this ship of theseus

debates i didn't know existed + a very humorous distinction

hostiles = antagonists that Murderbot is worried about 😳

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.

He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.

For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again tomorrow.

That routine just changed.

On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Awiqli (insulin icodec-abae), developed by Novo Nordisk, as the first and only once-weekly basal insulin ever approved for adults with type 2 diabetes in the United States.

This is not a minor update to an existing drug.

It is the first entirely new class of basal insulin to reach U.S. patients in more than two decades.

Instead of injecting insulin every single day, people with type 2 diabetes using Awiqli will only need one shot per week, on the same day, every week.

That means reducing from 365 injections a year down to just 52.

For anyone who has ever felt the weight of that daily ritual — the anxiety of forgetting, the physical discomfort, the constant reminder that their body needs help — this approval represents something much bigger than a dosing schedule.

It represents relief.

How the Drug Actually Works

Understanding why this injection lasts a full week requires a quick look inside the body.

Most traditional basal insulins are absorbed into the bloodstream and begin breaking down within 24 hours, which is why patients need a fresh dose every day to maintain stable blood sugar levels.

Awiqli works differently.

Its active ingredient, insulin icodec-abae, is engineered to loosely attach to a blood protein called albumin, which is found naturally and abundantly in the bloodstream.

This attachment creates a slow-release reservoir.

Instead of flooding the system and fading fast, the insulin releases gradually and consistently over an entire seven-day period, keeping blood sugar in a healthy range around the clock...

The FDA reviewed and ultimately declined to approve it for people with type 1 diabetes, citing concerns about a modestly increased risk of hypoglycemia in that population specifically.

Some regulatory agencies in other countries, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Japan, have approved Awiqli for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but for now the U.S. approval is limited to type 2...

What Comes Next

Awiqli is not standing alone in this space for long.

Eli Lilly is developing its own once-weekly basal insulin, called efsitora alfa, which is currently in late-stage clinical trials.

If that drug also earns FDA approval, it would give patients and doctors two once-weekly options to choose from, allowing for personalized decisions based on a patient’s health profile, insurance coverage, and individual response.

The broader direction of travel in diabetes care is unmistakable.

Fewer injections, smarter formulations, and better integration with digital tools like continuous glucose monitors and insulin-tracking apps are all converging toward a future where managing diabetes requires less daily mental effort without becoming any less medically precise...

A Small Shot With Large Implications

It is easy to look at a once-weekly injection and see only a scheduling change.

But the science behind Awiqli, the scale of the ONWARDS trials, and the consistent satisfaction reported by patients all point toward something that matters far more than convenience.

Diabetes management has always asked a lot of people.

It asks for daily vigilance, daily discipline, and a daily willingness to confront one’s own condition, sometimes in uncomfortable or inconvenient circumstances.

Anything that reduces that load, without reducing the quality of care, is worth taking seriously.

For the more than 37 million Americans living with diabetes, and the hundreds of millions more around the world, a simpler weekly routine could mean the difference between a treatment plan that works on paper and one that actually works in a person’s life.

That is the real significance of what the FDA approved on March 26, 2026.

Not just a new drug.

A new way of keeping people healthy, one week at a time.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts

The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.

Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.

Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.

Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.

So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -

OFC ITS AN AI BRO

You wanna see what his recent articles look like?

She spent over 30 years doing this. For 30 years she didn’t work outside the home. She didn’t know the terms of their lease. She didn’t have the passwords to “their” bank account(s), “their” assets.

He left her when she was in her fifties.

He said that he needed time to reflect and moved out of their house, but told her to focus on getting their last kid through high school (still homeschooled!) and he would take care of everything.

She reached out to the landlord months later asking where the lease renewal was only to find out it wasn’t getting renewed. Because her husband hadn’t paid the rent in OVER NINE MONTHS. The whole time he was promising her he was still taking care of her.

She and her sixteen year old youngest son found out they had to move out of their house with 3 weeks’ notice. She didn’t have a job or work experience or a degree or any idea how to get these things in 3 weeks. She didn’t own her own car. If she had not had friends to take her in, she and her son would have been literally out on the street.

It ruined that friendship, too. It’s a lot to ask someone to put you up indefinitely while you try to put your life together. She burned a lot of bridges taking what anyone would or could give because she had no other choice.

She did, eventually, hard years later, get on her feet again. But it will always be hard and she will never be where she could have been in life if she’d done things differently.

It's currently close to 4 AM now that I'm posting this, and I've been crying non-stop since midnight because my friends came back online one by one through an unstable connection and said: "Hi, I'm alive." I had prepared myself for the funeral of so many of my friends. Some haven't come back online yet, and we've formed small "search and rescue" groups to find their contacts or families to check if they're okay.

What remains a fact amidst all of this is that nobody in the world ever gave a single fuck about us. I was one of the lucky ones to connect during the complete shutdown via some newly invented way we were too scared to even publish on GitHub for fear of getting arrested. In the time I was connected, I felt immense guilt for having access to the internet, and I begged you all on my socials to be the voice of the people who were about to get executed.

Not even once did I see someone talk about the internet blackout in Iran, and it enrages me.

We've been massacred, mass executed, and then silenced by getting our only way of communicating with the world shut off and the world treats it as some background noise, some irrelevant news that isn't even worth spending time hearing about.

I’ve endorsed Michael Tubbs, but this isn’t even about that. This is about making sure someone who settled a lawsuit where she was accused of ongoing sexual harassment, does not become Lieutenant Governor.

I can’t believe, after Swalwell, this is still up for debate, but here we are.

I remember this story when it first came to light back in 2021, and then everyone just stopped talking about it.

Well, we are at risk of her winning the election, so we need to talk about it.

In January 2021, her employee, Judith Blackwell, Executive Director of the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee was fired.

She sued Ma on the grounds that she had been discriminated against, for being Black, disabled, after having a stroke in 2020 and refusing Ma’s sexual advancements.

Ma tried to get the case thrown out, but only succeeded with the racial and disability discrimination part.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Christopher Krueger said:

Ma’s own exhibits evidence that she called [Blackwell] into her room while half-dressed on three separate occasions and climbed into bed with her on a fourth.

He continued:

While Ma may dispute this at trial, her attempt to reframe these instances as isolated incidents of ‘unannounced’ entries that typically occur in shared living spaces is not supported by her own evidence.

As you can see, Ma doesn’t even dispute any of this happened, just insists they “were not sexual” rather “random, isolated incidents that do not constitute sexual harassment.”

After everything with Swalwell, I don’t know about you, but that’s really not good enough for me.

And, in 2024, before the case went to court, the state settled for $350,000. And Ma insisted that proved Blackwell dropped the charges, even though that doesn’t make much logical sense.

Loyola law professor, Jessica Levinson told the San Francisco Chronicle back in 2024:

There’s nothing to indicate the civil claims against her were dismissed because then there would be nothing to settle.

She continued:

This just seems strange to repeatedly engage in a mischaracterization of what happened in this case.

On top of that, Ma’s original plan was to run for Governor this year, as she said at a Sacramento Bee forum in 2019. But, likely because of this scandal, she thought Lieutenant Governor would be safer and keep her out of the limelight. It seems she was right.

Obviously, the only people who know if these situations were harassment are Judith Blackwell and Fiona Ma, but we’ve already been through something very similar with Swalwell.

The vast majority of people who come forward about sexual harassment or assault aren’t making it up.

It takes guts to say something and it especially takes guts to accuse a woman, when women are typically seen exclusively as the victims.

We can’t know what happened, but we can make sure the outcome doesn’t affect California going forward.

We don’t need to take this kind of risk. And we don’t need to send the message that allegations of sexual harassment are okay if it’s a woman being accused.

She has dozens and dozens of massive endorsements from labor, to sitting members of congress, to many of her current colleagues in the California executive branch.

But this whole thing just puts a bad taste in my mouth. California deserves better and the initial assumption must be that survivors are, in fact, telling the truth.

If you’re a California voter, I encourage you not to vote for her, if you haven’t cast your ballot yet.

And maybe even vote for someone like Michael Tubbs, the former Mayor of Stockton, who wants to make the position into something that matters, rather than just something ceremonial.

So now you have my endorsement and my disapproval all in one. But what you chose to do with it is completely up to you.

Me every time an Asian-American diaspora figure is racist, harasses others or behaves badly in otherwise ethically evil and hurtful ways, speaking as Asian-American Indian:

Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach brought forward a litany of anti-trans witnesses familiar from litigation defending these bans. Among them was James Cantor, a Toronto psychologist who has built a career testifying for states defending care bans despite no clinical experience treating transgender minors—and who was once quietly dropped from a Florida Board of Medicine hearing after it emerged he had served on the advisory council of the Prostasia Foundation, a group that has worked to destigmatize pedophilia. Folsom wrote that Cantor "has not conducted any original scientific research on the efficacy or safety of gender dysphoria treatments," and noted he is not licensed to treat anyone under 16 and has never diagnosed a minor with gender dysphoria. [...] "The Court gives Dr. Cantor's testimony little weight," Folsom concluded. The judge turned next to Farr Curlin, a Duke University doctor and theologian who was an author of the Trump administration's HHS report on pediatric gender dysphoria ... By his own admission, Folsom noted, Curlin's views are "radically counter to current medical orthodoxy." The judge found his opinions "appear motivated by his personal views as opposed to a methodology applicable in the field of medical ethics," and gave his testimony "little-to-no weight." ...

And then there was Jamie Reed, the self-styled "whistleblower" who built a national profile on lurid, largely unsubstantiated accusations against a St. Louis gender clinic and who has gone on Fox News to describe being transgender as a delusion. Reed also did not testify and could not be cross-examined. Folsom gave her affidavit "little weight,” and had scathing remarks towards her lack of expertise: “The Court gives thus Jamie Reed’s affidavit little weight, given that she is not a medical provider or mental-health professional. In addition, her affidavit primarily addresses her experiences with a clinic operating outside of Kansas—thus, it does not rebut or refute the credible, uncontroverted testimony about clinical practice within the state of Kansas,” read the order.

This decision is 117 pages long, and if you want to actually feel good about something a judge has had to say recently about trans rights, this is legitimately a good read. (I understand that some people do not read legal decisions for fun. You should still try reading this one. It's really good.)

The Book of Life, which was just a “myth to scare cherubs ” (or whatever that line was) is suddenly something everyone knows about and knows has a prime place where it is kept under watch, now has reality bending powers to give the screenwriters the ability to do whatever the heck they want. It’s not really explained and has no real logic to it. The little logic they attempt to give it doesn’t make sense. Michael goes around murdering just about everyone except for Aziraphale who was supposedly their original/main target. What were they waiting for? They had no issue deleting the Metratron. Surely, Aziraphale should’ve been next.

So much screen time is dedicated to stuff that doesn’t matter. The Eternal Flame (stop introducing new stuff so late in your canon! You only have 90 minutes!) is another plot device that really just seems to be there to further the nonsensical Book of Life stuff and retcon A and C’s first meeting (again). Jesus is just there. You could’ve cut out the gambling plot and the trip to Hell, for that matter, too. So much more time was needed to actually address a lot of the hanging threads left over from season two.

In fact, the more I think about it, pretty much nothing of any relevance actually transferred over from season two. I don’t see how any of this was necessary. The plot is entirely artificially created and divorced from season two; the only real connections to the previous season are that they had to mention the Second Coming, had to get Aziraphale back down to earth and I guess the Book of Life was technically introduced in season two. They did not, in my mind, do a proper reconciliation between our main characters, which was arguably one of their more important jobs.

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.

Does this look quiet, peaceful, nondisruptive?

And the struggle didn't stop after formal integration, once the Civil Rights act had passed. Because even when they are legally required to serve you, they can make you really fucking uncomfortable and threaten you and the cops probably will take their side.

For one example, there was a cafe that would serve Black people, but would then publicly break the dishes so that no white customer would ever have to eat off a dish a Black person had eaten off of. This was done publicly, right as the Black diner was done eating. The waitress takes the plate and smashes it. This is a signal both to the white diners "see, we hate them just as much as you do, you're safe here" and also a threat of violence to the Black diners. "If you're not careful we'll smash you just like we did this plate."

But at the same time, if Black people go there and eat every day ... how long before the cafe can't afford to do that? How long before they have broken so many dishes that it's eating into their profits? How long before the white diners start getting used to eating alongside Black people and simply don't care as much any longer, or start getting annoyed at the noise and fuss and mess?

1. Folks in these movements trained. They were disruptive and they were strategic about it and they trained so that they could stay calm in terrifying situations and create the targeted disruptions they wanted to create and not get goaded into deviating from that. Absolutely badass.

2. Not at all a criticism of OP because I think their description of people thinking it was "quiet self-sacrificial non-disruptive christ-like activism" is dead on, but I think that description itself speaks to the same kind of revisionism re: the Christ of the Gospels and how disruptive he was and why, and it's important to remember that, especially in this era of renewed christofascism. Rev. Dr. King was a prophet and you will never convince me otherwise.

Nonviolence is not a goal, it is a strategy. A deliberate strategy at a calculated time in response to violence of the oppressor, which can be effective if it shames the perpetrators. See: why Selma or Montgomery was chosen by the SCLC (they had the most racist unhinged sheriffs who would deploy maximum force, which got shown on nationwide broadcasts and finally moved the public).

Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t carry weapons if necessary, as many organizers in Selma did. Nonviolence doesn’t mean that you accept that people will throw bombs into your family’s home, as they did to MLK.

And yes, the absurd simplification and bastardization of this strategy is deliberate. It went from being a tool for fighting for liberation to being a justification for more violence and oppression used against future generations of protestors who didn’t meet the standard of perfectly obedient nonviolent non disruptive protestors. Which of course there is no such thing.