(*￣∇￣)ノ

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________________ SPEEDING FINES DOUBLED WHEN WORKERS PRESENT —————————

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⚠️ ROAD WORK 500FT ⚠️

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🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧

        🚚 🚚                  🔩             웃  🧰   🕳️   🪚웃       웃📋     웃    웃 🛠️       🔨웃               🏗️  🕳️                 웃   웃 🔧                                                     🚚 🔩      🔩                      🔩                             

🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧

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🎈🎈🎈🎈        🚗

☁️                               ☁️

         ☁️ ☁️

                                  ☁️

                       ☁️             🦅    ☁️

     ☁️

                             ☁️

                ☁️                           ☁️

                                                 ☁️

   ☁️

                   ✈️

         ☁️                             ☁️

                             ☁️

    ☁️

                            ☁️

               ☁️                           ☁️

                                               ☁️

                                            ☁️                              ☁️

    ☁️                      ☁️

     ☁️                                     ☁️

                            ☁️

          ☁️                             

                            ☁️

   ☁️

                           ☁️

                                              ☁️

                                            ☁️

                   ☁️

                                                                               ☁️

         ☁️                            

  ☁️

                          ☁️

☁️

                      ☁️                ☁️

    ☁️

                            ☁️

               ☁️                           ☁️

                                               ☁️

  ☁️

      ☁️                             ☁️    ✈️

                            ☁️

   ☁️

                           ☁️

              ☁️                           ☁️

                                            ☁️

                                           ☁️                             ☁️

   ☁️                     ☁️

    ☁️                                     ☁️

                           ☁️

         ☁️                            

                           ☁️

  ☁️

                          ☁️

                                             ☁️

                                         ☁️

                  ☁️

                                                          🦅                      ☁️ 

        ☁️                            

 ☁️

If you marry a good-time girl

A joyful woman known to her town,

If she is wayward,

and revels in the moment,

do not reject her, but instead let her enjoy;

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Back in the 60s, a team got some funding to research the extremophile bacteria living in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. Among the organisms they described was Thermus aquaticus.

Okay, who cares? That bacteria lives in hot springs. You let it get below 122°F/50°C? It just dies. It just hangs out in scalding hot water and maybe trades molecules with some cyanobacteria or something. Kinda neat, but was it really worth our tax dollars to send these people on a field trip to a national park?

A few decades later, another researcher used one of the enzymes isolated from that bacteria to develop a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).

Before PCR, if you wanted to make a bunch of copies of a given DNA sequence, you needed a team of experts and weeks of hard work. You needed to grow a whole bunch of cells and do a bunch of chemistry at them and there was still a high probability of failure.

With PCR, any jackass with a bachelor's degree can just pipette a barely-visible volume of colorless liquid into a lil tube with some other colorless liquid, throw it in the beige science box, and have the sequence of interest copied millions of times over in an hour or two. (Source: I'm a jackass with a bachelor's degree and I've done PCR on tens of thousands of specimens)

PCR is an absolutely critical tool in the molecular biology toolkit. Many assays for cancers and genetic diseases depend on it. It's a powerful tool for quickly detecting certain infectious diseases. It's how you find out if you really are the daddy. I'm not even going to start scratching the surface on how important it is in many areas of research. It's a magnificent technique that has dozens of variants to suit all kinds of niche applications.

So yeah, that goofy study about some shit that you think is a huge waste of time and money? You could be right, it might lead to a paper getting published that only matters to a handful of people in a super niche field.

Or it could completely revolutionize the world in ways that we never could have expected.

I was a kid who didn't really understand, but I remember the quiet conversations between my parents late at night, the fact mum would sit me down on the bed and explain that Pa was sick, the way that trips to Adelaide suddenly got a lot more frequent because we were on borrowed time. I remember Pa going in for radiotherapy which was a new treatment and had better outcomes in many ways to traditional operations. I remember that the doctor doing the procedure was young and inexperienced and, ultimately, wrong about the radiotherapy working.

I remember Pa being diagnosed with aggressive cancer, that the treatment hadn't worked, and that he had two years to live.

I also remember (because cancer research took off in a lot of ways in the nineties) that there was a new treatment they were trialling and Pa was eligible for it because he was terminal. And how the two years stretched into four.

I remember the news when that treatment stopped being viable, but how there was another new treatment that Pa could do, and that stretched his four years to ten.

(I remember how he hurt his back at the farm, and how Grandma had to have operations on her feet, and how they had to sell and move to the suburbs because they could no longer keep up with the property. I remember a new house that was different and closed in with people. I remember their dog, who was 17, dying. And the new dog (who was an asshole) going from puppy, to adult, to menace.)

When the treatment stopped working I remember chemo being an option, but there was also another new treatment for trial. Pa didn't want chemo, so he signed up for the new treatment. I remember the 10 stretching out into 11, and dancing at my cousin's wedding with my dad wearing her veil on one side and Pa with orchids in his (still full head of) hair on the other, then 13, and I was suddenly eighteen and an adult and he was there calling me "Gull" at my birthday. (I was always "Gull", short for seagull, because as a child I'd always beg for other people's chips. My cousin was "Mite" much the same way, except hers was "Termite" because she always got into stuff. I'm never sure which of us got the better bargain.)

Then 14, when his first great grandchild was born, the cheeky minx, who had his smile and his nose for trouble.

(I remember the new dog being put down because he got diabetes and his kidneys failed. I remember Pa getting Grandma another dog for Christmas, a dog that became his, the way that all dogs became his. Bobby would go on to outlive them both. He retired at fifteen, silly old thing, but Pa saw his first few trips around the sun.)

Eventually, as they all did, that treatment stopped working as well, the year Pa's second great-grandchild was born, how it was almost a tragedy, the cord wrapped three times around his neck, how Pa was my cousin's rock as test after test was done to make sure the baby was okay. I remember Pa going for chemo and being tired and ill. I remember him being in pain. I remember him walking up and down the hallway in the middle of the night, quietly swearing as he used the bathroom again. I remember when the chemo became too much and he gave it up because if he was only going to have a few more months, he was going to go out with dignity and not spending half of them with his head over a toilet bowl (his words).

I remember a funeral where half the town showed up to say goodbye.

(I remember his three year old great-granddaughter, the oldest of her generation, being terrified of ambulances for a long while after because she was old enough to remember him being taken away. Her mother was ten when my grandfather was diagnosed.)

I remember, as a child, I was half-convinced Pa would live forever, because they told him two years and he stretched that out to eighteen.

He never went into remission. His cancer was always classified as aggressive. Science gave him the chance to watch his grandchildren grow, to meet two of his great grandchildren, to see one of his granddaughters get married.

He couldn't be saved, he died eventually, but we all do.

Dildo Generator

Online 3D experiment by Ikaros Kappler which is described as a “Extrusion/Revolution Generator” ….

Created with three.js, you can alter the bezier curves and angle of the form, and is designed with 3D printing in mind (models can be exported and saved, as well as calculated weight in silicone).

I call this one the Megahorny

The fact that our oven is broken right now is just serendipitous.

Anyway. This might be the best $150 I’ve ever spent. That chicken was done before I had time to finish doing the dishes to eat it off of.

And the faster cook time means it’s lower in histamine and the texture is like, actually good??? Like what???? I can bring fresh food to my MIL’s, keep it separate from everyone else in the kitchen and just commandeer a wall socket for 20 minutes and have a whole ass meal with protein and vegetables???? I can eat safely at other people’s houses again???!?

Wait.

The FUCK?

Wait, is that why slow cooked meats always make me react and burgers or 20 min oven baked chicken breast doesn't?

Bone broth, for example, makes me extremely ill. As does yoghurt and a bunch of other stuff.

Also, be mindful of leftovers. Freeze any leftovers within 2 hours of cooking to prevent further histamine build-up. The longer cooked foods (especially meat) sit in the refrigerator, the more histamine develops.

Beef is also inherently higher in histamine than other meats, such as lamb or poultry, because it's aged for a minimum of 2 weeks to develop flavor.

And just to clarify again, before anyone rolls their eyes at any of this: histamine is not bad. It is, in fact, incredibly beneficial and necessary for immune system regulation, wound healing, and, yeah, developing the flavor of many nutritionally dense and flavorful foods.

This is also why MSG affects some people poorly. It's not unhealthy, it's just a histamine liberator, and some people can struggle with that--but those same people will also generally struggle with aged cheeses and tomatoes, and other foods where MSG naturally occurs.

The classic "old bicycle" we're all thinking of, which looked like this:

Is actually a technological compromise developed in the early 1870s. The very first bicycle was invented in 1817 and it looked like this:

It had no pedals and the rider would push it along with their feet, the same way toddlers learn to ride bikes today.

In about 1864, a mechanic in france came up with the idea of adding pedals to the front wheel, making the first self-propelled bicycle.

This was a great improvement because it's a lot easier to move and a lot more fun than the Fisher Price version above. It was a big thing for about five years, but there were some drawbacks.

First, because the pedals were directly attached to the front wheel, you couldn't go very fast without moving your legs incredibly quickly, which takes a lot of effort. It also is kind of awkward to steer because your legs are in the way of the wheel.

The other issue was bumps. Roads were not very smooth in the 1870s, most of them were unpaved and full of ruts, potholes, and rocks. And at first there were no rubber tires, just wooden wheels with metal rims. Altogether this made for a very bumpy ride.

The big front wheel, which was made possible by the invention of wire spokes and solid rubber tires, solved all of these problems. A big wheel runs over bumps more easily: think of how rough it is to ride roller skates over bumps in a sidewalk that you would hardly notice on a bike. And the bigger the wheel, the faster you can move with one push of the pedals. Having the seat on top of the wheel, instead of behind, also makes steering less cumbersome.

There are of course drawbacks to this design, in particular being so high up makes it very easy to go over the handlebars if you crash, and more likely to hit your head or break your arm.

Two more inventions helped drive this comical beast into extinction and bring back a more balanced, and safer, bicycle.

The first was the pneumatic tire, which contains a cushion of air, and makes for a much softer ride compared to a solid tire or a metal one. The cushion effect eliminates the need for a big wheel to smooth out the bumps in the road.

The second invention was the sprocket and chain drive. This lets you put the pedals anywhere you want on the bike, and with a big gear at the pedals and a small one at the wheel, you can get more speed out of a small wheel.

The first modern bicycle to combine a sprocket and pneumatic tires was built in 1879. It was an instant hit, not just because it was much less dangerous, but because the low drag profile and the smooth pneumatic tires made for a faster ride, and the trendsetters in cycling, then as now, were the racing community. There have been plenty of innovations and modifications in the years since, from ten-speed gears to carbon fiber frames, but these are all variations on a theme. The basic form of the bicycle has not changed.