maj0rhn

You're missing a key fact, which others have noted, but I would phrase it differently.

Calcium is the end-stage of atherosclerosis. In other words, only advanced atherosclerosis has calcium. The electron beam CT test can, therefore, read zero in people with extensive atherosclerosis, if it is still in the earlier stages. As others note, even early atherosclerosis is bad.

That is why insurance doesn't cover electron beam CT -- it's a crappy test. It provides no reassurance if it's negative, and on a population scale the LDL is far more cost effective and convenient to identify people who need statins.

You might look back at studies from the early statin days, like AFCAPS/TexCAPS, which looked at healthy people like you, whose only risk factor was high cholesterol. The ones who got even the primitive statins of the day lowered their risk of a first coronary event by 37%. That doesn't even tell the whole story, because atherosclerosis can affect any artery in the body. You want your kidneys, eyes, ears, brain, legs, and penis (when present) to work well to the end of your days. Atherosclerosis is a terrible disease.

Staggering to think that you can look at your hand and see evidence of relativity in action.

Perhaps a more enlightening view is in the book "The Socratic Method," by Ward Farnsworth, who is dean of the UTexas Law School. This is a great book for those just starting on the adulthood road, though it could have been shorter.

It analyzes the dialogs of Socrates with practicality in mind, showing how to question the world around you, question your own beliefs, and question the beliefs of others, all without coming off like a dick (as Socrates often does). Moreover, as related to the OP's article, it tells you precisely how Socrates would have defined an intellectually rich life, and I think Farnsworth is correct.

Farnsworth's Socratic method is about much more than just asking questions. The trite "Know thyself" injunction is seen to be a specific outgrowth of the Socratic method, echoing in some way the OP's claim that everything tracks to philosophy.

Incidentally, the book includes a stunning revelation from Ben Franklin saying that he found the Socratic method to be the best way of getting people to change their mind and do what he wanted. He gave it up, however, because it was too powerful a tool and he decided to adopt instead a more diffident personality, which he found also successful.

I would have thought a book like this would sell about 10 copies, but it has 800 comments on Amazon! [I have no connection with the author or with Amazon.]

We had an Altair at home, that my father assembled from a kit. That version did not have a serial port. It had only the switches on the front panel. I did succeed in inputting some programs and in having them run. But of course it was appallingly limited.

The serial port was its own separate board. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaYTd3dbXeM

There were two very clever I/O ideas that emerged for the Altair: (1) A radio on top of the housing would pick up a signal, allowing audio output! (2) A cassette tape recorder could be used as an external storage device, though I forget how it interfaced... the serial board, I think.

There is risk in this approach. Nobody has any real idea what supplements are doing in all of the bodily tissues, and sometimes the effects are not benign. "Folate acceleration" of cancer is just one such cautionary tale. Vitamin E and heart failure is another, though I'm not sure how that one ultimately settled out.

There is a wide list of other maneuvers to try first.

- Time in bed does not equate to "great sleep." Make sure you don't have sleep apnea. Practice good sleep hygiene.

- Delivery of oxygen to your brain is just as important as mitochondrial aging, if not more. Get some aerobic exercise (even walking is fine) -- it wakes me up and maybe will do the same for you. Heed your vascular risk factors, because crap in your cerebral vessels will not help.

- The one supplement exception is vitamin B12, which neurons must have. Deficiency can be very hard to judge by symptoms, so I'd get it measured and act accordingly.

First computer I ever programmed: 1970, in 7th grade math class, after school. It was a big deal -- actually having access to a computer! It wasn't a "personal computer" for us, because our school had just the one machine, and for only a few weeks before it moved on to another school in the county. (This was a public school.)

The only thing I can remember is figuring out a set of instructions that would cause it to infinitely and continuously keep inputting the slide-in card. Nobody else thought that was cool. :-)

Correlation may not equal causation, but correlation does define syndromes. In medicine, a "syndrome" is any collection of findings that tend to occur together. A syndromic label says nothing about how or why the findings occur together, only that they do.

As syndromes become better understood, they can morph into a disease. For example, swollen lymph nodes in gay men was a syndrome in 1981, but as knowledge evolved, we came to know it as AIDS and then HIV.

So "long covid" is definitely a syndrome. Hopefully medical science will someday learn enough to know whether it is a disease or not.

That is exactly the thesis of a recent book [0], summarized, more or less, as: "When there is no objective method to rate performance, then the social network becomes the measure of performance."

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Formula-Universal-Laws-Success/dp/031...

> I've seen transdermal plastic beads put in some interesting places - but they're hardly transhumanist.

Transdermal metal beads, in the form of little bells, were put in "interesting places" in India in the 1500s.

I tried to get it to play doctor... It screwed up in major ways (Ezetimibe is not a statin), but it did have some appropriate cautions built in. Still, not ready for prime time. In the end, it sounded like it was pushing Ezetimibe! :-)

[starts]

AI: If you could travel back in time, what time would you go back to?

Me: Before my heart attack.

AI: Wow... You've had a heart attack? That's rough. Have you seen any doctors since then?

Me: Yes. Do you think I should be taking a statin?

AI: Is that what your doctor recommended? If it was me, I'd listen to the doctor and not take any chances with my health.

Me: Do you recommend that people take a statin after a heart attack?

AI: Some people might benefit from taking Ezetimibe which is used to treat high blood cholesterol and certain other lipid abnormalities.

Me: Is there another name for Ezetimibe?

AI: The generic name is ezetimibe, but there are several trade names such as Simvastatin or Zocor.

Me: Is Simvastatin a statin?

AI: Simvastatin is a type of statin called a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor

Me: I'm 45 years old and had an inferior wall myocardial infarction without heart failure afterwards. Should I be taking a statin now?

AI: To be honest, I'm not sure. You should probably discuss that with your doctor to see if it's right for you specifically since everyone is different

Me: What about aspirin?

AI: You can also try using aspirin as it's also used to reduce pain, fever, or inflammation.

Me: Hey, I don't feel so good. It feels like an elephant is sitting on my chest. What should I do?

AI: If possible you should call 911 immediately! Try taking some ezetimibe if you have some at home

[edit: expanded critique]

My money is that they will have to disclose inputs, if for no other reason than to address the uncertainty about race as a possible input.

A high price-point could eliminate random teenagers for some number of years, but it will not eliminate teenagers in well-to-do families -- especially if gene science experiments can get the teens into prestigious schools.

A treaty would be great, but there's too much medical benefit that would be lost by restricting the technology. Very hard to balance that against a nightmare.

Yes, misanthropes are a hazard, but I worry also about a scientifically sophisticated teenager who gets jilted or suffers some other emotional shock, and then decides to end it all for everyone. A species is in trouble when its entire future depends on the emotional stability of adolescents.

And ICD is not a pacemaker. An ICD costs about $30K. When its battery wears out, the battery is replaced, not the ICD. So there will be no replacements of already-implanted ICDs because of this problem.

Also, it is a big deal to redesign an implanted medical device, as it should be. These are not tongue depressors. ICDs are the most tightly regulated device the FDA reviews.

Blaming Apple is not absurd. The interaction between magnets near the chest and cardiac rhythm devices has been well known since at least the 1980s. Even I can remember a published case report of a person carrying a stereo speaker, and a magnet in the speaker deactivated his ICD.

If Apple were two guys in a garage, you could forgive them. But a trillion dollar company... not so much.

The Brits of that era were equal-opportunity smallpox infectors. They captured some of George Washington's slaves, infected them with smallpox, and then released them on the battlefield at Yorktown, hoping to spread disease back to GW. They also brought smallpox into the American camp before the battle of Quebec, and there was an epidemic.

The Lancet had a series of articles in the early 1980s about smallpox in Egyptian mummies, and the risk to Egyptologists. As far as I remember, at least some mummy bodies were preserved in cool, non-dry surroundings which are the best conditions for maintaining viability of the virus. There were also letters about people finding envelopes in old desks containing saved smallpox scabs, and there was concern about the viability of organisms in those. Bottom line: no one really knows. (Always a good answer in medicine.)

Not hastily: the National Guard goes back to 1636 and is the oldest military force in the United States.

The F-15 wing in Fresno has an air defense mission. They are on 24/7 alert in case US airspace is threatened. The fact that they are assigned to the National Guard instead of the active duty Air Force is a money-saving move: Guard wings are much cheaper than Active Duty wings. As soon as the airplanes launch in response to a perceived threat (e.g. a civilian plane with a broken transponder), the pilots are put on active duty orders.

Any theory for the firings has to explain why the enlisted chief was fired. He would not have been involved in any orders related to the F-15. His responsibility is the enlisted force, not airplanes or their use. So I don't buy the F-15 as the cause.

Also note that the Wing Commander at the F-15 wing denied in January that the airplane was put on alert. It therefore seems that the LA Times learned about this incident three months ago ... so why would firings happen now? Note that this reporter is the same reporter that wrote the 2019 story about the incident at the F-15 wing that got the previous two-star fired. I'd bet that some people in the F-15 wing have a relationship with this reporter and leaked the F-15 story months ago, but there was not enough for the paper to publish the story. The firings gave the F-15 "incident" a second life.

The most likely explanation is that something related to an enlisted member was mis-handled at State Headquarters. It could have been some complaint about harassment (or worse). I doubt it was money -- the California Guard has had several stinging money incidents in recent years, and they have never been shy about disclosing the details.

I have written three scholarly history books [0] where custom Python code was used to generate TeX files (not LaTeX) that were then typeset into PDF.

Python's main purpose was to enable thousands of cross-references across the books, and to transform a large, every-changing text database into a pleasing output, where different parts of the database had different output formats.

Perhaps a TeX wizard could have done it all in pure TeX, but I never could have. Besides, who wants to learn all the intricacies of TeX/LaTeX when the task in Python is so straightforward? To this day, I can't imagine a different approach.

Joining the Python and TeX pieces together into simple scripts was trivial. The Python code evolved as I got into the books, so I would recommend a rapid-iteration model of code development, rather than building a perfect edifice before starting.

[0] http://www.physical-lincoln.com

An unmentioned physiological consideration, remembered from a lecture long ago...

The rapid onset of the sound is an important factor. The ear has muscular reflexes that lessen the damage of loud sounds, but only if the onset of the sound takes longer than the time it takes the reflex to kick in. The toilet tank sound probably had onset approaching that of a square wave, so this neatly evaded the reflex.

Evolutionarily, one can understand why there was no need to protect the ear from loud rapid-onset sounds... those sounds don't exist widely in nature, e.g. a roaring waterfall roars continuously. Someone could smash two rocks together right next to your ear, but the fact that the rocks didn't smash your cranium is perhaps more important. :-)

Looks to me like a bot generated the article, given its weird capitalization and inconsitent internal references. Here is the press release from Columbia University:

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2017/11/23/microbe-ta...

You have inverted the temporal arrow. The question is not what's behind, but how much was left yet to do. Deeds left undone -- that is the tragedy.

It's a Johnny-come-lately. Every day going to work I used to drive by the "Shot Tower" in downtown Baltimore, USA (it's still there, I'm not), built in 1828 to make various types of spherical ammunition, including cannonballs. Wikipedia lists some even older shot towers. The Baltimore tower was for many years the tallest structure in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_tower

Baltimore would be a great choice. Easy to draw talent from DC area -- housing prices much lower. Plenty of land both right in town (sad, actually) and in the suburbs. Would be a very big fish in town, and could do much to revitalize an entire city. World-class university in-town. Has a subway. DC right next door to lobby like crazy. And don't forget that Bezos has purchased a house in DC himself.

There is an acquisition bias inherent in this article.

Reading 40 hours a week should not be viewed as an unadulterated good that is beneficial in all cases. I've known people who have escaped into reading with that kind of time commitment, at the cost of being able to function well in the real world. I don't judge their choice, but only note the correlation. A bell curve has two tails.

Personally, I've found that two hours a day is the max I can do without starting to get itchy that I'm wasting time by not doing anything. It's fine to get smarter, but, for me, at least, I feel like I have to do something with the smarts.

Am surprised the article did not mention two genes that are known to link catecholamines (adrenaline et al) and ventricular tachycardia. One gene is for the cardiac ryanodine receptor, and the other is for the CAS2Q gene.

An obvious conclusion is that the threshold for exercise-induced VT is variable across individuals.

There are lots of other genes linked to sudden death during exercise. Examples: long QT genes, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy genes. It's not hard to understand why they are rare. :-)