a new apocalypse dawning

if you're wondering what & where it is before i start yapping, it's durdle door, in dorset

some background context, my first exposure to project hail mary was when folks started freaking out on the local facebook groups - ryan gosling's coming to town for filming a new movie!! i thought to myself ahhh fuck. the city that i go to uni at is gonna cameo in a gosling film. fml i guess i have to see this now

anyways i forget about it for ages until the movie drops and i finally go see it and imagine my surprise when i'm expecting miserable fuckass portsmouth and instead. i snap upright like-

"is that durdle door?!" "yes i think so-" "the dorset fieldtrip?!" "yep" "ohh my god. they went there?!" "i guess so" "what the fuck" <- live reaction of me and my bf who both have done fieldwork there related to our respective degrees (geology & palaeontology)

anyways now for some fun facts:

Earlier my little sister slammed her closet and room door-- not out of anger as far as im aware, she just pushed them too hard. I yelled at her to stop it.

she said she would, but it was clear from her tone she just said so out of obligation and was annoyed. i tell her to stop making loud noises a lot, so she probably assumed this was just another example of that.

realizing this, i explained her the reason: our rooms are right next to each other. When she slams doors, the wall shakes. When the wall shakes, my mirror shakes, and if it shakes too hard it can fall and break

after the explanation, she apologized genuinely and actually understood the reason instead of just thinking im nagging her or just want quiet. the fact that she knows the reason means shes more likely to remember, and she can apply the knowledge in different ways: "even if my older sibling isnt home, their mirror could still break, so i still shouldnt slam the door." She knows im not just trying to annoy her or assert dominance over her like a lot of rules and demands we give to children do- i just dont want my mirror to break. It helps her understand cause and effect.

Would this result be the same if i had just screamed at her or spanked her? Or did it make more sense to just explain? After all, it was a simple mistake. I could see my parents doing the same thing-- when you close a door, youre not usually thinking about the walls in the other room.

my thirteen-year-old cousin came to visit a few months back. he saw my copy of american psycho and asked if he could borrow it, because his friend had seen the movie and said it was really good. i said okay, sure, but just so you know, it's a lot more graphic than the movie and there's some stuff in there that you might find really upsetting. he asked what kind of stuff. i gave him a bare-bones outline of the contents (gore, sexual violence, cannibalism, etc). he said he would think about it.

a few days later, he came back to me and said, "it doesn't sound like my kind of thing. i think i might wait until i'm a bit older to read it." alright, i said, good call, and that was the end of it. i am 99% sure that if i'd just said "no, you can't have it, you're not old enough," he would have felt patronised and found a way to read it anyway, just to prove a point.

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.

That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-