☔

but so much is actively evil, hostile or otherwise enshittified. i don't want to track my greebles with splorp i don't want to pay a teehee subscription to get round cacophany's file limits i don't need 17 ways to skrimple my scronk 7 of which secretly activate scrungly plus ultimate i don't need to link it to my flowolf account i don't want to manage it with the flowby mowby i don't care if poob does or does not has it for me. i don['t care

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.

I don't think that there's a proponent of science-based medicine alive who doesn't understand that plant compounds are important in medicine and it is important to research them. We *DO* get a lot of medicine from plants.

But "medicine from plants" and "herbalism" are not the same.

The example that most people like to bring up is aspirin and willow bark tea. You can use willow bark as a painkiller, you can collect your own and brew it up when you've got a headache.

What you can't do is control the dose. You can't do this for a number of reasons, including having little control over the conditions the tree grew in and variations in preparation technique. If you're measuring very exactly you can control for some of these things, but even if you were in charge of the willow tree you collected the bark from it's not going to be the same at different places on the trunk or in different seasons.

That's not a huge deal if you're using aspirin for a headache, it can be a much bigger deal if you're using aspirin as a bloodthinner.

And the example that people LIKE to use is aspirin because it *isn't* a big deal. The example they *don't* like to use is foxglove (digitalis, which produced digitoxin, which can be used to treat heart failure) because that's a medicine from a plant that you can't fuck around with using herbalism, it needs extremely careful extraction and preparation because if it's done wrong it'll just straight kill you.

And then you get into herbal treatments that are generally safe and largely not harmful even if they may not do anything, and it can feel totally reasonable to recommend red raspberry leaf tea to a friend who is having cramps. As long as that friend isn't diabetic because red raspberry leaf interacts with insulin. And as long as your friend isn't on an anticoagulant because red raspberry leaf can ALSO act as an anticoagulant.

And those are just examples of what can happen if you know you are actually getting the plant that you think that you are getting and that it is unadulterated with fillers and uncontaminated with anything else and is properly prepared (or is prepared the same way as the last batch you bought and so it can be dosed the same way).

There are two ways that Kava Kava can be prepared; do you know which of those two ways is associated with more deaths and liver transplants? Do you know not to take Kava if you have a history of liver issues or if you are on antidepressants? (ctrl+f for "Hema Ketha" for the study from that overview that goes in depth on that; for whatever reason you can read the whole article in the overview but if you click on the link you only get the abstract)

Are you attempting to take therapeutic doses of turmeric? There's some evidence that it can help relieve joint pain. However you need to take really, really high doses because the medicinal compound in turmeric has low bioavailability. And because you're taking high doses you may be swapping out the risks of NSAIDs for the risk of lead poisoning, because it is unfortunately very common for turmeric to be contaminated with lead.

One of my big, big problems with CAM - including herbalism - is that people turn to it because they think it is safer than "allopathic" medicine. They think "it's better to drink raspberry leaf tea than it is to take midol because midol is full of chemicals and raspberry leaf tea is just tea." But midol doesn't interact with insulin, and most people are *aware* they're taking a blood thinner when they take NSAIDs.

There's this tea shop I go to that has maybe a hundred different kinds of herbal teas, some of which are clearly supposed to be medicinal, but the one that always stands out to me is the St. John's Wort tea that has "NOT FOR PREGNANT" on the label. It's good that they're recommending that pregnant people don't select that tea, but that tea is also not for people on antidepressants, triptans, birth control, warfarin, stantins, protease inhibitors, or people who have had solid organ transplants.

But it's just tea. And what could just tea do, right?

(It could make your anti-rejection meds so weak that it kills you. That's what just tea can do. But maybe one cup of older tea, or one cup that is more leaf than flower, or one cup that wasn't steeped as long doesn't hurt, so you drink it and you think it's fine, it's not a problem, and it isn't a problem until it is but you don't know the difference between one cup of tea and the next because this shit is impossible to dose)

This is also why I'm extremely leery of the "you can try CAM as long as you are using it alongside your doctor's care and you do what the doctors say" thing because that is relying on:

People reporting every supplement, tincture, tea, etc. that they are taking to their doctors (which they often don't do because what's the big deal it's green tea extract and billions of people drink green tea every day)

The ingredients in the supplements being exactly and ONLY what is on the label (which is a long shot - it seems like every three years there's a study or a report that finds that supplements - usually in the US but also around the world - don't contain what they are supposed to and often contain stuff they are not supposed to)

Doctors being aware of all of these possible interactions (which is a stretch; pharmacists are likely to have a better handle on it but even then, there are all kinds of supplements being labeled all kinds of things all the time; medical woo scammers LOVE to rebrand their supplements)

So long story short I'm not particularly bothered if you try herbalism on yourself after looking into things that you think will help you. I do have a problem with people who *recommend* herbal treatments without A) a full medical background understanding of the person they recommend the treatment to and B) comprehensive knowledge of whether the thing that you're recommending will interact with any medications they might be taking or exacerbate any conditions that they might have and C) some kind of accountability mechanism in place - like a malpractice suit or the loss of license - like a doctor might if they prescribed a medication that was dangerous to their patient.

Because that's the other infuriating thing - CAM practitioners often aren't held to the same standards as medical professionals. Patients who trust CAM practitioners often think of them like doctors, but they don't have the same protection from CAM practitioners like they would from doctors. If your herbalist tells you to treat your cancer with apricot pits or black salve - even if that's in addition to chemotherapy - it could end up seriously injuring you and they're not committing malpractice because there's no legal standard for their practice. Nobody can remove their license because there's no such thing as an herbalist license, so whatever harm they did to you can be done to other people after you with no professional consequences.

I have pretty much limitless tolerance for things that people want to do to themselves. If you want to take valerian because you think it helps you sleep (in spite of essentially no evidence that it does so and more adverse reactions among natural sleep aids than things like camomile - which also has no evidence that it's an effective sleep aid) I don't care, just make sure to check for drug interactions first.

Took this from Instagram because this is urgent US folks.

You need to call and email your reps no matter if you live in a red or blue state. This cannot be allowed to pass.

& how its republicans top priority to get passed

Spread this far- this could end voting rights for hundreds of millions of Americans

"But!" she said:

People who see a clean, trash-free river are more likely support laws to curb more harmful "systemic" forms of pollution. People who participate in river cleanups take pride in their work--their river!--and become evangelists for protecting it.

Oh and guess what else you can't say you can't say? **** [Nipples]. had to type that myself. penis is ok but **** [clitoris] isn't, and all my attempts to say "clit" were Misunderstood, which may just be my speech but at this point I am not willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Vagina is OK too but every time I say it there is a moment when an * shows up on screen first before the full word does. this doesn't happen when I say the word penis.

It is completely heinous. Anybody who needs speech to text is immediately forced to comply with the rules set out by people in a position of power and then enforced by a machine — a machine that is a very powerful accessibility tool. Imagine trying to dictate a letter to a doctor or fill in an E consult with speech to text, only to have words of your anatomy censored as if they are taboo. there is already far too much stigma around genital physical health — and note that I could say genital but can't say **** [clitoris] — for it to be okay for these words to be censored.

And even if somebody just wants to swear In a message to their friends or write smut/**** [pornography], they should be able to. There is no justification for this feature. No reason for it to be default.

[ID: REDDIT POST:

Title: "Speech to text alternative for Windows that DOES NOT censor curse words?"

Flair: "General Question"

Post main text:

"I hate how Windows speech To text censors my words, things like offensive words and curse words. I'm an adult and if I want to say those words, I should be able to say them and not have to deal with a bunch of asterisks. Speech to text alternatives?

answer: I was using a different, simpler windows voice to text functionality. Windows has a more extensive voice control functionality that actually allows you to navigate windows with voice as well but you can use it for diction only like i do:

You can turn off the profanity filter.

Use profanity filtering

If voice access captures a profane word, it is masked in the speech feedback. If a profanity is detected while you're dictating text, the masked version is typed out. By default, this option is turned on. You can turn the profanity filtering off or on from the voice access bar.

later one of my colleagues approached me in private and said, "hi. i know you've said that sometimes with your autism it can be difficult to read a room and know when it's appropriate to have certain discussions so i just wanted to tell you that the issue you brought up in class earlier, well, it wasn't the time. you could have waited to talk to the instructor after class or emailed him. it sorta caused a scene, and i know you don't mean to. : )"

i laughed and said, "yes i did. i confronted him about it in front of everyone because what he said needed to be challenged in front of everyone. it would've been dangerous for people to leave today believing what he said with no other points of view."

and my colleague looked SO shocked. he said, "oh! well, huh. okay!"

he really heard an autistic person calmly and succinctly articulate an argument about human rights and thought, "well that must be a mistake."

obviously there are people who need to do that for safety, but many people, like my colleague, do have the power and position to speak out, but they don't. so when they hear something they might even recognize is unacceptable, and someone says, "that's unacceptable," they see the person challenging the problem as the actual agitator.

my colleague was uncomfortable with conflict, and it was convenient for him that i'm autistic because he could assume it was simply a lapse in judgement that i said anything. not that it was responsible to say something, and i'm the person who did, and perhaps next time HE should.

cause now like instead of "oh I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to drive you crazy, I'm terrible and unsocialized" or "um well that's dumb, who cares" it's like

"it does? I didn't know that. how come?"

"because it will mildew and I keep tripping over it and I don't know whether you intend to reuse that towel or whether it needs to go in the wash"

"okay so usually if I intend to reuse it I hang it up, and if it needs to go in the wash I drop it on the floor. I guess because I thought I shouldn't put it in the hamper because it would get all the other dirty clothes wet and then THEY might mildew before we do the laundry."

"that's valid. what if we have a specific place to hang wet towels that need to be washed? how about this one hook here"

"perfect!"

The peptide, which is a short chain of amino acids, has shown effectiveness in experiments involving various coronavirus strains attempting to infect human cell lines and hamsters.

Researchers hope to conduct a physician-led clinical trial for possible preventive and therapeutic treatment.

"The peptide comprises 39 natural amino acids, and it is inexpensive and easily synthesized," Institute of Science Tokyo Distinguished Professor Yoshinori Fujiyoshi said. "It only binds to spike proteins, so it can be considered to have no side effects."

The peptide can be stored in powder form at room temperature and be administered to patients through inhalation by dissolving it in physiological saline and converting it into a fine spray using a nebulizer.

The research is slated to be published in the online edition of the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No really! Whenever I hear about the latest Ultra 4 Million HD Individual Traced Photon game that Could Replace Real Life, I think about this.

--Emily Dupree, The invention of Memory

The school closures that took place when the pandemic was first recognized in the United States are a prime example of this misremembering. Here are the facts: public schools were closed for 8-13 weeks in 2020 and 91% of these schools switched to distance learning. The duration of the closures was comparable to an ordinary summer vacation during which time children do not typically receive formal education. Everyone today who is 9 years old or younger (4th grade and below) was not old enough to be in school at the time anyway, and so was not directly affected by these closures.

Despite these facts, a much different story about the school closures is remembered today. This story emerges primarily in discussion of “learning loss,” today’s catch-all term for explaining educational underperformance in students today, even among those who were too young to have been directly impacted by the 2020 school closures. The story is that the school closures inflicted a negative and irreparable harm on student learning which is now rippling through the education system as students advance to the next grade each year. The “learning loss” theory does not provide an explanation for how this period of time differed from the learning loss that presumably takes place each summer; why, unlike summer learning loss, it is irreparable; and why the 91% of schools who pivoted to distance learning did not mitigate “learning loss” even to some degree. It is a theory that, at bottom, claims that the measures we took to protect our children from a disabling virus did more harm than good.

What the story leaves out is the fact that Covid infections inflict cognitive damage on children (and adults) and result in demonstrable and long-lasting negative effects on cognitive capacities. It also leaves out the fact that over 200,000 children had a caregiver die of Covid as of 2022 — imagine how high that number is now. The trauma of losing a caregiver negatively impacts educational performance, further compounding the struggles that children with new-onset and undiagnosed cognitive disabilities face in school. These two facts alone provide a much more robust and plausible explanation for the educational underperformance we see today. But these are not part of the mainstream explanation for it.

To be sure, educational underperformance in today’s students is a real issue; talk to any educator and they will tell you a crisis is brewing. I myself began to see a marked decline in my college students’ reading comprehension and ability to write complex papers starting in late-2021. Our students are underperforming relative to their pre-pandemic peers. So there really is a phenomenon that needs explaining. But the “learning loss” explanation conveniently attributes this phenomenon to the protective measures we implemented on behalf of our students for a brief period of time in 2020, not to our failure to develop permanent protective measures into 2024. It gets us off the hook.