eukaryote

I successfully treated my eczema with Vitamin D. It did take several months to clear up, but now I can eat what I want with no risk of a flare-up. I took 5000IU daily. I still take it now, but only a couple of times a week.

It doesn't work for all cases of eczema or psoriasis, unfortunately; many people I have recommended it to did not have the same response.

Best of luck - I hope your Vitamin D experiment works out for you!

Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) falls just after the day with the latest sunrise.

In the days before everyone had clocks and calendars, perhaps this was be easier to determine than the shortest day.

Ok, the other side of the debate is: education is provided by governments who want to protect people in power and their own interests, so pushes an education system that protects those in power (not saying I agree with this side of the debate)

1) Should Europe really be considered a continent, as it's just part of Eurasia?

2) Should (English-speaking) residents of England be considered the only native English speakers?

3) Before compulsory education, was the general population really stupid?

4) Has compulsory education made the world a better place?

1) Before eating a snack in the evening, ask yourself "Am I tired, thirsty or hungry?"

If you are tired, go to bed.

If you are thirsty, drink some water.

If you are hungry, eat a small amount (20g) of lean meat, cheese or nuts and leave the kitchen immediately.

2) Gradually cut all sweet food and drink from your diet. This will re-adjust your taste buds for a healthier diet, and you won't even notice.

I am 52 years old and suffer from eczema, which is an auto-immune disease.

I've been taking a daily 5000IU Vit-D supplement combined with vitamin K2 for a few years, and my eczema has completely cleared up.

I live in Scotland, so I am unable to generate Vit-D naturally for a good part of the year.

It is an interesting idea, but Australia has a breast feeding rate of around 90% and a large obesity problem

"Name a vaccine that doesn’t reduce onward transmission even as it cures disease"

Whooping cough - that treats the symptoms but does not stop the patient from spreading the disease

Edit: Added context

Reminds me of an excellent malicious compliance on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/8s58d3...

Same for me - I find the use of upper case keywords like this jarring in SQL. It seems quite old-school, like reading COBOL!

This is also a problem in the UK. When my children were young, it made little economic sense for my wife to continue working - practically all of her salary would have gone on childcare.

If childcare was made tax-deductible, my wife could have returned to work earlier. This would have meant our household could have contributed a far larger wedge in taxes to support society.

Europe hasn't avoided the dietary changes occurring in the US, it's just that the effect is less pronounced. European portion sizes are growing as well, but not to the very generous sizes I experienced in the US. There is less added sugar in European food - bread does not generally taste sweet in Europe, but it does in the US (to me anyway). Europe also does not use much (any?) high fructose sugar.

That being said, Europe is not immune to expanding waistlines. The UK is not far behind the US in obesity and overweight population. It is a similar story across the rest of Europe.

I think the key differences is that Europe has avoided the opioid crisis the US is experiencing, and the US suicide rate is also much higher. But other deaths rates, such as from alcohol abuse and obesity, are comparable between the US and the UK.

The US could also increase the price of petrol. This would encourage the use of more fuel-efficient cars. Most European cars are way more efficient than American cars. Admittedly, this is a cultural, not a technological, problem in the US.

I am sorry to hear of your loss - losing a cat is losing a member of your family.

It is difficult to explain to others how much an animal means to your life. I have been far more distraught about a pet dying than human relations passing away!

Please be gentle on yourself and let yourself grieve. And reflect on the wonderful life your cat was able to live in your company.

Oh no, not again

I use a simple version of a TO-DO list. I have a email folder ACTION, and mails with a subject prefix of TODO are moved there with an auto-rule. My wife also adds reminders to the TODO list as required.

This works well for me; I have weekly timesheet and billing to do, and it keeps track of where I am in the workflow. An automated job on my server mails me the weekly tasks required in the subject, and I delete each mail as the task is complete. For example my weekly automated tasks are

   TODO: create invoice
   TODO: add invoice to finance spreadsheet
   TODO: complete timesheet
   TODO: save approved timesheet
   TODO: mail invoice and timesheet to customer
   TODO: confirm scheduled payment received
   TODO: perform weekly backup
   TODO: CAR1 check oil
   TODO: CAR1 tyre pressures
   TODO: CAR1 water jet reservoir
   TODO: CAR2 check oil
   TODO: CAR2 tyre pressures
   TODO: CAR2 water jet reservoir

This allows certain tasks to be performed when the weather is appropriate.

A few years ago, I had a player in my tennis team who had a small beer before playing matches.

I do agree wine-dark is a beautiful turn of phrase, but from what I gather the literal translation is "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed".

Have considerable experience of being "wine-eyed", I can assure you my eyes are generally gleaming. :-)

I was surprised in this article that "wine-dark" is still being bandied about as a translation for οἶνοψ πόντος. According to a scholar I spoke with many years ago, a more reasonable translation would be gleaming or shimmering. This would fit with another known use of οἶνοψ, referring to the back of an oxen in the sun.

I suffered from ME many years ago, and I was looking for something - anything - to help me cope with the continual fatigue, muscle pain, insomnia, night sweats, tinnitus etc. I went to learn meditation, and the instructor told me that for many chronic illnesses, the stress of being ill can slow down recovery.

Once I started practicing meditation, I felt a slow improvement in my condition, and most of the symptoms had sufficiently eased after 10 months that I was living a fairly normal life again. I did experience a couple of mild relapses years later (both times by not easing up on intense exercise when suffering a throat infection), but the symptoms were more mild and I recovered each time after about 4 months.

I an not advocating meditation as a cure, but it did make living with ME more bearable.

passwordSafe. It runs fine on Windows and on Linux under Wine. I have never tried an alternative, to be honest, as it does a good job - double-click to copy password, an option to display certain characters from password, auto-generation of new passwords, hierarchically organised and searchable.

When sharing passwords with a team when using passwordSafe, we had to share the same sign-in password - not ideal.

I have tried a few tools for to-do lists, but settled on 3 folders in my inbox: ACTION, READ & WANT.

I created some rules: subject beginning TODO goes to ACTION, subject beginning READ goes to READ, subject beginning WANT goes to WANT folder. This means I can add to any list just by sending a mail to myself.

I created additional rules so all emails from credit card companies, banks, accountant and other important senders goes straight into ACTION folder.

I try and ensure all unread items are dealt with daily. If I set it to read, it becomes non-urgent.

I did not imply the treatment had no benefit. I stated that one third got better, one third had no change, and one third got worse. This is not a good result - a third of the participants got worse.

In addition, 13% of the participants on the trial had already recovered before the trail began, but were not excluded.

Finally, the thresholds for being “recovered” demonstrated worse health than the scores required in the first place to demonstrate the severe disability needed to enter the trial. This anomaly meant that some participants could get worse on physical function and fatigue during the trial and still be included in the results as being “recovered.”

“I’m shocked that the Lancet published it,” said Ronald Davis, a well-known geneticist at Stanford University and the director of the scientific advisory board of the Open Medicine Foundation.

“The PACE study has so many flaws and there are so many questions you’d want to ask about it that I don’t understand how it got through any kind of peer review”, added Davis.

"I will argue that ME is simply a belief, the belief that one has an illness called ME..... .I will argue that this line here [overhead slide] represents not the line between low and high cortisol responses [but] the line between real and unreal illness."

Simon Wessely, Microbes, Mental Illness, the Media and ME: The Construction of Disease, 9th Eliot Slater Memorial Lecture, Institute of Psychiatry, April 1994.

Although he may have softened his stance in the past few years, this is fairly representative of Simon Wessely's views during the past 20-25 years.

I'm sorry if you took offence at my use of the idiom "all in the mind" - its intended meaning is "imagined" rather than "psychiatric". I am not implying psychiatric illnesses are not real.

Regarding the PACE trail; I was referring to the trail conducted in the UK. About 73% of people with ME do not gain any benefit in symptom relief when CBT is used as a primary intervention.

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/2015/10/press-release-me-ass...

From what I recall, the result of the PACE trail was a bit of a farce. There were 3 categories of outcome for the patient: no change, better, or worse. Each of these categories contains roughly a third of the subjects. Despite such a glaring failure to produce a useful treatment, the PR spin focused on the third that got better, rather than the third of patients who got worse after the PACE treatment.

Surely this kind of breaks the medical tradition of "first, do no harm". The anger generated by ME patients in the UK was caused by the fact that it was proposed they would lose their benefits if they did not participate on a PACE treatment, a treatment that caused no improvement or made ME patients worse in 66% of the trail subjects.

A more open mind must be taken by researchers when approaching ME as a illness. They must remember they are dealing with subjects that have frequently dismissed as lazy, over-sensitive, and in many cases lying about their symptoms.

Disclaimer: I had ME for 2.5 years about 25 years ago, so I have been subject to family, doctors, friends and even strangers dismissing my muscle pain, blinding headaches, insomnia, continuous cramps and inability to regulate my body temperature as "all in the mind".

I wish anyone reading this who is suffering from ME all my best wishes - I remember clearly how ME feels.

I am now a healthy 45 year old man, who can now play tennis for 4-5 hours continuously without ill effect. There can be a future after ME for all of us if medical researchers continue to search for a solution, rather than classifying it as "all in the mind" as the PACE trail was seemingly intended.

My wife and I used to joke about this - we would ask each other "Are we grown-ups now?". Even after getting married, we didn't really feel grown-up. We are both grown-up now - this happened when my first child was born. This probably differs between cultures (I'm Scottish and my wife is English). I definitely wasn't grown up at 19, and I was living in London holding down a full-time job in IT, and living in my own flat.

yeah, but it's just a social more of the programming community to describe social mores as idioms :-p

Thoroughly agree with the crux of the argument, though. There is too much cargo cult science wih regards to programming practice. eg don't ever use gotos, upper case reserved words in SQL, functions should be no bigger than N lines. This type of thinking cripples our critical faculties, and is to be resisted.