StringTheory @ StringTheory @beehaw.org

Fun with strings! Ukulele, knitting, physics!

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2 yr. ago

“The JCU trial provides sufficient proof of concept that infection with live hookworms is safe and appears to have some sort of beneficial effects on people’s metabolic health, which will hopefully be confirmed by future clinical trials designed to confirm efficacy and explore how hookworms influence metabolism,” said Dr Paul Giacomin, AITHM Senior Research Fellow and immunologist.

Eat less vs feed a crop of worms in my guts…. Hmmmmm. I mean, it’s an efficient way of making sure you don’t absorb all the calories you consume. It would be a bummer if my worms’ eggs were infecting people who didn’t over-eat and would be harmed.

The anti-inflammatory aspect is intriguing, but there has to be better options for creating that response.

This “give you worms so you can continue to overeat without consequences” approach is far too reminiscent of the ancient Roman vomitoria. There has to be a less wasteful way to deal with obesity and its metabolic consequences.

Beehaw’s stance on downvotes is incredibly refreshing and freeing. There are no downvotes on Beehaw, and downvotes from other instances are invisible to members. You can’t just use downvotes to slash a post you don’t like, you have to reply and state your objection and start a conversation. And if a post is pointlessly nasty you can’t downvote it to oblivion, you have to articulate your reasoning for it being removed and submit it to a mod.

The lack of downvotes means you have to think and participate. You can’t just stab a button and rapidly move on to the next post like a trained monkey pressing buttons for a hit of cocaine.

A tried-and-true tactic used by people everywhere through-out history.

Another example: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/ron-desantis-florida-rosa-parks-textbook

Some people view sex as a means of expressing affection and connection, rather than as a means of having an orgasm. They would have no issue buying a sex toy to get their physical needs met, however hiring a person wouldn’t make sense to them because of the lack of emotional connection.

They don’t want to date a man who is regularly going to sex workers?

Schools, get the schools some serious ventilation upgrades. Petri dishes full of cootie factories…

But at the end he sees behind the curtain of the “utopia” he grew up in and realizes the truth about it. Hence the title of the book.

Russia probably saw this weakness

Good ol’ “Foundations of Geopolitics” by Aleksandr Dugin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

“Hallucinate” seems like an odd vocabulary choice when talking about an AI. It implies much more sentience than an AI can possibly have, plus the ability to spontaneously create from whole-cloth. (Which AI can’t do, at all.)

I feel like our brave new culture needs a different word for the non-sensical/inaccurate products of AI; something with the flavors of “assemble” “fabricate” “construct” “collate” “collage” “grab-bag”.

Our vocabulary isn’t keeping up with technology. Is there a linguist in the house? We need more words!

Bike lanes are not my favorite thing to ride on. I’d far rather move over a block and ride down a quiet residential street than ride down an arterial in a bike lane.

(Trails, of course, are awesome.)

The word “privilege” breaks down into the roots for “private” and “law.”

“Jab” got adopted in the US when the disinformation memes and stuff started flooding into social media. The creators of the memes learned British English, so they used British slang.

If you are sick with anything contagious throw on a mask if you go out in public. Common courtesy.

If your immune system is compromised, you are already wearing a mask in public anyway.

If you are visiting people in fragile health, you are already wearing a mask anyway.

Fun fact: I have some foreign colleagues who use ChatGPT to get the base for their patient reports. They give very short(and non personal!) instructions, a nice text pops out, they add in the details. Voila. Their report is better than mine as a native.

In the end, how is this different than using a good Epic template? Sit down and create a wardrobe of templates and smart-phrases for your reports. It will end up as fast as those ChatGPT texts, but it will be your own writing and details that you control. Epic has several different ways to import and copy other people’s templates, too. You could even use one of those ChatGPT reports to create part of your template if you like.

A similar study (observational) found eating tree nuts reduced recurrance of cancers by 50% in cancer survivors.

Tree nuts are pretty expensive. I sort of think it’s more likely that being financially secure reduced recurrance of cancers by 50%.

Washington and California are doing well with it. Hopeful that more states will do the same.

Meanwhile, hundreds of immigrants a day are moved to reception centers all across the country.

You know what? They don’t need expensive charter busses paid for with state taxes - their travel is paid by federal taxes. And they don’t need expensive private security to force people to stay aboard at gunpoint. They aren’t lied to, and they know where they are going. And they aren’t dropped on a sidewalk unannounced - they go to a reception center that has resources for them and knows they are arriving, and they are documented every step of the way. They don’t miss their immigration appointments because their appointments are scheduled near the reception center they move to.

Abbot is spending huge amounts of his state’s money to do a terrible and illegal job of duplicating a TINY portion of what the federal government is doing efficiently every day.

Also, immigration is at the lowest it’s been in 20 years. All this crap Texas is pulling is utterly pointless. We need new people who are eager to work - we don’t need to make child labor legal again. https://globalmigration.ucdavis.edu/20-years-declining-immigration-and-disappearance-low-skilled-immigrants

Texas officials confirmed the bus was headed to Chicago as part of its "border bus mission." Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is one of several Republican governors in southern states who have authorized the bussing of thousands of migrants to Democratic-run cities since early 2022 as part of an ongoing political battle over immigration policies. Critics have accused GOP leaders of using migrants as political pawns.

…

“State-sanctioned kidnapping is not a public policy choice, it is immoral and disgusting," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said of the practice in June.

Texas sure made a point with their stunt.

Not too sure it’s the one they wanted to make.

Florida students who want to go to college in other states will need months of remedial education to catch up.

This is a really cool old study that looks at how people switch to a run in order save energy - at a certain speed (which differs among individuals) it is less costly to run than to walk. We switch to a run because running uses less energy than walking would.

Forcing someone to walk when they’d rather run, or run when they’d rather walk, burns more calories. (And causes injury, but hey, calories burned, baby!)

I remember learning about this applied to various animals, too, and how this plays into the idea of humans being efficient at catching critters to eat because we can jog along for ages and wear them out. We just don’t stop, and eventually the prey drops with exhaustion. BBQ time! Humans: 1, Antelope: 0.