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🚨Safety Alert Australia

If you rely on a hidden phone for your safety, be aware that Australia’s new emergency warning system, AusAlert, can send alerts that override silent and “Do Not Disturb” settings.

If safe to do so, turn off any hidden device before the scheduled test and only switch it back on after the test period has ended.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

Obviously, this has already been pointed out by Black people in the fandom, but I wanted to bring it up because I’ve had a few asks about that song specifically that I’m not comfortable with answering. I am extremely happy that Jax is canonically transfem because even though I’ve never watched the show, I’ve witnessed people’s excitement about it, and I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but I’m also not going to pretend like the racism doesn’t exist because that’s not the kind of blog I’m running here. Any other song could’ve been used, and perhaps there wasn’t much thought put into its choice; I’m sure it wasn’t a deliberate act of malice, because from an outsider perspective that song seems to fit perfectly, but that ultimately doesn’t make it any less harmful, especially given the context surrounding the production.

I feel similarly about how United In Grief by Kendrick Lamar became a popular TikTok sound for people to make funny jokes about something going wrong when the original lyrics are specifically about Black grief. Or about the new trend of “the saxaphones are getting louder” taken from Boyz N The Hood, which is a movie about Black-American experiences that a lot of (white) people using this sound likely haven’t even seen.

There is one issue with this whole thing and that is: none of these things that tech bros are advertising are actually inconvenient, and in most cases they're the exact opposite.

Setting up apple pay (in my experience) is a hassle, and is a security vulnerability (the more companies directly connected to your bank, the more likely it is to get hacked), all for what? So you can take 3 less seconds taking out and swiping/inserting a card?

Untangling wired headphones? A hassle sure. Not as much of a hassle as losing only one ear pod, or one ear pod consistently dying faster than the other, or pairing issues, or worse sound quality at a higher price because it's wireless. How is any of that more convenient? It's like the same amount of convenience

Or how about siri and google always missing hearing what you say? Censoring swears despite being an adult? Going off when you don't say it's name?

Having algorithms currate your own feed leading to echo chambers, and radicalization pipelines, and making it harder to find the stuff you want,with yts new horrible search algorithm etc etc

None of these are more convenient, they're the same amount or worse. But guess what? They make money. So they're sold as convenient.

Honorary Cat 🐈‍⬛

The reference:

Marinating a bookmark…