Norovirus is a helluva drug, and I did not manage to dodge it.

See also:

They've already paid out half a billion, so Jan 1st - March 12th.

Echoing kleinbl00, had quiet a few tendon injuries recently. Been two months since my most recent knee tendon injury and I'm just now able to do the 30 minute walk to work without an inflamed ball on my knee.

Wrists are especially annoying because you can't exactly not use them if that's your job. I went heavy on the ergonomics after damaging mine a few summers ago. Wavy keyboard, slanted / vertical mouses galor, and a stylus for the phone. Plus re-organizing my desks to avoid any edges pressing on my forearms.

I'd be lying if I said the pain was completely gone even a year after the ergonomic upgrades. No laptop at the coffee shop. But the wrists are functional / able to work full days at the computer again.

Finally taking the time to tackle my back pain.

Got x-rays, blood tests, and seemingly no severe / degenerative conditions. Went to the physical therapist and they gave me an answer to the effect of: "nothing is injured anymore, the pain is psychological", but also my back is clearly way weaker on one side / the other side compensates for certain motions. So supposedly I just need to make my body understand that using that muscle shouldn't trigger pain. Now I just need to get comfortable sitting on the floor in lab and doing an upward dog-esk stretch 4x a day.

Lab going well, finally got the biologically-meaningful results that I'd been working towards for 8 months. Went to repeat it yesterday and it turned out I'd mixed up my cells when splitting them and the receptor of interest had disappeared. But if things going well next week I should have enough data to turn my thesis proposal into an NIH grant proposal!

My work (unrelated to AD) has recently had me focused on microglia, and the more I learn about them, the more I'm (1) fascinated and (2) dumbfounded.

Ditto, I'm looking at a group of host-recognition receptors on microglia. It's possible they turn down clearance of plaques. It's also possible they turn down clearance of synapses. The next two years will tell.

- Pan-abolishing student debt would financially wreck all organizations that loaned those students their money and likely pull down whole sectors of the economy with them. Dislike the system all you want, abolishing debt is simply a non-viable and downright lazy to pass off as a solution.

- See above. Remember that whole mortgage crisis from 2008? Now imagine if there was less incentive for any renter / home-owner to pay.

- Labeling: controversial, I disagree with, but not out there. Moratorium: absolutely a bad idea.

Imagine if you're a farmer and suddenly the gov't says you can't plant any of the same crops or use any of the same fertilizer until they have a chance to "figure out what's going on". A moratorium also flies directly in the face of the fact that there's already the EPA, FDA, and USDA regulating these crops / pesticides.

It's liberal fear-mongering and science-denialism, the same as conservative climate denial.

There's a lot in her platform's policy statement that's pretty out-there.

Notably:

- Abolish student debt to free a generation of Americans from debt servitude.

- Impose an immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.

- Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.

I'll say this: the universe of No Man's Sky is vastly more appealing than my direct surroundings... and the PC gaming community is so unbelievably toxic that I honestly don't understand how any of you interact with it. I was gonna buy an NVidia Shield just to run Plex but now I think I won't just 'cuz I don't wanna get any PC gamer cooties on my life.

I've been playing Dark Souls 3. One thing they got right is no voice / text communication in PvP / P+PvE. You've gotta communicate with emotes and environmental context. And the messages you can leave on the ground for players in other worlds is limited to a pre-determined set of words.

Which has led to a lot of "finger but hole" runes behind charred bodies hung over railings.

On June 6, during a spot on Fox & Friends, Trump described me as "not a very good reporter." A few weeks later, at his golf course in southwest Scotland, he introduced me to some investors as a "great reporter." He caught himself and added "sometimes."

Grade A professional negging right there.

"Kiss me where it smells, she said, so I took her to Allston."

Went to Allston last night, saw Boris, my face was melted.

If you color the top- + bottom-center, it also looks somewhat H- (and tie-fighter-) like.

Starski Wars

Finally starting These Are My Sisters at the suggestion of kleinbl00. Wondering what the possibility is that it is fictional, because otherwise I think the next 150 pages will take some mental work on my part to accept that such a world truly did exist for hundreds of thousands of people less than a century ago. It's got a dark sense of humor (I think?), too:

The nurse just now picked up one of the sheets I have written. She read it--looking at me oddly--asked what in the hell I thought I was doing. And because she expected an answer in keeping with my strange occupation--I did not have the heart to disappoint her. So I gave her an answer that fitted. I told her that I was Shakespeare, the reincarnation of Shakespeare trying to sidestep a strait-jacket. [...] She came back down the aisle with a whole ream of paper and said to me: "Go to it, Shakespeare."

Also an audiobook on the history of treating mental disorders with psychedelics for when I'm in lab. I keep having to stop that one though, the blatant disregard of medical researchers by the DEA and FDA just makes me sad.

Reddit functions on gamification.

Do you think this is true of /r/the_donald & co? This week had them completely covering the front page (Or at least, I had ~10/25 posts left on my front page after RES blocked the rest).

I find it somewhat hard to believe that they are really that popular a sub and not just gaming / mass-upvoting every post. But then again, if they were doing something obvious, I'd imagine the admins would be quick to shut them down, given the amount of shit / drama the cause on the rest of the site.

Dancing: Went to a Noisia concert last week and re-injured my knee and could barely hear for a day. Worth it, but need to work on getting the pluses without the minuses for next time.

Climbing: Pretty consistent at this point, may learn to lead this summer.

Thesis Proposal: Rounded up my committee this week. Debating putting one extra heavy-hitting name on the list, but otherwise I have a pretty solid team. One good cop, one bad cop, and one new hire whose position on the lawful good to chaotic evil matrix is TBD.

Ah shit, I need to stop procrastinating on mine.

I was talking with my adviser a few weeks ago about this. His criticism is that the "Moonshot" aspect of the project is "Get everyone together and figure out how to cure cancer". Which is to say: there isn't a yet plan.

I still stand by the value of the BRAIN initiative though. There at least the plan is: invest in concrete goals to drive the technology behind brain imaging forward.

Why exactly are you surprised? Is it because you find the likelihood of this working in humans to be nil, because of methodological reasons, or something else? I don't know enough about the subject to judge.

I'm surprised that a lab with full access to human post-mortem tissue was able to published a translational study with zero actionable items other than to check that this actually occurs in humans in the future.

It might be real, it might not be, but this just seems a bit early to start parading around results in the NYTs.

Looking it up, that one is twice the height of what I did yesterday. Also that lead-only overhang looks insane. Give me a couple more years and maybe I'd be up for it. I'd imagine it'd be pretty satisfying to reach the top, assuming it doesn't take two hours to get there.

We do allow quotes on here, updated the link's description :-P

It a device that reflects ions through a giant vacuum chamber. The time it takes for those ions to travel through its very controlled electromagnetic field is proportional to their mass-to-charge ratio. So with a metal screen (2nd to last picture in top comment) you can detect how many ions came through and calculate how long it took to see them relative to an initial electromagnetic pulse that flings them through the chamber.

Thanks, and yeah, jealousy is a big thing, the other big thing is that I know I don't need >1 partner.

Illustrated in one simple image!

Where from and to?

Are they moving too?

Details detail!

Don't let it get your hopes too down. I basically couldn't stand up straight three pubskis ago, an the X-ray made it look like there was cartilage damage, butnow it's good enough that I almost forgot to put my knee brace on this morning. A PCP told me that I had "runner's knee" (Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome), while pediatrics gave me a more specific sprain to a tendon on the outside of the outer side of the knee.

I was told that in addition to icing it when it hurts, it also helps to put a warm wet towel over it (when it doesn't hurt) to improve blood flow to the tendons. Coupled with (honestly pretty intermittent) PT and a knee brace, it got better much faster than I expected.

On a scale from 1 to Cloud, how service do you think it will it be?

Saw the movie last year and did not enjoy it at all ( Plus ). Maybe I was missing something?

^^ I echo this

OftenBen: I'm reminded of this ze frank video:

Finished Feast for Crows, decided to take a break from GRRM for at least a book. Started NeuroTribes a book on the history of autism.

There's a personal account in there of some CAM abuse local to where I grew up. The family interviewed in the chapter talks about seeing a provider who referred them to his (unbenownst to them) wife for behavioral therapy. After rounds upon rounds of diet changes, probiotics, and pills and injections of various supplements, the parents grew a bit suspicious.

They finally quit just before starting another round of chelation therapy when they realized that their son was being recommended chelation when his mercury levels were high (indicating "heavy metal toxicity") as well as when they were low (indicating "poor clearance of heavy metals"). When they finally asked if any measurement wouldn't result in more chelation, the doctor told them flat out "no", so they left, leaving behind thousands of dollars of money wasted on therapies. And on top of that, they were accused of "giving up" on their son by fellow parents on communal forums.

It made me sad to read all that, seeing a clear example of a provider taking advantage of parents in a shitty situation. But I never realized the pressure from parents of autistic children to "fix their kids" by any means necessary.

A Feast for Crows, understanding now the comments about GRRM and an editor, though enjoying the switch in characters to clergy / religious fanatics.