For people who would prefer to interact with bash on the console in languages that have large character sets -- Japanese, in my case.

Installed debian with Japanese as the default system language and the console dumps Japanese messages at me.

Currently, they are not renderable, and I have spent some time trying to fix that.

Yeah, I can change the environment variables, etc., but I would like to be able to just leave it as is and get readable Japanese in the console.

Yeah, and now we have evidence that it might not be just the excess grains.

I think the final bite of sarcasm was a little too much. (Or maybe a little too close to grim reality these days.)

There are other things in this particular anecdote which are known to negatively affect weight gain in both children and adults.

(In anecdotes, such contributing factors are often overlooked and/or hidden, which is a big part of the reason why anecdotes, even from people you trust, are hard to integrate with data.)

Are you controlling your diabetes? How?

If we sat down and talked, I'll bet I could point out how even a tenth gram of sugar can sometimes push your blood sugar out of balance.

Actually, this is kind of what sugar intolerance is all about. It's not about completely banning all sugars. You can't do that.

It's about being conscious of what kinds of sugars one consumes, in what forms, what activities coincide with the consumption, etc. It's also about mass-produced so-called food products with way too much cheap sugars.

It's also about learning that the natural flavors of food can be palatable without smothering them in cheap sugars.

When you break the tongue's addiction to the commonly used (because they are cheap and too easily digested) sugars, the tastes in foods are actually useful in helping you figure out what you need to eat.

I've made observations, essentially unplanned experiments including effective blind controls, sufficient that I can see that sugar intolerance is a reality for some people. The interactions are a bit complicated, and I'm not qualified to publish a paper on the subject, but the connection can be seen by someone close enough and willing to observe with open eyes.

What is the OS?

Anecdotal, and first/second person from me is third person to you, but, ...

Not sure if your 1/10 gram matches the actual amount in a placebo, but the amount of sugar in a non-placebo pill can indeed have bad effects on someone with sugar reactions, including liver and kidney function.

We know that it can have a significant effect on a diabetic person, as well, so there's no need to fuss about the amount.

When someone in the family is sick and claims sugar intolerance, does it do any good to argue whether sugar intolerance is real?

Seriously. Let the person cut back a bit on sugar, even if it means having, for instance, to make one's own biscuits because you can't get sugar free bread in the store. It's not a whole lot of trouble to go to, and home made biscuits are not particularly evil, either. Might even taste good after a bit of practice making them, adjusting the recipe, etc.

Which is on-topic here, because we too often get too involved in arguing about science when the best thing we can do for someone who is sick is just listen, express sympathy and support, and if they think of something sensible to do, encourage them to do it. (Again, for most people, cutting back on sugar is quite sensible.)

Shoot, sympathy and support are often better medicine than anything the doctor can prescribe. Can promote communication, too.

Inert means inert, yes.

On the other hand, "inert ingredients" means ingredients that show up in a list in a standard as being supposed to be inert when used in a specific way. Thus, YMMV.

Raising the mandatory retirement age is raising the age at which the government's employment rules say, "Move over, get out of the way, let the younger kids have their turn at having fun!" It's the age at which the government comes after both the employer and the employee and starts denying tax breaks, issuing fines, etc., if the employee won't quit working full time.

I think you're thinking about the age at which a non-full-timer can start drawing pension funds and retirement benefits.Before you raise that age, you have to look at the average life expectancy, the general state of health, etc. in the last n years before people die, etc. You want to set that age so that the non-existent average person has a reasonable expectancy of a reasonable amount of time to enjoy retirement.

And then you get into definitions of "enjoying retirement", and "a reasonable amount of time" and such idiocies.

In an ideal world, the government would not be collecting or paying pension or insurance, and would not be having to draw either line. Leave it up to the individual. Sure, the average twenty-year old is going to do stupid things like buying sports cars and tobacco instead of saving.

No, the average twenty-year old will not. Some will, but by the logic of letting the tobacco smoker just die early if he wants to, we should be willing to let the person who doesn't want to save responsibly die early for lack of pension, too.

Of course, there will usually be family and friends who will pick up the burdens in both cases. And they are the ones who should.

If they can and if they will. Which is the whole problem here.

Anyway, the government, if it's going to get involved, should constantly adjust the regulations so that people who want to do right things aren't getting too many roadblocks in their way.

The really amusing thing is that this is exactly what passwords originally were.

Before computers, I mean.

There are simple security issues like the strength of a password or the strength of encryption on the file where the password is stored.

Security includes harder system problems, like where the password file should be stored, should they all be stored together, how to enforce permissions or privileges on the password file(s) and so forth.

And even harder problems, like how do you encrypt the username/password exchange. (And whether and how the username should be encrypted as well.)

And then you get to the really difficult problems of managing security. Which includes secretaries and help desk personnel and customer policies that are susceptible to social engineering. These, also, are part of security.

Sum of a series.

Nobody is going to pay you to literally count beans in jars all day long.

Stuff beyond that requires the ability to work with sums of series that some people understand intuitively, and the rest of us learn in calculus.

(And, actually, those of us who understood it intuitively generally discover later how much we missed because we thought it was too easy.)

Yes, we use math even if we don't understand that we do. That includes higher math, and discrete math is actually part of the higher math.

You generally take calculus first because most people don't have the tools to work with discrete math until they have taken calculus. Many of those tools are actually part of calculus, even though they can be understood and used intuitively by some people.

All three of his personalities at work use math.