- keithflower parentJohn, I've been following your work for years (including back in the old lemonodor years). I just wanted to say thank you here, for sharing your expertise for all on this topic, and for all the other tremendous work you've done. What an inspiration.
- I feel for you my friend.
From my experience, having young kids is a very difficult time for relationships. Couple that with all the challenges around the pandemic and other current craziness, and things get even tougher.
From my experience also, as your child gets older that part of the stress tends to settle down and things feel better and relationships do generally improve.
Having said that, I'm a big fan of couples' counseling, which I think all couples can benefit from, regardless of the state of their relationship. IMHO, the ability to communicate is of primary importance, and it's not something that we're just born knowing how to do. One huge benefit from couples counseling is learning open communication with kindness.
Here's hoping things get better soon. Take care of yourselves!
- I'm betting on some kind of glitch on the State Department website, but it's an interesting historical note that when Richard Nixon formally resigned in August 1974, he did so via a brief letter to then Secretary of State Kissinger.
- I support this ban.
I’m a physician. In addition to this president inciting a riot, this president and his supporters are complicit in using social media to promote unscientific, self-serving views that strike at the health of my patients and adversely affect American healthcare in general.
Enough is enough.
- Looks like they are fixing this, but good grief, isn't anyone in Stanford's well-paid hierarchy looking out for these young doctors?
Residents, nurses, and other front-line healthcare workers should be receiving these inoculations TODAY.
Residents have enough stress without needing to demonstrate to force an organization to simply review the results of "algorithms" and do the right thing.
- “Capturing the Unicorn” - the story of The Unicorn Tapestries and the mathematician brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky:
- Having followed this story for some time, I grieve with the family as much as an outsider can.
This brave family's story is an inspiration.
Dr. Might's linked post includes many ways to help honor Bertrand's legacy, and to help others.
Thanks to Bertrand, Dr. Might, and his family for bringing more light into the world.
- Thank you for all of it, Dr. Graham!
What a life.
- Worthy of HN border acknowledgment, please.
- Emacs with org-mode.
- Your selective quotation misses the main point of Wallace's piece. He is wrestling with the ethics of causing gratuitous suffering.
The 'grasshopper' quote is Wallace actually quoting the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, possibly not an unbiased source for science. Wallace goes on to say:
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim [grasshopper quotation] is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.
Wallace goes on to write:
The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.
- There's a wealth of fascinating information including book series on deep space communication at the JPL DESCANSO Deep Space Communications and Navigation Center of Excellence:
- See a physician.
- Ask permission to talk to the outgoing manager. If they balk at transparency, you'll know where the "communications" problem lay.
- The rotation I did through a hospice service when I was a fourth year medical student was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
Hospice staff are experts at effective pain-wrangling (pain in all its many manifestations), and, as they say, in helping people live until they die.
I'm grateful for the teaching - from both clinicians and patients.
- Note to tech world: THIS is how you take responsibility, make things right when mistakes happen, and look out for the communities we live in.
- Please try again. Please see a physician.
- President Obama just tweeted: "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."
- Dr. Kirsch's (a psychologist) work has been valuable, with some justified criticisms of antidepressant therapy and their trials. But his work did not show that antidepressants are clinically ineffective.
Dr. Kirsch's analysis showed that for mild depression treated with antidepressants, there is in fact an improvement in symptoms of depression based on rating scales like the Hamilton Depression Scale - but for mild depression, this improvement in the numbers doesn't necessarily translate into what you correctly identify as clinical significance. However, Dr. Kirsch's own "cutoff" for whether or not such a numerical increase constitutes "clinical significance" or not is itself just an arbitrary number that itself has been criticized.
Also, Kirsch's own metaanalyses (and other metaanalyses) show clearly that for moderate and severe depression (and other conditions), antidepressants are indeed clinically effective (in other words, yes, the benefits actually "mattered" from a patient's perspective), and, importantly, they are highly effective at preventing relapse.
They work, and work well.
In addition, there are a variety of reasons why many short-term clinical trials of antidepressants (which have made up the bulk of clinical trials of SSRIs, for example) are entirely different from the way physicians prescribe antidepressants (and other medications) clinically, and may underestimate their benefit even for cases of mild depression. The beneficial effects of antidepressants increase with longer exposure (i.e. exceeding the length of a six week clinical drug study), probably because of downstream neurotrophic factor(s) increases. Many trials of antidepressants limited dose adjustment or dose adjustment rate. Many clinical trials have excluded patients with severe symptoms or dual diagnoses because inclusion introduces a safety issue or may introduce too many variables. Also, physicians will switch patients to another antidepressant if there is no sign of early efficacy, and while one antidepressant may work very well (probably as a result of genetics), another will not work at all. Most studies focusing on one drug are not going to switch to another medication in the same class (for example, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor) during the trial, even though that's routinely done in clinical practice with good result.
Antidepressants work. Psychotherapy can also be helpful as a sole treatment for mild depression (although please note that psychotherapy has its own set of risks, costs, and drawbacks), and patients often get additional benefit by engaging in psychotherapy along with medication treatment. However, a psychologist or counselor treating a moderately to severely depressed person who fails to refer that patient for evaluation for treatment with an antidepressant would be risking a malpractice suit.
- > Can you point me to a "guide to reading 'Zen'" or something similar which can show me where I'm going wrong?
"Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":
http://www.amazon.com/Guidebook-Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenan...
Both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Guidebook are highly recommended. Just read.
- Mesmerizing...really well done. Thanks for sharing, and for the book recommendation!
- Neil's a fantastic human and great mathematician - I'll just post my same comment from the last time a story came up about him here:
Great to see this article about Neil, a warm and brilliant guy - I had the chance to meet him personally the last time the joint AMS meetings were in San Francisco.
When I submitted a simple integer sequence[1][2] to OEIS on Thanksgiving Day a few years ago, he took time that very day to respond and coach and educate me about some delightful related math.
- Sadly, we sold it before I went off to school.
But I later bought a bright orange '64 Triumph Spitfire ($400!), and spent many interesting hours tweaking the engine (with its infamous twin carburetors), until an unfortunate failure in judgment occurred on the Potrero Grade.
We were able to put the engine into a close friend's Triumph, so it's possible that beautiful little temperamental engine lives on, somewhere.
- Great work that evoked a lot of memories for me.
When I was 15, my dad and I bought an Austin Healey Sprite from a junkyard, which in addition to the engine under the bonnet also happened to have a complete spare engine in the passenger seat.
We made a blind guess at which engine was "better", and overhauled that one. It was a great opportunity to learn practical things about cars, but also deeper lessons in patience/gumption (Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, comes across someone who is purchasing an entire motorcycle in loose parts. "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together....and that's the best way to learn, too.").
The only problem was that on reassembly, we couldn't get our newly overhauled engine to start. We tried everything we could think of. We were unfamiliar with the peculiarities of British cars of that era, and it took us more than a few hours to notice and comprehend the words conveniently printed right there on the speedometer: "Positive Earth".
We switched the battery wiring so that the positive terminal connected to the car's ground, and she fired right up....at 2 o'clock in the morning in our suburban garage. What a great memory.
We hadn't yet hooked up the exhaust, so the throaty roar of the engine awakened more than a few neighbors.
Unlike the video shown, we ended up with more than a few leftover parts.
The little 4-cylinder ran just fine without them.
- History of Lisp, by J McCarthy:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html
The Evolution of Lisp (Steele and Gabriel):
http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf
The Original 'Lambda Papers' by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman
http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html
Many papers on the evolution, design, and implementation of Scheme:
- Your comments about ADHD are completely wrong, as any parent of a child (male or female) with a bonafide diagnosis of the disorder (or adult with the disorder) can tell you.
- "Jared Diamond....a terrible scientist".
What? No. I completely disagree, as would many others, and I've frankly never read a more balanced work than GGS.
But perhaps you could go ahead and educate us scientifically on what is more important than access to resources in determining the histories of peoples.
He is the author of multiple, well-reviewed scholarly books, and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers published in journals like PNAS, Nature, and Science[1]. Other scholars have cited him thousands of times[4]. He is completely well-respected within the scientific fields he works in.
National Geographic[2] notes: "Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.
Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award); research prizes and grants from the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies—National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.
Diamond's field experience includes 22 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and evolution of birds; the rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost golden fronted bowerbird; and other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist, he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology and a member of the board of directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA and Conservation International."
Awards and honors [3]
1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association
1985 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
1989 Archie F. Carr Medal
1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah
1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimpanzee
1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize
1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal
1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 International Cosmos Prize
1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists Union
1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
1999 National Medal of Science
2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
2005 Elected Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse (shortlisted]
2006 Dickson Prize in Science
2008 PhD Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond_bibliography
[2] http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/jared-diamo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond#Awards_and_honor...
- The parent's humorous wish is granted by the wizards of MIT Scheme (and, I daresay, even more fulfilled by Racket):
"Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme."