Apparently real life is not like Trauma Center and tumors don’t come with fun perforated lines showing you where to cut.
I was shocked too
Real cancer looks almost identical to the tissue that spawned it, which makes it easy to cut too much or too little. Luckily, science is on it. Here is a TED talk by Tal Danino about releasing bacteria that can only live in tumors, and fluoresce when they reach a certain density:
This is meant as a diagnostic tool. But once you know cancer is there, separating it from the tissue is still an issue. For that I direct you to Quyen Nguyen’s work with florescent stains. Her lab produces a variety of stains in different colors which stain different tissues (she demos on cancer and nerves) to show surgeons what to and not to cut
Hey everyone- I’m travelling a lot this week and while I have produced an impressive number of half posts, nothing is quite ready to go. But! If you are in the SF/Berkeley area, I will be near you for the next few days and we should hang out. You can email me at elizabeth@ this domain name.
PS. Please don’t rob my house, it would make things weird with my house sitter.
Reading The Remedy, or really anything about the time after formalized western medicine but before the germ theory of disease, is an exercise in terror or frustration. How could anyone think attending a childbirth with autopsy gunk on your hands was a good idea? Or leaches. Who looked at those and said “I’ll bet those will make people healthier”?
My first reaction reading The Colony, about a Hawaiian leper colony founded shortly after the germ theory became entrenched, was “oh no doctors, you overapplied the lesson.” Leprosy has an epidemiology a lot like tuberuclosis: long periods between infection and symptoms, and an ease of spreading that means everyone is constantly exposed to it. This makes it look like an inborn condition, not a contagion. Leprosy and TB are actually pretty closely related too. I assumed that doctors looked at their failure with TB and overcorrected. It didn’t work because only a small fraction of people are suspectible, and (it’s implied although never stated outright) they will be exposed to it whether symptomatic patients are quarantined or not.
Then I remembered that shunning lepers* predates germ theory by a couple of thousand years. Ancient and medieval people were completely capable of identifying disease as contagious and instituting a separation. So why didn’t industrial-age doctors?
Then I remembered that while the peasantry considered it obvious that disease was contagious and should be shunned, they considered it equally obvious that leprosy was punishment from God for sin and the black plague could be avoided by killing Satan’s minions, the cats. Nobody talks about all the things everyone knew that doctors correctly disbelieved in.
Without a lot of proof, I strongly suspect that doctors signaled intellectual rigor and membership in the medical class by disbelieving things the peasantry believed. Believing things the peasantry does believe doesn’t signal either of those things even if the belief is correct. No one gets credit for believing eating food is good and eating Belladonna is bad. If you’re not very careful in that environment, it’s easy for peasants’ belief in something to become evidence against it.
This is similar to the process of the toxoplasma of rage, in which people signal membership in an ingroup by loudly believing its most dubious claims. I also highly suspect it’s what’s going on with dietary constraint and toxins. It is obviously true that what you eat matters, some things you put in your body will damage your cells, getting rid of them is good, and there are things you can take to get rid of them. It’s called heavy metal poisoning and chelation. Or if you’re Huey the dopamine dog, chocolate and activated charcoal. But dietary constraints and belief that specific things were bad for you got associated with special snowflakenes, so you can signal intellectual rigor by dismissing them. This despite the fact that nutrition obviously makes a difference in your health, that humans vary across many dimensions and there’s no reason to assume they wouldn’t vary across digestion and nutritional needs. Likewise things we put in our mouth obvious have the capacity to hurt us and there’s no reason to assume we have an exhaustive list of those, or that they’re identical across all humans.
In D&D terms: people are advertising their will save bonus by how credible an idea they can disbelieve. No one wants to be this guy:
[Thor rushes Loki, only to run through the illusion and trap himself in the cage]
Disbelieving everything is an easy way to be right most the vast majority of the time. For every correct idea that’s an almost infinite number of wrong ones, and even those that are true are incomplete (see: physics, Newtonian). But if everyone disbelieves everything, we will never discover anything new.
I’m not in a position to criticize anyone for being frustrated at people for being wrong. I lived that life for a long time. But I try to counter it now by remembering that humans aren’t really capable of distinguishing “laughably wrong” from “correct, and world changing” without investing a lot of energy. If there aren’t negative externalities and they’re not asking anything from me, their investment in their crackpot idea is something like an insurance policy for me, or a lottery ticket. Most won’t pay off, but when they do I’ll be glad they were there.
“Minimal negative externalities” and “at no cost to me” are important caveats. Children need vaccinations, and I don’t want the government paying for medicinal prayer. But if a functional, taxpaying citizen wants to spend their own money to get their chakras realigned every six months? Yelling at them seems like a waste of energy. Hell, they may have a genetic variation that enhances the placebo effect to the point it is medically significant. The human brain is weird and we don’t even know what all the pieces are, much less how they work. If someone investigates something that’s a positive for me, even if all they do is conclusively prove it doesn’t work.
You can believe people are wrong, you don’t have to accept all ideas as equally valid. But what I would suggest, and what I’m attempting to do myself, is to make the amount of energy you put into your disbelief proportional to the harm the idea causes, not its wrongness. To have wrong ideas drop out of sight, resurfacing only if they cause problems or turn out to be a winning lottery ticket. I think that on net this leads to a better world, and in the meantime I’m calmer and less annoyed.
*Which really means shunning anyone with skin discoloration, ancient people not being entirely up on their bacteriology.
So you’re saying yelling at myself for an unwanted emotion is…not…helpful? But then how will my brain know it was wrong?
Speaking of which: they discovered a new organ in the brain. It’s always been there, we just didn’t notice till now. Like the biological equivalent of the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home. The new organ is lymph tubes that drain lymph fluid from the brain to your lymph nodes, which means the brain is more connected to the immune system than we thought.
Science also discovered a tiny lobster that eats bacteria and lives on deep sea thermal vents.
4500 words on energy work and neurology. I love this because it’s so respectful of people’s experiences and the long tail of what the work can accomplish, while being really rigorous with the explanation. Caveat: does not actually cite any science for explanation. But I still found it useful and interesting. Also it taught me the word psychoneuroimmunology, which is even better than neuroendodontics.
One argument against earning to give is that people won’t follow through: the culture will corrupt them and they won’t give. Will Macaskill points out that people dedicating their lives to charity don’t have a 100% follow through rate either. The miserable conditions we expect people to tolerate because “it’s for a good cause” (read: you’re selfish for asking for more) are a recipe for burnout. Half of all teachers quit in their first five years, and high poverty schools have a turnover rate of 20%. That’s not actually that much higher than other professions- but 40% of people who pursue an undergrad teaching degree never teach at all (source for all). The best number I can find for nonprofits as a whole is that 45% of young workers expect their next job will be at a for-profit. Would love to see comparable numbers on earning to give.
As a follow up to yesterday, I just want to say that having a thing I look forward to that I can only do on the bus is working out brilliantly as a device for making commuting less miserable and it was totally worth buying the Kindle Fire to make it happen. If you want to try for yourself, I recommend getting the 16gb, the 8gb could barely hold three HD episodes. I also recommend an anti-glare screen, because its glare is awful and the screen picks up fingerprints like woah.
The next recommendation is a little weirder. I bike to the bus, which means I’m in biking clothes and have to maneuver my bike onto the cow catcher. This makes waiting for the bus a little tricky- anything I have in my hands will have to be put away really quickly so I can rack my bike and get on, but I have no pockets. And for reasons that may not be entirely rational, the time it takes to unsling my backpack and put a toy away makes me really stressed out. But if I don’t use a toy the time at the bus stop is wasted, and that’s stressful too. What I wanted was a way to make the whole of commuting feel either productive or like an indulgence.
So I made myself a shirt, out of two shirts and some fabric glue.
Two shirts enter, one shirt leavesI believe my cat may have been getting high off the fabric glue.
Steps:
Place desired toy on shirt, cut patch around it. Leave space for depth.
Put fabric glue on single edge of patch and apply to surviving shirt.
Lock cat in other room.
Reapply patch to surviving shirt. Once you have it aligned, apply glue to other two edges and apply (you leave the top open so it’s a pocket). Remember to apply it less than completely flat, so the pocket will have depth.
I don’t know if this is a property of the fabric glue, my shirt, or this project in general, but some of the glue filtered down such that the base shirt was glued to itself and the patch ran free. If you catch this early enough you can separate and try again.
This shirt is not aesthetically pleasing and is weirdly stiff where I overapplied fabric glue, but it gets the job done.
[explicit spoilers for episode 1 of Hannibal, implied spoilers for 2 and 3. I haven’t seen past that but I am making predictions about what will happen]
My need to make movies make sense is most obvious when it comes to animal behavior*, but that’s not its only manifestation. Take police procedurals. I made Bones tolerable by saying la la la science fiction. I’m now watching Hannibal because it’s one of the best shows available on Amazon Prime Streaming, which is the only streaming service that allows offline viewing, which is important because I have a bus commute again.**
Hannibal… does not make a ton of sense. The premise is that an ex homicide detective is a brilliant criminal profiler but unable to get into the FBI because he couldn’t pass the psych screening, so they just hire him as a “special agent” that does everything a normal agent does, including field work. You would think that was Hannibal Lecter, but it is not. Lecter is the psychiatrist the FBI hires to babysit the unstable profiler (who I can only imagine will one day regret copying Lecter’s answers off a psych test). Lecter also accompanies the agent on field work, which I don’t think even regular FBI agent’s counselors are normally allowed to do. The actual profiler (Will Graham) comes up with theories more or less out of thin air and they always turn out to be correct. He insists the evidence makes it obvious.
On the face of it, this makes no sense. But what if Hannibal is set in a just slightly alternate universe, where psychic powers exist but are considered shameful because they make people mentally unstable? The FBI can’t officially hire them, and they in fact test for powers before hiring to make sure they don’t hire any psychics. But if there just happens to be a profiler who makes totally evidence based leaps, enabling them to catch really gruesome serial killers they otherwise couldn’t, well surely you can hire them on a contract basis.***
Why doesn’t the psychic Graham notice Hannibal is murdering and eating people? I’m glad you asked. Hiring a babysitter for a psychic is tricky business. You wouldn’t want someone they could manipulate or even read, that would defeat the purpose. So you hire someone who’s a null field to psychics, or at least your psychic. As a bonus, this person can lie to them when need be. Note that Graham says he hates going to psychiatrists- presumably every one he’s been to has been unreadable to him, and he hates that.
And that’s how I learned to enjoy Hannibal.
*Ask my brother about watching the King Kong with me.
**”So you’re coping with your motion sickness by watching a show about food and gore?” “Yes”
***The same way my team at Microsoft rehired the same contractor for our Apple version over and over again.
First, it’s great, and totally reverses Pixar’s downward slide. Second, they did an amazing job of making everything work as a character/story and a metaphor for how the brain works and an Aesop. A good chunk of the time kids’ shows teach lessons I consider abhorrent (looking at you, My Little Friendship Means Never Having Boundaries) , and at the beginning it looked like they were setting up one of those, but in the end in became clear they considered it exactly as problematic as I did.
Also I need to see it at home so I can cry harder. That is all.
Another argument for remote work. Pixar once accidentally deleted the entirety of Toy Story 2. When I read the headline I assumed this was some sort of really complicated RAID failure, but no, someone “rm –rf”ed from the wrong directory and the backup’s overflow mode was “overwrite old data.” Translation: someone typed “delete all” from the wrong directory, the backup system didn’t have half the space it needed, and it didn’t tell anyone when it ran out. The movie was saved because an employee was working from home after giving birth, and she had a two week old copy at her house.
Then Pixar decided they didn’t like the movie and redid the whole thing. But it was a great story up till then.
How do you think family income predicts children’s college attendance? This article gives you a chance to predict it before you see the actual results (along with other people’s guesses). Keep in mind the x-axis is income percentile, not income. I was unable to find a graph that went by income.
Attempted chlamydia vaccine in the 1960s made people more likely to get the infection (and this was not just because they had riskier sex- they saw the same effects in mice). New research suggests this is because the vaccine somehow stimulated the part of the immune system that is supposed to recognize your own cells and prevent your immune system from attacking it. The vaccine taught your immune system to ignore chlamydia infection. They think they’ve found a way to correct for that. Bonus: Vaccine works better as a nasal spray than a skin injection because the uterine lining is more like the sinuses.
Diet, Skeptics, and Getting It Wrong: “Mocking people for wanting to absorb their food and avoid intestinal cancer isn’t going to teach anyone anything except that they should stop listening to you.”
It always makes me happy to see researchers studying who a drug helps, rather than looking at the population average. This week it’s a suspected link between blood pressure and the efficacy of a particular PTSD treatment.
Many software teams operate on “you were the last person to touch it, you own it.” Sometimes this makes sense (it prevents people from checking in cheap hacks and leaving others to deal with the consequences), but it also engenders a learned helplessness, because you can’t make one change without becoming responsible for every bug and feature request until someone gets desperate enough to make one little check in, at which they become responsible for every bug and feature. It engenders a kind of learned helplessness that encourages hacks rather than digging in a fixing a problem. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is this problem, but for altruism..
For those of you just tuning in: on a genetic level, all parental investments in their offspring are equally valuable. From the offspring’s perspective investing in them is two to four times as good as investing in their sibling (depending on if they’re half or full siblings). The fight to get the amount of resources they think they deserve is parent-offspring conflict
One manifestation of parent offspring conflict is weaning conflict, where offspring would like to keep getting nutrients with no effort and their mom would really like them to go out and get a job.
But it can start before then. Conflict over exactly how much nutrition a fetus should get may contribute to preeclampsia (high blood pressure during pregnancy) and insulin resistance (PDF). This is not just about mothers not wanting to give up nutrients- more nutrition leads to larger babies, which is almost always good for the baby but kind of hard on the person forcing it out through their vagina. There is even speculation that the human custom of making a thick uterine lining (nutritionally expensive) only to flush it away each month evolved as self defense against a placenta that would otherwise invade your uterus like ivy invades bricks.
This is your uterus on babies.
Creepy, yes. Abhorrent, at the level of individuals. But totally logical and predictable from the level of a gene.
The idea of kin selection was implicit in my post on haplodiploidy but let’s make it explicit. The unit of selection is the gene, not the individual. The individual is a co-operative venture by many genes to reproduce themselves [I attempted to explain why this was and it became 4 paragraphs on the origin of DNA, so let’s just take it as a given]. There’s no reason for genes to prefer directly reproducing themselves: if you can get more copies of yourself by helping someone else’s co-operative venture than your own, that’s a better investment. Doing so is known as kin selection.
The most obvious example of this is parental investment in offspring. Offspring aren’t you, but they have your genes. For a diploid sexually reproducing organism, a given allele of yours has a 50% chance of being in your offspring via common descent (sharing an allele via coincidence doesn’t count for reasons we will get to). But a full sibling is just as related to you as your child, so raising them is just as good. The technical term for this is helpers at the nest*. It’s especially likely when raising offspring is exceptionally costly and resources (e.g. territory) are very limited, so the choice is between raising siblings or nothing, rather than raise siblings or raise your own offspring.
As you might guess from the name, helping at the nest is most common in birds, but you do see it elsewhere. Golden Lion Tamarins live in groups of 2-8, but will usually have one, with a maximum of two, breeding females. Females are unable to provide sufficiently for their offspring on their own. They’re helped out by other group members, which are likely to be their own children, siblings, or sibling’s children.
Honestly I have no idea if that’s a helper or a parent but it’s adorable.
Nest-helping may be at intermediate step between the “good luck, fuckers” school of parenting (technical term: r-strategist) and eusociality. For example Carpenter Bees (carpenter is a genus, there are 500+ species within it) are usually solitary, but some build nests near each other in trypophobia-inducing pattern,. show specialization and cooperation between nesting adults (e.g. one guards all nests while others forage) , and daughters sometimes share a single nest with their mothers.
Don’t trust pictures in nature articles. I couldn’t find a picture of cooperation so I used one of fighting.
One way to help your own siblings is to raise them, like helpers at the nest do. Another is to free up parental energy by taking less for yourself. From a genetic perspective, you should stop asking for things from your parents if the energy would benefit a full sibling twice as much, or a half sibling four times as much. But from the parents perspective children are all equally valuable, so they will want to switch giving as soon as resources benefit one child more than another. This is parent offspring conflict, as explained by noted evolutionary biologist Dylan Moran at 30:00 in this lecture:
More on parent offspring conflict tomorrow.
*Note: kin selection is not necessarily the only reward for helping to raise siblings; individuals may also learn parenting skills or give themselves a leg up claiming their parents’ stuff when they die.
Aceso Under Glass 
