool.

No, haven't even realised that Sheldon Brown's site was hosted there. I used to have a website up on geocities when I was a kid, browsing neocities brings back so many happy memories.. Thanks!

Sorry if I sounded disagreeable, I didn’t mean to be. I was just taking a trip down memory lane.

No worries. Felt exactly like that. That's why my mind went to how I felt when altavista's babelfish appeared, I did the same thing for a few minutes before responding :-)

Well, I guess not everyone had the same experience. Maybe I should have spoken only for myself. It's not that I didn't use search engines before google appeared or that I don't do it now. Just the fact, at least in my experience, that I would get to know way more and way better web locations, related to what interested me, through discussions with other people with similar interests, than I would through search engines. Even when discussions are not possible (like in magazines) or are too massive to follow, it is often, especially in technology-related subjects, preferable to have them archived (through subscriptions) and search directly those archives when I need something specific. It was true for me back when engines didn't have as good indexes, it is true for me now that their role as businesses is becoming obvious. I guess it also depends on what someone considers interesting.

I did love how altavista translation service was called though, really liked the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :-)

There was a time before google's search engine, when all the previous attempts had not managed to become the dominant entry point for the web. During that time, we would find interesting web pages through people and/or specific interests. Then, google came, and for a time it was good (read like The Second Renaissance Part I story from animatrix). Ads and SEO were not everywhere yet, content mattered more than those two. So, while I came here to suggest what @bbbhltz@beehaw.org commented, when I read your post text I thought that maybe, at least for what we tend to constantly look for news, articles and discussions, we shouldn't constantly rely on search engines. For example, most technologies have news letters, weekly/monthly magazines, mailing lists, community boards or other forms of group communication through which you can gradually discover better content sources (individuals or groups) on what interests you. Without the search engine service and its cost (direct or indirect) between you and the content.

Believe it or not, what you swallow has almost nothing to do with your weight. The only place the body absorbs energy from food is in the intestines, and the brain controls that process.

I would believe it if I started gaining weight by just breathing. Also, no. Not the only place. Part of the alcohol consumed is absorbed through the stomach.

The digestive tract is a tube, open at both ends, through which food passes. The process of extracting energy from that food is complex and highly tunable: the brain controls the production and secretion of hundreds of enzymes and other chemicals, as well as the physical action of the muscles lining the tube.

The brain controls pretty much everything, and this everything is highly tunable. I mean, how else would well adjusted people adapt to the highly complex lives they live as adults? With commercial pills?