[With the upcoming Thanksgiving celebration in the US on Thursday and its history of over-indulgence, this seemed to be a timely warning.--Ed.]
Do you take your phone to the loo? Spent half an hour a day in the peace and calm of the smallest room in the house safe and secure in the knowledge few will disturb you? Are you at all concerned your habit could be detrimental to your health? According to Sydney gastroenterologist Professor Chris Berney you should be. Doctor Berney has treated 16 people over the past 18 months for haemorrhoid related issues which he believes comes from spending too long on the loo. Regularly spending over 20 minutes with the rear sphincter relaxed can result in a decline in control which leads to blood clots developing. Prof Berney published his findings regarding young people spending too much time on the toilet in the Australia New Zealand Surgery journal.
Where are the futuristic chairs with the built-in toilet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @03:23PM
Recovering Angry Birds Sphincter here. Fortunately that game has jumped the shark for me and I now have normal poop sessions.
I am sure there is a detrimental effect repeatedly making your legs to numb as well.
And thanks to this, I now have a picture in my head of well known Twitterers sitting on the pot, particularly orange colored ones. I DID NOT NEED THAT!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday November 25 2020, @03:35PM
My grandmother had one at the side of her bed, at age 90 when she became less movable. A pot with seal in a chair of true Art Nouveau style.
Why everyone thinks the best practical tech is always found only in future?
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 25 2020, @03:40PM (7 children)
The list of things that belong in the bathroom is pretty short, people. Soap, shampoo, towels, paper, the pile of "girl" things the wife keeps in there, the plunger and the toilet brush under the sink, and the ironing board that no one has used in 20 years or more. (No, I have no idea where the iron is, or if we even have one.)
Leave the phone outside, mmmkay?
And, wash your hands before you leave!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 25 2020, @04:33PM
Back in my day the girly stuff WAS the reading material!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 25 2020, @06:17PM (5 children)
Wait, no shaver? No nail scissors? No comb?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 25 2020, @06:37PM (4 children)
Dear Wife has shaving stuff. Not I.
Nail clippers are on my desk so that I don't have to spend unnecessary time in the bathroom.
Comb? Run your fingers through your hair while it is still wet, the hair will dry in place.
Why you wanna make things complicated?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2020, @12:42AM (3 children)
Real techs use dikes for that.
They are a truly useful tool. Normally used for trimming ends of wire, they are often pressed into service to trim darned near anything.
A good pair will trim nearly anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2020, @06:14AM
Are we talking hiring said dike or owning?
Also, what happens if the dike brings her girlfriend?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 27 2020, @06:35AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2020, @11:18AM
There is an art to using dikes to trim nails. For me, the little ones usually used for trimming component leads on printed circuit boards are best. Lineman's / electrician's dikes are way too big.
I need the ones with the narrow cutters...you know, the ones that you would ruin if you cut piano wire with it,.. it is far more suited for wirewrap wire or 1/8 watt resistor leads. The thin head and pointed end makes it much easier to get one piece under even the toughest curled old man nail and neatly trim it perfectly right to the edge.
Even if you can't see what you are doing and are doing the job solely by feel. Which is the case when I do my toenails.
I have tried those things sold as nail trimmers...personally, I much prefer the same tool I use in my pcb work. No, one cut doesn't do it. I feel around with it, taking several dozen small bites until it's trimmed to my satisfaction.
I have also seen these tiny dikes around craft sections of various stores. People like florists and wire craft hobbyists use them too. Even seen them in dollar stores.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday November 25 2020, @03:42PM (3 children)
Or Facebook?
But I do sometimes look at news, or work on some puzzle game I may be
obsessed withsolving at the time. But I try not to get obsessed with the problem when the purpose of being in that room is completed. I can always resume the solution to a problem or puzzle in the nice chair in the living room.More fun, spend time on front porch swing, without phone, pondering software solution to automatically solve the puzzle of current obsession. After while you begin to see general patterns in how to explore problem solution space which tends to be a tree structure. Avoid revisiting solution states that you've been in before (eg, hash of every prior problem "state" kept in a Set of visited nodes). Focus on exploring tree breadth first, with most promising solution states explored first. At some point arrive at A* (a-star) style search general class that can be subclassed with different hurestics and scoring functions plugged in. Don't add a string of nodes to the end (or beginning) of next states to explore -- rather add a lazy "child node generator" object that actually expands (lazily) into the next nodes that would have been at this point in the "next nodes" list. This makes huge combinatorial explosion not take up much memory and avoids cpu cycles on nodes that might not ever get explored further. But now we're needing functional programming, lazy evaluation, and other high level things that you don't find in low level bits-and-bytes focused languages. People on SN will wine and whale about how inefficient such high level languages are.
More challenging puzzles would be those that don't appear to fit that problem solving strategy.
Oh, it's time to be done with the business I came into the small room for.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1) by sea on Wednesday November 25 2020, @08:32PM (2 children)
I have written this code in lisp. A general-purpose graph search algorithm with arbitrarily heuristics and lazy next-node function.
It isn't any better. The problem with graph search is not the memory consumption of the 'next nodes' list. The problem is the *seen nodes* set.
You see, lazily generating the next nodes makes it so we use very little memory there, but no matter what, we need to avoid searching the same subtrees over and over, so we *must* store some searchable form of the seen nodes, which is where the combinatorial explosion goes. That set explodes. If you try to limit the size of that set, then you end up searching subtrees repeatedly, wasting cpu cycles. These algorithms are called IDA*, etc.
There is no escape from the limits of computation. Graph search requires exponential time *or space*, and that's all there is to it.
-
Oskar Lidelson
(Score: 1) by sea on Wednesday November 25 2020, @08:59PM
To be slightly more precise, it's exponential in the graph's branching factor to the depth of the solution from your starting point.
You can also think of it in terms of the graph's actual size. The problem here is that graphs have *two* sizes: A number of vertices, and a number of edges. You still have to look across every edge to see if the vertex on the other end is one you've seen before. Linear is the worst case in general, though you can trade-off in time or space.
The graphs we typically want to search are so huge that linear time (or space) is still just too much. Good pruning and heuristics are the only way to do better.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:59PM
In some types of puzzle problems, some "seen" nodes are dead end. They hit a state where no more moves are possible from that state. Or no moves that don't result in other previously "seen" states, even if that set is only the state you just came from (eg parent within the tree). In these cases, those seen nodes have no children that get added (or rather a lazy expander of the children) that get added to the further nodes to explore. Therefore those seen nodes no longer remain in memory.
Each node explored is no longer looked at after that. The only references to it for GC purposes are the lazy expander of child nodes (if any) that were (possibly) added to the list of further nodes to explore. If that didn't happen, then that node is GC'able.
The first puzzle I solved in about 2010 was one known as either "Unblock Me" or "Traffic Jam". (On Play store) I had seen a real-life version ("traffic jam") of this before Android version ("unblock me") existed, or even Android or iPhone existed. My point. When I first went to solve that one I imagined a huge combinatorial tree explosion and immense time to solve. End result, on a decent system equipped for decent Java workloads: solution was almost instantaneous. Just a few seconds. Number of nodes visited was only in the high tens of thousands. Of course in this puzzle, each board state doesn't have a very large number of possible moves (eg child nodes) away from and towards a different state.
Solving, say, a Rubik Cube, each state would have exactly 18 possible states you can move into. 6 faces, where one face can be manipulated into 3 different states. How big an explosion this results in might be affected by how good your scoring functions are in identifying whether you are moving toward a solution. Maybe calculate a score based on the "organization" or lack of entropy of this particular cube state. I'll have to try that one some time.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday November 25 2020, @04:06PM (4 children)
I don't own a dumb "smart" phone, still don't need one or want one.
They are just now figuring out that sitting in the bathroom playing with your tweeter can be bad for you?
Can we finally have some of this good science about blinding blue LEDs?
I fully expect in the next 5 years that all toilets will come with mandatory built in IoT equipment so it can automatically post your shit on Twitter(R)(TM) and Facebook(R)(TM). Sad thing is, I'm sure a few such toilets already really exist.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 25 2020, @04:16PM (1 child)
Doesn't Fitbit already do that? Or, at least report it to your doctor?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @05:49PM
fitbit: doc, what am i doing in this butt?
doc: the backstroke?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2020, @03:40PM
Join ThunderLog the largest network of poo picture sharing in the world
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2020, @06:18AM
Japan has toilets like that now? Not sure if they post to twitter
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Wednesday November 25 2020, @06:00PM
It was on some health or medical site, somewhere: "You don't defecate in the library, so you shouldn't read on the toilet".
If you're constipated, drink some water and go for a walk... but not too far.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @08:22PM
... aw
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:57PM (1 child)
Pokemon in the shitter gave me some hemmoroids. Cut down the time and the problem clears up. Kinda like legs going numb.
Did people not read books? I'm sure this isn't new. Although many used to not be so fat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2020, @12:58AM
Agreed, and had the same result. Hemorrhoids. Real pain in the butt. Please keep your visit brief, or suffer the consequences. I wish I had seen this advice 40 years ago.
I did something even worse, thanks to Larry Flynt and Hugh Heffner.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday November 25 2020, @10:14PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2020, @06:20AM
It's the 30 mins per day family won't intrude on