wallacepolsom
Peter Solarz
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
KIROKAZE
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
trying on a metaphor
Not today Justin
pixel skylines
roma★
blake kathryn
Game of Thrones Daily
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Product Placement
Three Goblin Art
we're not kids anymore.
@theartofmadeline
Love Begins
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@randomfoxdoc
Double Income No Kids used to be seen as a kind of lavish lifestyle, now it’s like…a requirement to have any remote chance at financial stability
This post is getting notes again so I see we’re all handling the cost of living crisis well 🙃
sexism in medicine kills people. racism in medicine kills people. fatphobia in medicine kills people. queerphobia in medicine kills people. classism in medicine kills people. ableism in medicine kills people.
do not downplay people’s fears about being mistreated because they are a part of a marginalised group. it is a matter of life and death and you should be angry about it.
All my haters retroactively cease to exist when I sit in the time machine of success
Not sure why I made this post. I don't have any haters.
undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal
This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.
The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human
Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.
[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #'i can solve the unpredictability of the world by making my model complex enough' #yes however #beware /End ID]
reblog to reassure the next person who reads this that everything is going to be okay and it’s all going to get easier soon
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There's this whole story unfolding on TikTok right now about this account that got popular — a woman in the US who calls up churches & pretends to have a starving newborn that hasn't eaten since last evening & asks them if they could help her out with a can of formula. Unsurprisingly, none of the ridiculous megachurches actually ever say yes, and the churches & other religious institutions that did say yes are getting lots of support from people.
But I just saw a video of a TT user explaining that they decided to do their own little social experiment — by walking up to drug dealers on the street, telling them there's a young woman with a baby who needs help with formula, and literally all of them immediately reached into their pockets. In this story, the OP did have a real neighbor with a baby who ended up getting some much needed baby supplies. Thanks to the charity of local drug dealers.
A lot of Americans are learning that their rich white Christian churches are less willing to help their communities than black churches, mosques, buddhist temples, the satanic temple & apparently also crack dealers.
@copperbadge this seems up your alley
If the system ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess! Accounting may not be the oldest profession, but someone had to keep the books for them.
I mean, in theory I know that Excel is based on the structure of earlier accounting technology that's been around for hundreds of years -- what do we think we did to track commerce before computers? -- but it still kind of blows my mind to, for example, look at my ancestor's journal from a whaling voyage in 1770 and see spreadsheets in the back.
Hezekiel Starbuck
Oh wait until you meet some of his siblings, like Sylvanus and Gayer, or Syl's kids Hepzabeth and Uriah. The old Nantucket Quakers knew how to name a fellow. I suppose I'm lucky I ended up Sam and not named for great-granduncle Soloman.
Solomon is a badass name
Solomon is badass. Soloman sounds like the stage name of a weed rapper from the mid 90s.
whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.
and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.
My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.
Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.
I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.
He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.
I think about this a lot.
I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.
I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.
60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.
But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.
Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.
Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.
Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.
In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.
In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.
In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class
In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.
That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"
Trees evolved and lived and died and did not rot long, long before the organisms that can break down and metabolize their corpses ever came along.
And now, humans are working with fungi that can safely break down petroleum plastics, and with techniques that allow us to actually recycle these materials.
The world is full of difficulties... Medical, mechanical, environmental, so much more. But the world is also full of change, and humans are capable of working with that change purposefully, intelligently, cumulatively across time and populations. There is always a value in trying, in learning, in making an effort or building a community. Even if we don't succeed, every effort helps build the support for the thing that will, even if we can't always see how.
We owe it to those who did the best they could with what they had then, to do the best we can with what we have now, so that those who will come after us will have even better, more useful, more humane tools for the problems they will face. Who knows what we can accomplish together, for each other, when we don't give up?
when i was younger and stupid and in the (glass) closet i was dating the son of a pharmacologist. this man had made millions developing medications. he was fond of me and privately told me i was too funny and smart to be dating boys.
he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are "for women" - will not be clinically tested on my body.
the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."
it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.
at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this - that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.
i remember him shrugging. "that's not to say it doesn't happen," he said. my ears were ringing.
i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant. when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.
how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment. how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.
it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to "save" our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren't we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can't get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually.
who cares about you and your actual safety. think about what you could be carrying.
I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."
That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.
modern medicine has a lot of people forgetting how easy it is to die
exhibit a
I frequently ask myself these days, is this still worth it?
But not having another back up plan now, i guess I just have to finish the next 2yrs and 4 months. 🙃🙃🙃
I actually do not how to face my day to day with happiness. I just try to find joy in little things now.
Trying to do things for others but the system does not want to take care of you, what kind of environment is this?
Lol
