exasperation

What's a good amount of volume for increasing bench press most consistently?

I'm in my 40's, about 210 lbs, and have been doing a 3-day program with each day focused on bench, deadlift, squat, where I just do warmup sets, then 3x5 at my 5 rep max, and then move up whenever I'm able to actually do all those sets. This week, I'm able to do 3x5x175 lbs.

On bench day, I'm doing regular bench, overhead press, and incline bench, and then some body weight push ups and dips. In recent weeks I've only been able to add 5 lbs every 2 weeks. Should I be focusing more on changing up the rep or set scheme?

Or, alternatively, am I wrong for trying to focus on my weakest lift? I know it's weird to be able to deadlift more than twice as much (385 lbs) as my bench (175 lbs), but that's just where I'm at.

regardless of how many beans you buy, the meat dairy and egg industries continue to pollute in ever greater amounts.

No, reduced demand will wreck the prices for the producers, who will reduce supply and thereby reduce the overall volume of production, which will reduce the volume of pollution, water usage, etc. Beef production in the U.S. has been relatively stable since 2000, despite the population growth and increased consumer spending on food. The market responds to input costs and demand, and things like drought conditions drop production significantly.

I can't answer for dual numbers, but I can answer for imaginary numbers in circuit design.

Imaginary numbers are those that include an imaginary component, that squares into a negative number. Traditionally, i^2 = -1, but electrical engineers like to use j instead (I tends to be a variable used to describe electrical current).

Complex numbers, that include a real component and an imaginary component, can be thought of as having an "angle," based on how much of it is imaginary and how much of it is real, mapped onto a 2-dimensional representation of that number's real and imaginary components. 5 + 5j is as real as it is imaginary, so it's like having a 45° angle. The real number 5 is completely real, so it has a 0° angle.

Meanwhile, in alternating current (AC) circuits, like what you get from your wall outlet, the voltage source is a wave that alternates between a maximum peak of positive voltage and a bottom trough of negative voltage, in a nice clean sinusoidal shape over time. If you hook up a normal resistor, the nice clean sinusoidal voltage also becomes a nice clean sinusoidal current with the exact same timing of when the max voltage matches up with the max current.

But there's also capacitors, which accumulate charge so that the flow of current on the other side depends on its own state of charge. And there are inductors, that affect current based on the amount of energy stored magnetically. These react to the existing current and voltage in the system and manipulate the time relationship between what moment in time a peak current will happen and when the peak voltage was.

And through some interesting overlap in how adding and subtracting and delaying sinusoidal waves works, the circuit characteristics line up perfectly with that complex angle I was talking about, with the imaginary numbers. So any circuit, or any part of a circuit, can be represented with an "impedance" that has both an imaginary and real component, with a corresponding phase angle. And that complex number can be used to calculate information about the time delay in the wave of current versus the wave of voltage.

So using complex phase angles makes certain AC calculations much, much easier, to represent the output of real current from real voltage, where the imaginary numbers are an important part of the calculation but not in the actual real world observation itself.

So even though we start with real numbers and end with real numbers, having imaginary numbers in the toolbox make the middle part feasible.

Set phasors to "confuse"

Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks!

Jessica and Ashley and Jennifer took over.

Karen is not particularly special as a name that became overwhelmingly popular in just one or two generations, and then fell back off. And so even as earlier generations considered it to be a child's name, later generations came to associate it with older women.

Gladys and Gertrude and Edith are other examples, highly associated with certain older generations.

One day we'll think of Madison and Emma and Mackenzie as old lady names too.

If we used all the pasture land viable for farming we would have abundant and varied produce at a budget cost. Unfortunately that's not the case.

That doesn't sound right. A big part of the reason why beef keeps getting expensive much faster than pork or chicken is because it's getting a lot more expensive to raise pastured animals than factory farming feedlots. It's also why, historically, a culture's preference for pork over beef (or vice versa) could be predicted by looking at how urbanized that culture is.

Not all meat is equal, and beef is particularly inefficient at turning plant biomass (and water) into meat, and needs a lot more land area for traditional methods. Even modern feedlot methods don't actually help that much in terms of competition with other meat animals, because chickens and pigs are also easier to feed in feedlot settings.

Vegetarian diets are pretty cheap for meeting the bare minimum nutritional requirements. Legume+grain is the staple food for many cultures for a reason.

But also in the real world, most people want variety and taste, and meat is often a cheaper and easier way to provide that higher level of enjoyment, compared to the work necessary to process non-animal sources into certain tastes and textures that are easier to find from animal sources. So when we're talking about the diets of rich societies, who can afford to spend money and effort well beyond the bare minimum to keep us alive, we're spending plenty of effort on adding non nutritive flavors, including stuff like spices or fermented sauces.

So you're probably right when focused only on the rich western societies where it is true that the typical vegan spends more on food than the typical omnivore in the same rich society. But it's not broadly true across the board, and at the very upper ranges of luxury spending, I'm not sure that still holds up (some meats and seafoods can get quite expensive at the very very high end).

The worst is instructional manuals being replaced with videos.

Going back 10 seconds, 20 times, so that you can visually see how two pieces fit together is way more annoying than just looking at a visual diagram on a printed page. Especially when you've got both hands full with stuff.

I’d rather read twenty minutes than watch a 5 minute YouTube video.

Part of the reason why I have no patience for video as nonfiction is because I read a lot faster than videos (or audio) can communicate information. So for me, I'd rather read a 5 minute document than a 20 minute video, even if one is literally a transcription of the other.

At least with audio I can take that in while doing something else.

The 787 has 8 main tires and 2 nose tires. The main tires are 218 lbs (about 100kg) and the nose tires are 114 lbs (about 50kg). So a set is roughly 1970 lbs/900kg, pretty close to a short ton. 5 metric tonnes would be about 5.6 sets of 787 tires.

Deep dish is delicious. Lasagna is delicious. Baked ziti is delicious. Calzones are delicious.

Look, you can't go wrong with tomato sauce, cheese, dough, and optional meat. It's all delicious, and playing around with different ratios is still great.

Next, the researchers examined how fitness was associated with the risk of dying in random accidents such as car accidents, drownings and homicides. They chose random accidents because they assumed that there ought to be no association between the men’s fitness in late adolescence and the risk of dying in random accidents. This method is called negative control outcome analysis and involves testing the validity of your results for a primary outcome by comparing them with an outcome where no association ought to be found. If, however, an association is found, it may indicate that the groups studied are not actually comparable, and that the study suffers from what is typically referred to as confounding. The researchers found that men with the highest fitness levels had a 53 per cent lower risk of dying in random accidents. Yet, it is unlikely that the men’s fitness would have such a big effect on their risk of dying in random accidents.

This seems like a completely unsupported assumption.

Physical fitness can make a difference in the survivability of unexpected drowning risk. Imagine a boat overturns and people have to swim to safety. One would expect that the extreme consequence of death would tend to happen to the least fit people in the group, even if everyone experienced the same traumatic event.

How much do bone density and muscle mass affect survivability in car accidents? Does good cardiovascular circulation help with healing, fighting off infection, etc.?

And I'm not sure about homicides. What are the methods of killing, and what percentage of these deaths involve reckless or negligent homicides? Can physical fitness play a role in simply getting away from the danger (whether that danger is intentional, reckless, or negligent)?