I got my first DEXA scan in January of 2020. Between then and March 2020, I lost 2.5 bodyfat percentage points, but then I moved to the middle of nowhere with MIRI for COVID, and gained 12 percentage points between then and February 2023, which was my next scan date. My DEXA scan from today finally again shows a net decrease in body fat percentage compared with 2020! I'm still 25lbs heavier than I was then, but 20 of those are lean mass!

Freaked out a little bit today during my workout: I've been doing progressive overload on various dumbbell lifts for a couple months, and today one of my lifts was way harder than I expected. I hit failure ~ 4 reps earlier than Thursday. Only after failing even earlier on the second set did I realize that I had set the weight 20% too high. I felt dumb but also it's cool to get a little confirmation that I'm not just hitting "failure" via confirmation bias!

Has Scott Alexander already done a kabbalah-style bit about how MAGA is a multilingual recursive acronym? I.e. it's obviously cognate with PIE *meg- (meaning "great"; root of magnificence, magnitude, maharishi, major) and also the G stands for "great"

TIL: the thrift store near my house sells paperbacks for $1 and hard covers for $2. And if you don't mind the fact that they've organized the books by spine color, you can find excellent books. In fact I found one paperback that I ordered on Amazon yesterday for 10x the price.