2,031 karma · joined August 23, 2014
For example, the mouse study showed alterations to myelin sheaths. Conceivably there could be long-term implications, as in leading to conditions like multiple sclerosis. Of course this sort of hypothesis remains to be tested. Late-appearing effects are notoriously difficult to establish as consequent to small insults years or decades before.
Remains to be seen where this line of research goes. I sure don't expect to see any outcome of it in the near future.
Sure, writing code is the stimulating creative part. And purifying code, making it elegant, polishing the creation to a brilliant sheen is highly rewarding. By contrast, documenting what's been done is tedious, boring, a gigantic pain, a total drag. Yet if it's not adequately documented all that creative effort will inevitably amount to nothing but a reason to hate its creator.
Furthermore, is it really possible to write superb documentation for lousy code? The effort to document the work is a kind of quality check on the work.
Can't say how many times it's come back to bite me where it hurts. Looking at stuff I finished 6 months, or God forbid, 6 years ago, poorly documented programs invariably prompt a shameful recognition that I have no idea what the hell I did. At least when someone else wrote it I can justify feeling indignant at the "mess" I have to figure out. But when it's my own, that's just sad.
Of course the work we leave behind (at the end of a job, retirement, etc.) will usually be resumed by someone. Excellent documentation is our finest legacy. Consider how it supports moving a project forward when the code's author isn't there to "explain" how it works.
And if we're honest with ourselves, writing cogent documentation is hard, often much harder than writing code which is why it's such a brutal task. OTOH doing something hard is a good reason to tell oneself "A big accomplishment! Good for me!" Something to feel good about!
A rule I aim to live by: the workday isn't over until I record what I just did and the reasons for doing it the way it was done.
The RF was probably too low power to produce readily measurable effects on temperature in the brain. I imagine that it could be a difficult piece of data to collect. However, you're undoubtedly correct that whole body temperature wouldn't be informative in such a study.
Makes sense, keeping some distance from running microwave ovens is a good policy. After an oven has been in service for some time what are the odds seals become leaky, etc. Probably not a great risk but no harm in minimizing one's exposure.
But I can't think what else could be involved other than thermal damage. Thinking about it, I also wonder how much thermal stress is required to produce damage. If only a small increment in thermal energy at a micro-level or at particular chemical bonds is what happens, it would be a challenge to detect and measure such tiny, localized changes. Then again if the effect (that is, RF agitating some chemical entity) is small enough maybe calling it "thermal" wouldn't be exactly right.
Will be very interesting to see how this line of research develops. In any case, a great question that requires a lot more work to decipher.
FWIW in Portland water isn't at all a cheap resource which speaks to the costs of even fairly local transport and delivery. (Portland's water source is ~60 miles east at Mt. Hood.) To me it suggests attempting to share water with very distant areas would be an extremely expensive/complex engineering feat that would dwarf construction of the new Panama canal. Even a project of such scale is by comparison merely a backyard ditch.
Of course some of these features were already present in other languages. However, steady improvements to Tcl have pushed the language well beyond how it was described in the article. Definitely not a "toy" but overall as capable as the other scripting tools out there.
Alas Tcl is more complicated. It's sort of dynamic but not quite depending on how variables are accessed. For one thing a proc definition provides a separate scope from the global variable scope. If we define:
set b 5 ;# global
proc w {a} {
# upvar 1 b b
+ $a $b ;# "can't read 'b': no such variable"
}
proc x {} {
set b 2 ;# local
w 0
}
x ;# error re: no such variable 'b'
Of course the call to w in x doesn't operate under lexical scope since procedures are global and can't access variables inside another procedure's scope.
It is possible under some conditions to mimic lexical scope using the upvar command. In the case of proc w, uncommenting the upvar call would reference var b in the calling proc (or stack frame).
Wow, written out that is kinda "mind-boggling"! But in practice it's not a problem keeping it straight, at least most of the time...
The thing with upvar (and uplevel) is that by default upvar refers to variables in the caller of the current proc. But when a proc is called indirectly (e.g., a callback proc) then the variable upvar is intended to reference may be 2 or more frames above. Using something like "upvar #2 refvar var" works as expected. It's analogous to deferencing pointers in C when there are >1 levels of indirection.
Is there any programming language that doesn't have some confusing rules? If a language is going to be useful the answer is bound to be "no". It's a curious how we get used to a particular (or even peculiar) syntax. When used long enough it begins to feel "natural" and obvious, and find it amazing how anyone would have difficulty understanding how it works.
I've played around with Red and it's pretty interesting. Though rather different from Tcl. Red compiles to native code out of the box which is an advantage. Currently Red is limited to 32-bit output. When they get 64-bit working along with self-hosting compiler I think the language could become a major success.
AIUI the biggest dietary culprit is the insidious infiltration of sugars into the foods that many people eat. Much of the prepared, convenience foods people rely on contain sugars that even dedicated label-readers may not be able to readily identify. A whole laundry list of cane sugar, sucrose, high-fructose syrup, rice syrup, honey, invert syrup, molasses, panela, muscovado, etc.
Unless they're sneaking sugars into chicken, sure doesn't seem that it would be the main problem.
Whether this inherited intolerance of alcohol is the norm depends on which populations we're talking about. For example among people with European ancestry this genetic variation is uncommon. And indeed alcohol dependence is a huge issue in many parts of the world.
In my experience disulfiram is only useful with people who are motivated to quit drinking. Forcing alcoholics to take disulfiram is asking for catastrophe. (Courts used to impose this condition on people charged with driving while intoxicated.) I've known individuals who drank anyway and wound up in the Emergency Department. Fortunately none died but it can happen. Anyway it's an issue because having an anxiety disorder often leads to abusing alcohol.
But the article's real story is not only the potential antianxiety benefit of disulfiram, but the intriguing finding regarding novel mechanisms of action, and that is worthwhile exploring further whether the drug ever gets approved for this new use, or not.
Not at all contradicting your point. It just goes to show we have to take things in context, the context itself being subject to infinite variation.
But the article is reporting a different effect altogether. Disulfiram indirectly inhibits glutamate signaling, which produces a putative "antianxiety" effect in an animal model of anxiety. It makes sense in that glutamate is the primary activating neurotransmitter in the brain.
After all existing antianxiety agents like benzodiazepine drugs work by binding to GABA receptors. GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. The logic is increase inhibitory effect == reduce activating effect. BTW it's not coincidence that alcohol also binds to GABA receptors, the reason people reach for a drink when they're feeling nervous.
But the problem remains that taking disulfiram for anxiety means using NO alcohol at all. Maybe a few people are OK with this but I bet most will be unwilling to give up having a drink now and again. So it creates a problem since people will forget and with both on board it can be a big headache, in more ways than one.
And at the same time overestimate their own capabilities. Both history and life experience teach us that more often than not failure is an outcome of inadequate self-observation. Imagined prowess based on mistaken assumptions is so often the source of defeat even more than losing to a genuinely superior adversary. It's the difference between arrogant blindness and courage under fire, the first is a dishonest prelude to failure, the second affirms reality and probability of success.
I'm not sure how it could be confirmed that Ukrainian actions cause the ship to sink. Hardly likely that Russia will say so even if it is true.
Maybe someone with expertise in these matters could shed light on the question. Certainly there are more than a few people around the globe who are highly invested in knowing the answer to that one.
> I don't know how one can reasonably weigh between a medicine with known risks (and plausibly unknown risks!) and the unknown risks of something like psychedelics, which are not yet understood at all but anecdotatlly appear to potentially have a very high reward/risk ratio.
Yes, the key word in your statement is "anecdotally". Anecdotal evidence is not good enough. Need to have systematic, carefully vetted evidence documenting specific benefits and risks before it can be said the compound is understood well enough for general use.
There's a process to work out drug dose/risks. A prospective treatment goes through phase 1/2/3 trials. Basically it's about discovering the characteristics of a drug, good, bad and ugly. Well, at least as much as can be discovered in the course of it.
> That is not to say it can't cause other types of damage.
Exactly so. Hallucinogens can be bad for people with predisposition to psychosis, mania, panic attacks, dissociation. That's maybe ~3% of the total population. People may not know or care if they're at risk, so it can be a problem.
> And here you also say that unlike the advice you give your patients you might decide differently when it comes to yourself.
What I mean is that I have an obligation, taken an oath, that I won't knowingly expose patients to unnecessary risks of harm. It's always about having evidence that benefits exceed risk. It's a judgement call to be sure. In any case everything is done under full disclosure and consent.
I might be willing to take on a risk myself with less sure evidence of benefit than I could justify recommending to patients. There I have a higher burden of proof to meet. IOW I can experiment on myself but I won't experiment on others who might go along with it just because they trust me.
> The most trust worthy thing to do is admit that there are limits to our knowledge.
Fully agree and any trustworthy person would say "I don't know" when in fact one doesn't know something. When it comes to human knowledge it's always limited. For one thing we can't know what is unknowable, capabilities are constrained by our neurophysiological construction.
I'm OK with saying so when I don't know. It happens a lot.
One more point. It's true past practices in medicine are troubling to us now. I have qualms about certain things being done now. But cultures evolve, ideas of what's acceptable and not change. Applying today's ideas of standards to prior generations is likely to lead to a negative judgement, but is that a fair appraisal of our predecessors?
If we take a hard, critical look at our own time, and think about how some contemporary practices (not just in medicine) will be viewed by people 100 years from now, really what will they think of us? Plenty of current things would qualify, but it's hard for us to see them that way. Culture is invisible to the people embedded it it.
If you're in my office and I recommend a medication that you decide not to accept I'm not going to twist your arm to take it.
I might take calculated risks and do things myself, but when there are unknown risks due to utter lack of knowledge, you're right I wouldn't advise it for others. In my role trustworthiness is everything, it simply is wrong to do things that violate patients' trust. So true I won't take unnecessary chances with their health and well-being.
Not my job to defend conduct of others of decades ago. I could argue with your comment about "overprescribing", but really I see no point debating non-issues. Discussion only means something when based on facts, IOW it always comes down to specifics, not squishy generalities.
First out of the gate was ketamine (now on the market as esketamine), and currently psilocybin is being studied. It's showing promising results, however, the details re: dosing and adverse effects are still being worked out.
It's an inescapable fact: ALL drugs produce side effects (at least in some recipients). Who will or won't tolerate a given drug is mostly hard to predict beyond the overall odds.
Everyone in my field has seen individuals who have experienced serious harm due to use of hallucinogens including psilocybin. IMO using this class of drugs shouldn't be considered trivial. Sure, a lot of people have taken such "illicit" drugs without lasting problems, but response is a stochastic function. Odds of harm are no doubt small but as use spreads to a larger pool odds are adverse reactions will emerge.
Of course people with serious depression already have major brain dysfunction and likely vulnerable to exacerbated adverse effects. Compared to normal functioning there's sharply decreased room for error.
In medicine the primary rule is "above all do no harm". Absent sufficient data backing particular practices, choosing to step into new territory requires moving forward with great caution and care.
[0] https://www.fastenal.com/content/feds/pdf/Article%20-%20Magn...
As to design, we've gravitated to a relatively spare approach. Though not at all imitating "industrial" space, after all, we actually live in our home. Linoleum flooring, quartz composite countertops, stainless sink/range, laminate cabinets, etc., are "homey" enough but also durable materials.
One thing is crystal clear: in small kitchens storage is a precious resource. Dedicated cooks prefer buying supplies in larger quantities, spices, flours, etc. That means a tightly managed pantry with little empty space. Sometimes having "too many" cabinets can be a good idea.
But understandably tastes and needs vary, so no doubt others would do something entirely different with the space our kitchen occupies. Then again, if I was designing our kitchen from scratch, well, it would be so MUCH better, but WTH, when wouldn't that be the case.