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12:04 AM
@M.A.R. What is that like?
 
12:15 AM
> Roughly 10-15% of most western countries’ populations are already on an SSRI.
Interesting.
I know some people.
But 10–15% is higher than I expected.
 
12:38 AM
@Cerberus yes it sounds like a lot
I wouldn't think that thatany people are even seeing a doctor for mental health let alone depression
And there are lots of other depr meds besides SSRIs
 
@Mitch Yes, but they're not prescribed as often. And SSRIs are also used for other conditions.
 
For non depression? Like anxiety?
 
> 1 Medical uses
1.1 Depression
1.2 Social anxiety disorder
1.3 Post-traumatic stress disorder
1.4 Generalized anxiety disorder
1.5 Obsessive–compulsive disorder
1.6 Panic disorder
1.7 Eating disorders
1.8 Stroke recovery
1.9 Premature ejaculation
 
Oh haha yeah it's like any very specific psych drug turns out useful for every other psych issue
Like the antipsychotics and antianxieties all seem to be the same
But those last two!
 
You don't see it listed for schizophrenia or attention deficit disorder.
 
12:44 AM
I mean
 
There's aren't used as antipsychotics.
 
@tchrist maybe there should be a trial testing for those
Like hallucinogens being claimed for a bunch of things now
@tchrist sure, I'm exaggerating
 
> Sexual dysfunction ranging from decreased libido to anorgasmia is usually considered to be a significantly distressing side effect which may lead to noncompliance in patients receiving SSRIs.[36] However, for those suffering from premature ejaculation, this very same side effect becomes the desired effect.
 
Even though 15% seems really high for current usage, I bet there's a lot of underdiagnosis.
So what I'm getting at is...
Maybe along with our fluorine there maybe should be a little shpritz of paxil
 
@Mitch Their potential for busting otherwise untreatable cluster headaches -- so-called suicide headaches -- has been known for fifty years. Something about vasodilation.
 
12:51 AM
@tchrist sort of like how boner pills were discovered... Some high blood pressure meds, the mechanism was ... well... blood redistributiin
 
Unless you're talking about experimental use of ketamine in a clinical setting for treating major depression. But I wouldn't classify that medication as a psychedelic, however the clubbing set may use it.
 
@tchrist I've always thought that of all the symptoms of being sick, fever, aches, coughing etc, the one things that makes everything the absolute worst is the headaches
 
Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
Not the thing you talk to your urologist about.
> A defining point in the history of aspirin was the discovery that it inhibited the prostaglandin forming cyclooxygenase.1 Prostaglandins cause inflammation, fever, and pain; have gastric cytoprotective actions; and are implicated in platelet aggregation, so this discovery provided a unified explanation for the effects of aspirin (and most other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs).
 
@tchrist the latest thing I heard was rcts for psilocybin
Or some vague nearby thing to that
 
Yes, although one wonders how that would work out for anything but the lowest doses.
The one I heard about had three branches: placebo, low dose, high dose.
 
1:00 AM
@tchrist yeah low dose.
The word I heard was 'subclinical'
Which sounds like 'having no effect at all'
 
> The cluster headache patients in the study who were chronic experienced remission periods ranging from 24 hours to eight months, changing their classification to episodic. Of the 52 participants who used psilocybin, 42% achieved significant results with sub-hallucinogenic doses equated to brighter colors and mildly altered state of consciousness.9
> Harvard Psilocybin Results:

Out of 26 patients who used psilocybin to stop cluster headaches, 22 reported it aborted acute attacks.
Out of 28 patients using psilocybin as a preventive or prophylactic, 25 reported going into remission, or that their cycles “terminated.”
Out of 19 patients using psilocybin between cycles, 18 reported a longer remission period.
Small studies. They're trying larger ones now.
 
Maybe subclinical was a misreading for subhallucinogenic
 
That's exactly what I was thinking.
That's from here, and is old data.
I'd swear I read something new about this just last week.
> Research on psilocybin and other hallucinogens is in a renaissance following a four-decade lull. Many among the 127 studies of psilocybin published in 2020 suggest promise in treating mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression and anorexia nervosa.
So yeah.
I wonder whether we're going to need semi-annual covid vaccinations.
> Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, had projected that a fourth dose might be needed 12 months after a third shot. But he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the timeline might need to be moved up. One of the company’s top scientists recently said a fourth shot — possibly one targeting omicron — is likely to be necessary.
It's frustrating to first hear things like that from corporate CEOs not from physicians with long careers in public health.
You don't know what to make of it.
In contrast, Moderna has been keeping pretty quiet since an initial peep. Doubless researching.
 
1:23 AM
@M.A.R. 10.3% of participants in the fluvoxamine group ended up being hospitalized, compared with 13.1% of participants in the placebo group. ... The result isn’t statistically significant (p-value 0.09)
 
2:04 AM
@tchrist that makes think of two things
1) all the poorer countries who just don't have a 1st vaccine available for people
2) all the people who -do- have a 1st vaccine available for them but don't get it out of childish fear of needles
Buy we've been over this before
I mean not everything is horrible
Did I tell you already about the Red Spot on Jupiter?
 
@Mitch The pinkening?
 
You know how it's this awful basically hurricane multiple sizes of the Earth big
Well good news it's shrinking!
Woohoo!
Things are looking up!
I mean progress right!
And closer to home...isn't the ozone hole shrinking too?
I haven't been paying attention to that for a while
Here's hoping my inattention has let it not be so self-conscious and go about it's business's of shrinking
I mean it probably has bigger worries than me not paying attention
But I'm there for it if it needs me
 
 
2 hours later…
3:54 AM
Golden statue of the alabai dog in Turkmenistan
The dictator's favorite breed
Turkmenistan's dictator has the most psychedelic videos on YouTube among Central Asian leaders.
 
4:15 AM
Mount Whoredom, Boston, USA, 1745-1823
> Mount Whoredom, as the west summit of Beacon Hill was called until 1823, likely derives from a hill in London that bore the same name for the same reason.
 
 
3 hours later…
7:12 AM
You are a regular guy who keeps a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf.
And I am a regular guy who keeps a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf.
We are the same.
 
 
3 hours later…
9:46 AM
Current weather. Minus 3°C
 
10:02 AM
@CowperKettle Dmitry Muratov got the Nobel Prize. I just saw an interview with him on BBC Hardtalk. I think the New Yorker did an article on him.
 
10:15 AM
@Xanne Yes, I know.
They probably issued the prize to him in order to safeguard Novaya Gazeta from persecution.
The prize is used as a political tool.
Sharp drop of ambient temperature makes you more likely to die of aortic dissection
> The first case of AD was described in the examination of King George II of Great Britain following his death in 1760.
> By July 1492, Pope Innocent III had become very skinny. To Filippo Valori, he had become 'an inert mass of flesh, incapable of assimiliating any nourishment but a few drops of milk from a young woman's breast'.
"Case report on the use of human female milk in treatment of an elderly male with cachexia of uncertain cause"
 
10:42 AM
Vladimir Putin's electoral rating is 32%, the lowest value since 2013
It was the highest in Jan 2018, but after the election in March 2018 he increased the pension age, and this dropped his rating, and it has never reached more than 41% since that.
 
11:12 AM
@Xanne Dmitry Muratov is a man of integrity, and Novaya Gazeta is probably the best newspaper in Russia, but the problem is that Russians do not care. They only notice when their personal pension age is being increased. If Russia attacks Ukraine, or if Putin tomorrow sets up a torture camp like Lukashenko did on Okrestina St. in Minsk, Russians will not care. They will go on having fun, watching movies, going on holidays.
Novaya Gazeta has a meagre readership for a country of 144 mn people.
Insa Lander is a Russian blogger who investigated corruption. She dared to investigate a local official in Kabardino-Balkaria. Her flat was raided yesterday at 5 a.m., and she was arrested on charges of terrorism.
Her lawyer arrived at the court, but the court already decided to put her behind bars for the duration of "investigation". They did not divulge the nature of the charges even to her official lawyer. They just keep saying "terrorism". What kind of terrorims could be performed by a lady blogger is unclear.
See? You can yell it at all crossroads, Russians will never care even if she is raped, then led out in the street and has her head cut off by the FSB.
See this movie, with English subtitles
Novaya Gazeta's Anna Politkovskay was killed on Putin's birthday, for making too much fuss.
A murder as a birthday present to Putin.
Putin's support rating kept on at well above 40% for years after.
 
11:40 AM
Word of the day: Fraser fir
> The Christmas decoration trade is a multimillion-dollar business in the southern Appalachians. North Carolina produces the majority of Fraser fir Christmas trees.
 
 
2 hours later…
2:09 PM
This does not mean that Omicron is milder per se. The thing is, a large portion of the cases are in people who have already gained a degree of protection -- from previous infection with other strains or from a vaccine.
 
Thanks.
 
You're welcome!
I'm following Topol's twitter feed, it's interesting
 
Is there any consensus on previous infection vs vaccination? which is better?
 
Vaccination.
 
Vaccination carries a lesser risk of death, so it might be better overall.
If we only take "survivors of previous infection" vs. "survivors of vaccination", I don't know )))
 
2:19 PM
I mean I've got both under my belt, so I don't mind either way, but still curious nonetheless
@CowperKettle Oh, I meant specifically for reinfection. Of course vaccination is better if you get sick for the first time I'd imagine.
I ended up getting sick with it like a week before my scheduled vaccine appointment... Big bummer
102-104 degrees Fahrenheit fever for 2 weeks straight
 
2:50 PM
Sorry to hear that!
 
I mean, I didn't die so
¯_(ツ)_/¯
 
@tchrist: You've probably seen this already, but I just got around to reading The Economist this week: Linguistic trivia highlight Spain’s enduring cultural divisions.
 
I hadn't read that article yet.
 
I didn't realize the Catalan portion of the population actually resent use of ñ.
And spell some words with the accent grave.
 
Apparently the Economist refuses to bow to the Spanish, or the Catalans. They pretend it’s Catalonia.
 
2:55 PM
Well, cue discussion of British foreign accents.
 
If they spelled it Catalunya the way Catalans do, at least people would say it right. Although I should hope these days that even the Spanish spelling would do the same with Cataluña.
@Robusto The è and the ò are for the open versions of those vowels, closer to English DRESS and THOUGHT. Catalan is like the majority of Romance languages with 7 main vowels not just 5 like Spanish. But they also have schwas like Portuguese does.
In Catalan, the second and fourth syllables of Barcelona have the same vowel.
As they do in English, but not in Spanish.
 
Speaking of Barcelona, R.I.P. Stephen Sondheim.
Feb 8 '11 at 13:47, by Robusto
Also ... and this should be interesting to you from your musical background, Reg ... in my younger days I actually smoked weed with Stephen Sondheim. His weed!
 
Company is a 1970 musical comedy with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by George Furth. The original production was nominated for a record-setting 14 Tony Awards, and won six. Originally titled Threes, its story revolves around Robert (a single man unable to commit fully to a steady relationship, let alone marriage), the five married couples who are his best friends, and his three girlfriends. Unlike most book musicals, which follow a clearly delineated plot, Company is a concept musical composed of short vignettes, presented in no particular chronological order, linked by a celebration...
 
It's doing some sort of frozen spitting thing out there. I don't know that I would call it actual snowflakes yet, but it may well become such. The decks have become frozen white in the past hour.
 
3:04 PM
Decks? On ships?
 
The first moisture in forever.
 
@tchrist What is white to you is clear to us. It's not much, but it is rain.
 
@CowperKettle No, the deck boards of my porches and balcony.
 
@CowperKettle Think metaphorically.
 
It's only 30 here; they didn't know which side of the freeze-line we'd be on when it dribbled in.
 
3:06 PM
44 here.
 
It was still 51 yesterday. And I guess it will be 60 this weekend again.
 
Wow, that's a winter
 
That was our weather yesterday, the Jemez Mountains seen from Placitas.
I was mountain biking.
 
That was our weather today, with the delivery service office seen from under the overpass road
I was jogging.
 
3:11 PM
Слишком много снега.
 
Да! )))
 
@Robusto Oh listen to how it's read out. She has to change the literals so that it can be understood aurally. She doesn't say them the way natives do, though. Of course.
 
> It's possible that we don't find any signs of other civilizations in the Universe for a simple reason. On a certain stage in their development, each civilization discovers criptocurrencies, and from then on, it spends all its energy on mining.
 
It's decoding the digraphs in Catalan orthography that's the really tricky part.
 
@tchrist I see the cedilla in Portuguese, but can't recall ever having in Spanish. Am I having a senior moment?
 
3:18 PM
@Robusto No, but if you did you would: it was invented in Spanish, and used to be used there.
 
@tchrist Hence the name, I suppose.
 
36
A: Porque é que temos o "c com cedilha"? (Why do we have "c with cedilla"?)

tchristPortuguês Existem duas formas distintas de escrever o fonema /s/ hoje porque a nossa ortografia moderna não reflete a pronúncia atual, mas sim a pronúncia do português arcaico. A letra ç tem origem no castelhano antigo. Naquela época ainda se escreviam as palavras da mesma forma que elas continua...

There's an English translation at the bottom of that post.
> The letter ç originated in Old Spanish. During that time words were written in the same way as they’re still written in Modern Portuguese.
 
@tchrist This is surprisingly pretty readable for me.
Only a word here or there is opaque.
 
You get used to it.
 
@Flats I've heard that vaccination is much better, but prior infection does offer some benefit. Also vaccination is better on new variants than prior infection.
If I had a reference at hand I'd give it, but I don't so I won't.
 
3:25 PM
The names of letters are masculine in Portuguese, but they're feminine in Spanish.
"um c novo", "una c nueva"
 
@tchrist now do the German eszett 'ß'
 
heh
 
@tchrist So for Puigdemon is it pwitch de mon or putch de mon ?
 
@Mitch Putch.
 
@tchrist huh. now I know
I thought it was pwidge de mon
glad I never said it out loud
 
3:29 PM
Looks like pweeg or pweedge, but it ain't.
 
to a Catalan
 
Notice all the masculine agreement in "Evolução do Z (Ꝣ) visigótico ao moderno Ç".
 
oops '- de mont'
 
In Spanish it all needs to swing feminine: "Evolución de la Z (Ꝣ) visigótica a la moderna Ç".
Oh maybe it's pweedge.
The upcoming d seems to cause regressive assimilation to voice the affricate.
I don't think that's phonemic. It's like how in Spanish mismo and desde actually have [z] there for phonemic /s/.
Those aren't the same.
Notice how your brain picks up the initial consonant as B not P because it's not aspirated.
Here, this is optimal: forvo.com/word/carles_puigdemont
All those are native speakers; the differences are merely allophonic.
His first name is spelled Carles but the last vowel is just a less-stressed version of the first vowel. Unstressed "e" in Catalan is more like [ɐ] or even a weak [ʌ] than it is like [ə], so you'll hear it as "uh".
"Carlas" would be closer, but that's misleading because now it looks weirdly feminine.
Spanish never reduces unstressed vowels, but Portuguese and Catalan always do.
Portuguese goes further, often dropping them entirely.
Especially "e", but sometimes also "o" at least to the English speaker's ear.
Another difference is that Spanish and Italian are pronounced more to the front of your mouth, but Catalan and Portuguese to the back.
There can be no "dark L" in Spanish or Italian. It's too far back.
That's why they have so much trouble saying English full.
Romanian shares some rare-in-Romance sounds with (European) Portuguese.
Modern French is the only Romance language without phonemic stress. I wonder how that happened.
French exhibits perhaps the most extensive phonetic changes (from Latin) of any of the Romance languages. Similar changes are seen in some of the northern Italian regional languages, such as Lombard or Ligurian. Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian showing the most conservatism, and Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian showing moderate conservatism.French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for...
I don't think that that explains this.
And stress is required to explain those phonological changes. But today there is no phonemic stress in French.
> Stress is not necessarily a feature of all languages: some, such as French and Mandarin, are sometimes analyzed as lacking lexical stress entirely.
> atements about the position of stress are sometimes affected by the fact that when a word is spoken in isolation, prosodic factors (see below) come into play, which do not apply when the word is spoken normally within a sentence. French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but that can be attributed to the prosodic stress that is placed on the last syllable (unless it is a schwa, when stress is placed on the second-last syllable) of any string of words in that language.
Yes, but how did this come to be?
> The idea is that if listeners perform poorly on reproducing the presentation order of series of stimuli that minimally differ in the position of phonetic prominence (e.g. [númi]/[numí]), the language does not have word stress... It was found that listeners whose native language was French performed significantly worse than Spanish listeners in reproducing the stress patterns by key strokes.

The explanation is that Spanish has lexically contrastive stress, as evidenced by the minimal pairs like tópo ("mole") and topó ("[he/she/it] met"), while in French, stress does not convey lexical inf
> The loss of the formerly strong stress that had characterized the language throughout much of its history and triggered many of the phonetic changes.
 
4:02 PM
In Russia, pupils are given sheets with many Russian words to memorize proper stress.
For instance, not tor'ty but 'torty for "(layer) cakes". We have a cake company in Yekaterinburg that is titled "Ne torty, a torty" (not cakes but cakes), which brings up memories of memorizing proper stress.
 
@tchrist the 'g' in the second one is more of a fricative than the first, but both mostly voiced, like you said, assimilating to the following voiced 'd'. The 'ui', however, I couldn't figure out in the second one.
@tchrist I'm having troubke parsing that and it is what I want to know about... which is I guess the naive 'why' of how French lost word syllable stress.
@CowperKettle now I can ,mem or 'rize my 'mem ories of mem or 'riz ing stress
 
He had a kind of foxhunting Strava for 1 user.
 
5:14 PM
youtube.com/watch?v=WhNBJE4rolI#t=3m28s They're pilgrim SPURS. (What does he actually say there?)
 
5:44 PM
He says Smurfs.
 
Astronauts use Linux because you can’t open windows in space.
Indeed! I also thought it was spurs, but now I can hear smurfs
 
@MichaelRybkin He says "they're pilgrim Smurfs."
The Smurfs (French: Les Schtroumpfs; Dutch: De Smurfen) is a Belgian comic franchise centered on a fictional colony of small, blue, humanoid creatures who live in mushroom-shaped houses in the forest. The Smurfs was first created and introduced as a series of comic characters by the Belgian comics artist Peyo (the pen name of Pierre Culliford) in 1958, wherein they were known as Les Schtroumpfs. There are more than 100 Smurf characters, and their names are based on adjectives that emphasise their characteristics, such as "Jokey Smurf", who likes to play practical jokes on his fellow smurfs....
 
6:00 PM
> The researchers found that the use of hair products, particularly hair dyes, bleach, relaxers and mousse are associated with lower levels of sex steroid hormones, which have a critical role maintaining pregnancy and fetal development.
 
6:14 PM
@Xanne Thank you very much. But what exactly does he mean when he says "pilgrim smurfs"?
 
The Smurfs are toys from the 1980s. Smurfs are little blue people. One of them in the clip is a woman carrying a pie, as I recall. Pie, Thanksgiving, pilgrims.
 
Pilgrims are guys who came to America in 1620s
These Smurfs have the same attire.
3 hours ago Russia issued an ultimatum to NATO, demanding it to officially drop the 2008 statement.
Russia is cosplaying a 1913 Austro-Hungary, only with nuclear rockets.
 
6:35 PM
The Smurfs (French: Les Schtroumpfs; Dutch: De Smurfen) is a Belgian comic franchise centered on a fictional colony of small, blue, humanoid creatures who live in mushroom-shaped houses in the forest. The Smurfs was first created and introduced as a series of comic characters by the Belgian comics artist Peyo (the pen name of Pierre Culliford) in 1958, wherein they were known as Les Schtroumpfs. There are more than 100 Smurf characters, and their names are based on adjectives that emphasise their characteristics, such as "Jokey Smurf", who likes to play practical jokes on his fellow smurfs....
Smurfs are European in origin, so there’s a pastry-chef smurf etc., so the guy in the video probably just made up the “pilgrim smurf” thing. It was a successful franchise—comics, toys, TV show for children.
 
> The Smurfs wear Phrygian caps, which came to represent freedom during the modern era.
 
6:52 PM
How the Smurfs got their hats.
 
I started reading about Attis
And from there, about Oscar Wilde's poem mentioning Attis
 
If we’re not careful we will go from a guy buying dolls at a flea market to the history of Western civ.
 
7:08 PM
The Romans held a whole long festival of hilaria, in which they first mourned the death of Attis and fasted, and then celebrated his resurrection. Sounds suspiciously reminiscent of something else. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilaria
 
I'm more interested in the petasos.
A petasos or petasus (Greek: πέτασος) is a broad brimmed hat of Thessalian origin worn by ancient Greeks, Thracians and Etruscans, often in combination with the chlamys cape. It was made of wool felt, leather, straw or animal skin. Women's versions had a high crown while those for men featured a lower crown. It was worn primarily by farmers, travellers and hunters, and was considered characteristic of rural people; elite Greek men generally chose not to wear hats. As a winged hat, it became the symbol of Hermes, the Greek mythological messenger god.Along with the pileus, the petasos was the most...
Why do paintings and film almost never show this hat, which was once ubiquitous.
 
Because it's not picturesque enough, probably
 
They were for a long time probably more common in the Greek world than cowboy hats are now in Texas.
And used for the same reason.
 
The Afghan pakol hat
 
I was going to say that looks like an Afghani.
 
7:12 PM
Some historians think that it came from the Macedonian hat worn by Alexander's warriors
The kausia (Ancient Greek: καυσία) was an ancient Macedonian flat hat. It was worn during the Hellenistic period but perhaps even before the time of Alexander the Great and was later used as a protection against the sun by the poorer classes in Rome. Depictions of the kausia can be found on a variety of coins and statues found from the Mediterranean to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the Indo-Greeks in northwestern Indus. The Persians referred to both the rest of the Greeks and Macedonians as "Yauna" (Ionians), but made a distinction between "Yauna by the sea" and those "with hats that look like...
 
@CowperKettle That looks like a hat that would be at home in the Italian Renaissance.
 
7:27 PM
@Xanne Too late
The important question is -why- the originator of the Smurfs chose the Phrygian cap for them. Was it simple esthetics? Was Peyo some kind of anarcho-syndicalist and the Smurfs some proletarian collective? Or was it just easier to draw so as not to have to draw hair for all the characters? These are important questions.
 
 
2 hours later…
9:18 PM
@Mitch No. It was because the hats looked smurfy.
 
9:53 PM
@Robusto ou schtroumpfâtre
oder .. was auf Deutsch... schlampe?
hm I hope that's not a slur
oh... schlumpf
also, sie sehen schlumpfig aus
And in Chinese...
tippity tappity... gtranslate... tippity tappity... ding
Blue Refined Spirit
Blue Elf?
Or literally 蓝精灵
 
10:29 PM
@Mitch The middle character is the one meaning spirit (at least in Japanese). Chinese apparently has a different character for blue, which in Japanese is 青.
And I think a better translation than refined would be essence.
Blue Spirit Essence? Blue Essence Spirit?
Spit in the ocean?
 

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