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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I feel like this pattern of people lying to doctors and doctors adjusting things to account for it really messes with rigorously honest people.

    A little while back I was reading how when they ask you how much pain you’re in, with 10 being the most pain imaginable, they pretty routinely have people calmly say “12”. So, if you’re actually using the scale where you’ve probably never experienced more than a 9 and would be sobbing at an 8, so you say 7, they automatically assume you’re in basically no pain because you said less than 10.

    Kind of wish we could just speak accurately and take each other literally instead of playing games where we try to figure out exactly what lie to tell to convey the truth, but I guess that’s not how most people are wired.


  • It’s always good to support the original publisher and encourage local libraries by reading a hard copy, so I could never endorse piracy, even for people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy. Even though it’s true that both libgen and annas-archive have ebook copies of this particular book (and can easily be found via google), I could never in good conscience direct anyone to such a site.




  • Sweet vegetables. Anything that is unambiguously a savory main course plant, but has some sugariness to it. Peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, turnips, beets, etc. I can eat them, they’re just even more work than most food (I agree with the other commenter who said that food in general is just a chore like brushing your teeth, although really good food is basically a neutral experience for me, where the enjoyment is about worth the effort)

    Oh I guess now that I think about it maybe there are exceptions, like I think a lot of people would consider red onions sweet but I am fine with those. I think it needs some sourness or sharpness to offset the sweetness, the problem is if it’s just sweet + savory and not much else.



  • Lol, the timing of this is pretty crazy. Today is a big milestone birthday for my brother, and texting him some birthday wishes is my major task for the day (you know, the thing where, as long as I do that, I have completed today, even though there are other things I will hopefully be able to do, but might not because the main task might take all my energy).

    We live pretty far apart, and I don’t have too clear an idea of his current interests, and his job doesn’t leave him with a lot of spare time. Usually I buy him a digital gift of some kind (ebook, switch game I think he’d like, etc) and send a happy birthday email that’s like 2 sentences that I spend all day composing in my head. I haven’t figured out what to get him this year, but also, for my birthday earlier this year he just texted me instead of buying me a steam game I’ll never play, so I’m sort of taking that as a signal that it’s okay for me to do the same (I’m relieved, rather than offended - I’m totally fine with not receiving any particular birthday greeting or gift myself). I ran that idea by my NT mom, and she agreed that that sounds absolutely fine.

    So I guess I’m about to text him something like “Happy xth birthday! Hope you’re having a great day! Any big plans to celebrate the milestone?” And then have a brief back and forth on the basis of his response. “About to” here meaning in the next few hours I guess.

    On the topic in general, I run into this with Christmas presents as well, who to get presents for at in-person gatherings of various sizes, or for close family that live far away, etc, and what to give them.




  • It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

    I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.




  • I was curious to learn more about this, because it sounded interesting, so I googled it. I’m guessing you’re talking about the interstitium? There’s a lot of criticism of that episode for inaccuracies about the interstitium (known for much longer than the 5 years the episode claims - it’s been mainstream since at least the 80s), traditional Chinese medicine (the treatments they mention have been proven to be no more effective than a placebo) and the connection between the two (there’s no relation between the interstitium and the lines predicted by chi). Everyone in the discussions I found sounded pretty disappointed in the episode.

    Even if it’s usually pretty accurate (I don’t actually know whether it is), radiolab is not the same thing as the scientific establishment, and this is probably why the OP asked if anyone who does science for a living rather than reading pop science articles could reply.




  • randomsnark@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzLichens are things
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    1 month ago

    For anyone else who was curious about lichens covering “a not insignificant amount” of the earth’s surface, a quick google tells me it’s about 7% (according to e.g. new york times, scientific american, etc)

    Edit: oh and estimating the age of an exposed surface by lichen diameter is called lichenometry. I’m seeing stuff about it being used in geological contexts but it makes sense that it could work for old buildings too


  • That’s fair, although the tone of the conversation definitely involved her being less happy with my behavior now than before the diagnosis (as I mentioned, she attributed my recent lack of conversational energy to the diagnosis). It felt like it was at worst “complaining” and at best “concerned”, with “celebratory” not really being in the ballpark.

    I guess from a combination of what I’ve read in the past about people struggling with autism disclosure, and the fact that my mom is a retired GP who should have a handle on how sensitive a diagnosis might be, led me to assume that it was understood to be a sensitive subject.

    Anyway I guess I’ll calmly broach the subject with her tomorrow, prefacing it with a mention of my usual tea-making habits, segueing into what I heard, then mentioning a) how I’d prefer to handle my own disclosure, b) that my conversational reticence is not a result of a newfound distaste for neurotypicals, and c) that maybe she should discuss that sort of thing with me instead of just guessing and then telling other people how I feel.


  • Thanks for the reply, there’s a lot of good thoughtful input there which I’ll think about.

    I was going to just upvote and not reply, but I had an amusing moment while reading your comment (and then felt that if I was going to reply at all, I should first acknowledge that this is some good substantial advice). I’m usually pretty good about understanding figurative language, but when you said “spilling your tea”, there were several seconds of confusion and rereading, with me thinking “but I didn’t spill my cup of tea, I didn’t even get around to making it”. I understood eventually, but kind of a funny autistic moment.