Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

good news: health

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:03:59 GMT

There's more evidence that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease: two more natural experiments (in which people were offered the vaccine based on date of birth or where they lived). One of them comparED the older Zostavax vaccine with the newer Shingrix: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/spotlight-on-the-shingles-vaccineagain

As the blogger, Eric Topol says, "If this vaccine was a drug and reduced Alzheimer’s by 20%, it would be considered a major breakthrough for helping to prevent the disease! But as a vaccine, it hasn't reached any sense of being a blockbuster"

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Family resemblances are complicated

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 23:10:01 GMT

via oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
( cut for length )

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Know Your Rights // Conozca Sus Derechos

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:13:33 GMT

Rep. Pressley sent out email about what to know and do if confronted by police or immigration agents. ( long, and maybe you want to skip anything news-related )

There's also a Spanish version, and both are available as PDF infographics. The phone number above is for a Massachusetts legal help line.

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two cool animal videos

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:17:09 GMT

Putting this here partly so I can find them again:

Cricket frogs crossing water: The motion has previously been called "skittering" along the water surface. Video shows that it's similar to what porpoises do. The frogs repeatedly leap out of the water and submerging again, moving forward with each leap (via conuly)

Dragonfly acrobatics: some dragonflies dunk themselves in the water to cool off. They submerge briefly, then fly vertically upwards, and do rapid loop-the-loops to dry off (via andrewducker; paywalled)

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as James said, "What a creative use of King Charles III of England"

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 23:23:54 GMT

This is more serious than that subject line suggests, Disney and the now-dissolved Reedy Creek development board made a deal to prevent Ron de Santis et al. from punishing Disney for being pro-LGBT and pro-sex education.

I am reminded of the rule against perpetuities, which I think I learned about from a Sarah Caudwell mystery novel.

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two cool science stories

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 20:25:15 GMT

Hominins in Ethiopia had a workshop making hand-axes out of obsidian 1.2 million years ago. This is more than twice as long ago as previous evidence of this kind of focused activity.

The article in Nature goes into a lot more detail, with color illustrations:

The standardized obsidian handaxes provide ample evidence of the repetitive use of fully mastered skills. This must have required a foundation of already developed knowledge and skills.

Present-day humans have some understanding of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures.

This study builds on earlier work showing that at least some gestures are consistent across ape species, and other gestures are consistent only within a species:but a gesture that means "give me that food" in chimp is "groom me" or "carry me" in bonobo.

The difficulty in carrying the research over to humans has been that we use a wider variety of gestures, combined with (spoken or signed) language: there isn't a single gesture for "come closer" or "give me that food." What these researchers did is ask humans to interpret chimpanzee and bonobo gestures, on video, edited to show only the ape gesturing, not what it was responding to, or how another ape responded to it. Humans consistently did better than random chance at identifying the meaning of the gestures.

On the other hand, the best accuracy was about 80%; it goes down for gestures that have more than one within-species meaning, and for gestures that have different meanings to chimps than to bonobos.

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vaccines: envy and etiquette

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 23:35:50 GMT

Captain Awkward just posted an article on "Vaccines: Envy and Etiquette": suggestions of what to say and do, and what not to say, if you have already been vaccinated against Covid, as well as suggestions for people who are still trying to schedule an appointment.

If you're reading this, you'll probably be nodding or thinking "I know that already" about some of it, but maybe not all, and Jennifer is a good writer.

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Reasons not to trust the CDC and FDA

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 18:38:36 GMT

On the Science-Based Medicine blog, David Gorski asks whether we can still trust the CDC and FDA and concludes "I don't know."

For me, this is more evidence that no, we can't: Gorski (aka Orac) has been a voice for "trust the science, don't listen to anecdata" and pointing at CDC recommendations for things like vaccination for a long time. But that was before Trump, when we could trust the CDC to look at the science, not edit the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report to make the president look better.

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short story recommendation

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 20:59:30 GMT

Reading Wednesday will return. In the meantime, here's a short story I liked: "The Swarm of Giant Gnats I Sent After Kent, My Assistant Manager," by Marissa Lingen.

mrissa says it's part of a series of monsters-and-friendship stories; based on this, I look forward to reading more.

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strange times

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 16:03:12 GMT

Or, as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up:

In these unprecedented times -- times in which the very phrase "unprecedented times" is becoming much more common -- the New York City Department of Health seems to have quietly endorsed the use of glory holes. This is part of a three-page guide to safer sex and COVID-19, along with advice that masturbation is good and kissing is risky.

When asked if the above passage was a tacit endorsement of glory holes, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control and Incident Commander for the Health Department’s COVID-19 response, told Gizmodo (emphasis, again, ours):

We trust our audience and New Yorkers are creative enough to know what this means.

(via ambyr)

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Cool thing of the day

Wed, 06 May 2020 02:11:21 GMT

tarascon pointed to this article about rainbow obsidian, including photos of something that's at least as cool as the name sounds.

Lots more photos, from a commercial rock/mineral store.

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cat hoodie

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 21:44:03 GMT

I got this fine hoodie from an online acquaintance. Also, I just re-colored my hair.

I'd been idly wanting a new hoodie for months, and then I saw these. Liz has an Etsy store with this and a wide variety of other embroidered clothing, bags, and such. A lot of it is fantasy or sf-themed:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/UnusualFrequency <https://www.etsy.com/shop/unusualfrequency>

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Captain Awkward, on dealing with Covid-19

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 11:54:10 GMT

I've been reading the Captain Awkward column for years, and started supporting her on Patreon when she said "if I get $x/month I can focus on writing and make the blog site entirely ad-free." Two or three unconnected people have now linked to this, so:

Captain Awkward on helping one's friends during the pandemic, and on social distancing for extroverts." This one has some useful suggestions from the commentariat, as well as Jennifer's own thoughts.

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coronavirus sitreps

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 02:40:49 GMT

The World Health Organization is issuing daily coronavirus situation reports, addressed to researchers, doctors, and the general public. The first page is an executive summary: updated numbers of cases, risk assessments, and four short paragraphs about what's in the rest of the report.

Today's report includes a page on clinical management of patients with COVID-19, more detailed surveillance data, an article on preparedness for healthcare professionals, and recommendations and advice for the public. As of 1 March 2020, they're saying "If you are not in an area where COVID-19 is spreading, or have not travelled from an area where COVID-19 is spreading, or have not been in contact with an infected patient, your risk of infection is low."

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QOTD (signal boost from eftychia)

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:56:12 GMT

eftychia has found another fine pair of quotes on Twitter:

"It's time to face the music
It's time for oversight
It's time for consequences
In the House of Reps tonight"
-- Molly Kleinman, Ph.D. (mollyali) 2019-09-24

"Why did it take forever?
I guess we'll never know...
It's been a kind of torture,
It's time for Trump to go!"
-- Glenn Hauman (GlennHauman), reply

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limits of de-biasing language

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 12:01:50 GMT

An interesting article on the difficulties of de-biasing language difficulties of de-biasing language, from a machine learning viewpoint. The author notes that simple approaches can hide bias in automated systems without removing it, e.g., if an algorithm is trained on a biased dataset in which "programmer" clusters with words that are more often found on men's resumes, words that might be irrelevant to job qualification. At the same time, the effort is worth making; even if a completely unbiased algorithm isn't possible with current methods in a society with baked-in prejudices, a less-biased one will get better results if the goal is (say) to hire qualified programmers, or make loan decisions based on ability to repay, not on race or gender.

The problem we’re facing in natural language processing (as in any application of machine learning) is that fairness is aspirational and forward looking; data can only be historical, and therefore necessarily reflects the biases and prejudices of the past. Learning how to de-bias our applications is progress, but the only real solution is to become better people.

(via Richard Mateosian, on Copyediting-L.)

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Just for silliness

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 16:53:49 GMT

In his ongoing chronicle of official state everything, Kevin Underhill informs us that New Jersey is considering designating an official state microbe.

If they do, this would be the second official state microbe; I imagine someone in New Jersey thinking "Is brewer's yeast the best you can do, Oregon? We invented streptomycin."

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Good news for immigrants and sanctuary cities

Wed, 16 May 2018 15:03:13 GMT

The Supreme Court just ruled, 7-2, that the states cannot be required to enforce federal law. The case in front of them was about sports betting. That AP story quotes Justice Alito's decision, someone from the ACLU, and someone from the Cato Institute:

“The court ruled definitively that the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law. In the immigration context, this means it can’t require state or local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

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I am one of today's lucky ten thousand

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 02:17:01 GMT

Over on File 770, Ingvar has been posting the serial adventures of Trigger Snowflake, a sort of parody of old sf pulp magazines and the Sad Puppies. In the latest episode, a court forbids someone to express gratitude "except within Venostationary orbit."

In the comments, Ingvar noted that they're not sure how crazily big Venostationary orbit is. So, I googled, and found that someone had posted the answer a few years back: about a million and a half kilometers. The search results also led me to something I found more interesting, Emily Lakdawalla’s discussion of keeping a comsat in stationary orbit over Mars, which she was looking at in terms of communications with Mars landers.

The calculations, and the task, are tricky because planets aren’t actually uniform spheres, producing gravitational irregularities that cause a “geosynchronous” satellite to drift over time. So, the satellites need fuel, mostly to keep them over the equator, but also to keep them from shifting longitude. Mars's gravitational field is more irregular than Earth (in part because of those huge shield volcanoes), making it much harder/more expensive to keep a geo”stationary” satellite in position.

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"Important MassHealth Changes, esp for Harvard Vanguard and Cambridge Health Alliance Patients"

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 20:09:51 GMT

siderea posted about MassHealth changes a few days ago. The post title is hers, and she notes that she spent quite a bit of time trying to find out what the new rules will be, especially for mental health care. (Do read the comments here.)

(I'm linking because the Davis Square community is pretty local, and this is of interest to people outside Somerville, or who just don't read that journal.)

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Mon, 31 Jul 2017 20:34:09 GMT

My friend mrissa wrote an excellent essay for the Disabled People Destroy SF kickstarter: Malfunctioning Space Stations.

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climate change website

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 02:08:24 GMT

The city of Boston has put up a climate change website that republishes EPA and other federal government stuff that the current administration has scrubbed:

http://climatechangedata.boston.gov/

The top of the home page identifies it as a City of Boston site, and says
The City of Boston wishes to acknowledge and attribute this information to the United States Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies for the decades of work that they have done to advance the fight against climate change. While this information may not be readily available on the agency’s webpage right now, here in Boston we know climate change is real and we will continue to take action to fight it.

I haven't explored very much yet, but there's a lot there.

[cross-posted here and to the thisfinecrew community]

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fanfic recommendation

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 23:08:42 GMT

Never Getting Back Together (Like, Ever), by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels), in which Aral Vorkosigan asks Captain Awkward for advice. This is a short, funny Yuletide story, tagged with "crack" and "apologies to Captain Awkward and the Bad Advisor."

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the blizzard of '88

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 18:59:44 GMT

Someone at Weather Underground is live-blogging the current (just starting) northeast U.S. snowstorm. In the comments, among the maps and discussions of what models the National Weather Service using, user pegleg666 posted a link to a post-Sandy blog post containing the Cuban poet José Martí's description of the blizzard of 1888 and its aftermath.

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More fire rainbow photos

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:27:56 GMT

Inspired by padparadscha's post about seeing one, I have uploaded three more photos of the fire rainbow (aka circumhorizontal arc) that I saw out the bus window last Saturday afternoon. My Flickr (not twitter, damn it) username is rosvicl. I did very minimal photo processing, mostly cropping the images a bit.

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