accidental scientist

Designing a combination therapy for acute ischaemia

2019-11-28T20:04:00-08:00

If one were to design a combination therapy for neuroprotection and neurosupport following a major ischemic stroke, they might decide to do something like this in continuous IV delivery form:

To limit reperfusion injury, and limit apoptosis cascades, and provide immediate support

L-Glutathione, Vitamin C, N-Acetyl Cysteine, and Sodium Butyrate to help limit reperfusion injury, and limit the infarction injury areas to only the immediately affected neurovascular system, including reducing glutamate-related toxicity.

Many of these substances have more than one purpose in this mix. The L-Glutathione and N-Acetyl Cysteine operate as ROS-antioxidants and prevent other forms of cellular damage. The Vitamin C takes some of the load off the vitamin C scavenger pathways which exhaust L-Glutathione stocks to recycle Vitamin C after use, ensuring that L-Glutathione can focus on its other role.

A DHA/triglyceride emulsion should be included in this mix delivered for the first few hours, then later should be replaced by DHA/EPA (see below).

Neurosupport, neurogenesis, repair and remodelling

To the above neurovascular protectants, we add: L-Serine, phosphatidylserine, and citicoline to provide the necessary building blocks for neurogenesis, repair and remodeling.

(Phosphatidylserine might be left out of this mix - testing is required to determine if it’s more helpful than L-Serine alone, or if it interferes with healing. If in doubt stick to just L-Serine. Depending on the kind of injury, phosphatidylserine might help more in some cases than others, as it’s expressed at the damaged ends of nerves to target them for repair).

Thromboyltic agents (anti-clotting agents)

rPTA therapy is currently the gold standard for breaking down clots, and should probably be administered once the above listed substances are in the blood stream in sufficient concentration (or co-administered). rPTA can tail off without stopping delivery of the other listed substances.

Matrix metalloprotease inhibitors (e.g. doxycycline, tetracycline, minocycline)

These should be used to prevent large scale remodeling of the area during repair (and potentially also protect the area from certain classes of bacteria - and possibly also further clots/bleeds by inhibiting porphyrin/gingipain-producing bacteria).

Capillary/Endothelial relaxation

Nicotinic acid (vitamin B3) to trigger flushing reaction and relax the endothelium, particularly in small capillaries.

Nutritional support

DHA/EPA as raw building blocks (in addition to normal TPN nutrition for proteins). This is after the first day or so of DHA + triglycerides.

B-vitamins, and other protein sources are pretty obvious. But omega 3’s are essential for some of the necessary repair work. They should be fresh, and have been kept chilled to avoid rancidity, ideally only being warmed to body temperature during infusion, and possibly kept in an anoxic environment, with a short wavelength-light blocking bag.

Delivery phases

This would be delivered in phases - first the anti-ROS group, neurogenesis group. MMPI antibiotics + rPTA after a few minutes (rPTA therapy ramping off over time according to the existing protocols for use). DHA/trigly. replaced with DHA/EPA after about a day or two. Not sure when to start introducing the B-vitamins, particularly B3.

Contraindications

Extreme care would be needed before attempting this on a patient with an intracranial haemmorhage or bleed, rather than a clot. For patients already on blood thinners who have a seemingly paradoxical clot, consider increasing the dose of matrix-metalloprotein inhibitor antibiotics and reducing the blood thinners dosage gently as DHA/EPA, NAC and other treatments in this list all have a blood-thinning/anti-clotting effect.

Notes

The difficulty with such a therapy is not only getting anyone outside of researchers in Barcelona to try this, but the fact that it works best within the first three hours. I expect something like the above mix to become standard medical practice in about 30 years, assuming we don’t come up with better mechanisms involving nanotech or RNA therapy.

A possible connection between Propionic Acid (Calcium Propionate) and Autism

2019-09-05T16:46:00-07:00

This news flew around the web a bit about a month or two ago, but just in case you didn’t see it, I wanted to rebroadcast it here.

Propionic acid is a relatively common preservative (also known as E208, or Calcium Propionate). It’s an anti-mold/fungal agent that is added to some baked goods and cheeses to increase their shelf life, and also created in the body by some kinds of gut bacteria under specific circumstances. It’s also created naturally in some cheeses, for example Swiss.

This study came out recently, and was published in Nature: Propionic Acid Induces Gliosis and Neuro-inflammation through Modulation of PTEN/AKT Pathway in Autism Spectrum Disorder

It appears to be a potential cause of Autism-like symptoms, and some subset of Autism cases. It triggers the same kind of bad speciation/incorrect migration of neurons seen in the brain in people with Autism, as well as similar inflammatory markers seen in those people.

Most of the news stories on this a month or two ago focused on the fact that Calcium Propionate/propionic acid is a preservative commonly found in food, when the real story is likely that bad gut bacteria create this in-vivo, and it may be causing issues.

There have been previous weak correlations between autism and biliary colic, so it would be interesting to see if the dysbiosis mentioned in this paper is an underlying cause for that condition too - that would be a very elegant result.

Other studies show that it appears to also have bad side effects on blood glucose, but in much larger doses than you’d normally see in food. It’s possible that there’s a genetic component here and some people are less able to metabolize it. (Those people should also avoid Swiss cheese where it occurs naturally).

What does this mean for Autism?

I don’t think this leads to a “cure”, and even if it can be confirmed to be a causative agent, isn’t necessarily the cause of all kinds of autism, but this knowledge may lead to future diagnostic tests that a mother can be given during pregnancy. It may also lead to a list of foods to avoid during pregnancy as a first step. If the correlation becomes strong enough that it becomes an ethical issue not to yell from the rooftops about it, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

As for undoing the damage seen here, I am not aware of any way to undo the effects seen here, and I’d err on the side of no, there’s no good way to “fix” any of this, unless you know a good way to trigger nerve growth - although exercise and weed both seem to be able to under some circumstances. (shrugs)

Something to keep an eye on for the future.

What can you take from this?

If you’re ultra-conservative and a biohacker, my takeaway would be that if you’re in the last two trimesters of your pregnancy, do the following:

Avoid all foods, particularly baked goods, which contain Calcium Propionate, and Propionic acid on the ingredient label for yourself until your pregnancy is over. This includes food which contains it naturally, such as swiss cheese.
If you’re breast-feeding, avoid the same foods until you stop breast feeding
Don’t feed those foods to children under age 7 if at all avoidable

However, at this time there’s very little evidence to support doing the above, given that part of the puzzle appears to be genetic variation + environmental factor = problem, and if you don’t have the genes that cause issues, you shouldn’t have any problems at all. (And we might not even know which genes cause the issues yet).

If you have food intolerances to certain kinds of breads and not others, it might be worth your time identifying if those breads contain calcium propionate and if so, see if all breads with it in cause you problems, such as sluggishness or sleepiness. If they do? Avoid them at all costs from there on out.

Next time: Crohn’s disease is also tied to calcium propionate, so if you have Crohn’s, you may want to avoid it to - or at least watch to see if it can cause flare-ups for you.

A New Life Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies

2019-08-25T02:14:00-07:00

I’ve just spent the last ten years of my life working inside of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, a merry team of techninjarocketsurgeons known for being air-dropped into games companies to help them optimize their games for the Xbox console, and in doing so I’ve worked on thousands of games, from AAA to Indie titles, and helped everyone I could wherever I could. Including helping Xbox get together with Sony and others in the industry to set up an open-standards body around HDR gaming.¹

We also did a bunch of things like helping developers write Windows games, write Kinect-based games for Xbox 360, a little research and development here and there on technology which may or may not have ever shipped, and who knows what else. We also did a bit of tech support, documentation, education (I also ran our games technology conferences - usually owning the entirety of the content production, strategy and planning side of the house, and doing everything from writing and structuring keynotes to giving a ton of highly-rated talks myself).

Xbox ATG has been around for 19 years at this point², and I’m proud to have been a part of it for half of its lifetime. Not a bad innings.

Either way though, ten years is a long time. It’s time for a change.

As one chapter ends another one begins…

So where am I going now?

I’d love to be able to say that I was starting my own games/software company, or becoming a screenwriter, or ditching all of this to become a full-time musician, or any of those things. Unfortunately I can’t say that yet. (Boo!) That’s still high on my list, but top of the list is getting to the point where I own a house.

Shelter’s important, after all. Even more important when working for yourself is a) having a place to live with predictable rent, b) having a mortgage for tax-deduction reasons (in the US, you can’t deduct expenses in any way that makes sense for a small business unless you have a mortgage - starting out, it’s that which tips you over from taking the standard deduction towards itemizing everything). And it’d be very useful to have a nest-egg to fall back on - especially when running a company means that you have to pay for your own healthcare. Realistically I only get a few shots at this before I run out of time on this spinning rock, so that’s not going to happen yet.

Throw into the mix that it’s pretty apparent that we’re due for a recession and it’s going to land any second now. Everyone’s saying it already, so it must be true. If you don’t believe me, see this previous tale of fashion signaling recessions - particularly the part about skirts, becaue in the past month or two I’ve started to see a lot of above-the-waist high pants on women instead of skirts (and a recession makes way more sense than anything else for that particular example of retro fashion boomeranging back into the zeitgeist, because it makes over 50% of women’s butts look absolutely terrible in them - I’m just glad that it’s not heading in the direction of men as well, because I’m not wearing mid-torso pants for anyone, and it’s make my gut look more like I’m about to give birth than anything else in recorded history).

All that said and you still haven’t said where.

Get to the chopper… I mean, large stable tech company with some Gamesy stuff

The answer is… I’m going to Google. This week I start my new employee orientation and will be joining their Android Gaming division. The goal? To make android gaming better for game developers (I think you can see the theme here).

At this point you might be thinking Why aren’t you going to Stadia?, to which I’ll retort that I almost went there, but I didn’t want to move to New York or San Jose.

Why Google at all? They’re not known for their hard focus on gaming, and they’re certainly not known for having any kind of stamina in their gaming strategy and plans. The general opinion in the gamedev community seems to be that they just seem to lose interest and aren’t a real force or player.

That’s the word on the street… now are those opinions correct? I’ve seen enough in my talks with them to imply that they’re serious this time. Really serious. No, honestly, you have no idea how serious they’re being. Trust me.

Serious, at least, enough for me to risk a few years of my limited time on this planet on them. Look, I could just take my savings and try to put out an album and make it big on the EDM circuit. I’m not.³

If not them, where else?

I did consider a couple of other places, and it was (to be completely honest) an insanely hard decision to make. I had offers on the table from Tesla and Oculus, and I was also considering a few other places, including Epic, Harmonix, and Warner Bros/Monolith. But this time it was a combination of an established large company, (including a friend who was asking me to come on board and is promising to mentor me), and some really tough back-and-forth with the pro’s and con’s.

I can still go to Tesla or Oculus (or, for that matter, Harmonix) if I change my mind. That’s reassuring.

The difference this time is that if I find that I don’t completly relish the experience at my new gig, I’m willing to leave in a much shorter time frame than I ever have in the past, and bounce around until I find a home that was as much of a home as Xbox ATG was. Historically I’ve been really stubborn about trying to muscle on through and make it work. (That said, all signs point to Google being a place that is kinder than many companies in the industry, and where people put collaboration first - which is something I’m really looking forward to).

Heck, after a few years, I might just take a spin of the roulette wheel and start my own thing (after all I’m not getting any younger). And yes, in true Simon Cooke fashion, it might come completely out of left field and be a tiki bar like Zombie Village, but located somewhere near Seattle.

Ultimately I don’t want to move any further away from games than I have at this point though - that’s a requirement for me. I really enjoy being in the entertainment space and working with creative people who think in curves as well as straight lines. :) And at the same time, I’ve got to pay for college for the kiddo, put a roof over my family’s head, and put food in their bellies. Something that has become surprisingly expensive in Seattle over the past decade.

The future begins here…

So as I write this it’s 12:18am the night before “Noogle” (New Google-r) orientation. They have a lot of people coming tomorrow, so many that registration starts at 7:30am and I’m in the group that is supposed to show up earliest. Are they sure this is a software engineering job? Have they met software engineers? Half the time you’re lucky if they show up before 11am, never mind 9am. And those are the early birds!!!

(Four days later, and In retrospect, traffic around Mountainview is painful… and this avoids a good chunk of it).

Wish me luck, I’m going in. I don’t even specifically know what I’m going to be doing (I have hints, but they’re in the realm of “it’ll be kind of chocolate flavored, with a bit of spice” rather than deep down to the E numbers, palm oil, and cocoa liquor).

I just know it’s going to be interesting and a wild ride.

I’d claim that I had a hand in enabling Sony and Microsoft’s recent partnership to provide backend services for PSN Network, but to be honest, I have no idea if I did or not. That said, I’m relatively certain that if the stuff I’d worked on with them hadn’t work out well, and had soured the relationship between the companies (which was at risk), it would have been much more difficult for that deal to happen. So maybe that went a little easier because of me. I can’t really say. ↩
I came up with the Latin motto⁴ for Xbox ATG for its 16th (or 0x10th, or %1000’th if you prefer) anniversary. It reads: “INDISCRETA MAGICAE • SCIENTIAS ET ARTES • IGNIS, LVX ET SONVM” which means “Indistinguishable from Magic - Science and Art - Fire, Light and Sound”… because any sufficiently Advanced Technology Group is indistinguishable from magic… ↩
I’m also not crazy. Call me when I make more than ~$2.47 per year making electronic music and I’ll reconsider. My minimum is probably $5 a month before I start getting giddy, quit programming, and start planning to play Burning Man or Coachella. (I’ll open for Infected Mushroom… it’ll be great, and I’m sure they won’t mind…) ↩
You can do this by round-tripping between English and any other language you want in an auto-translator such as Google Translate. Just keep slightly changing your sentence until you come up with something that you can translate with it to the other language and back again intact. If it does this, then you’ve probably got something which is a stable translation (if not always a good one), as it’s not shifting when it’s translated in either direction. ↩

Flat People, Resumes and Coded Language

2018-02-11T12:25:50-08:00

People often speak in coded language - some more than others. The problem with coded language is that it requires a secret decoder ring to figure out what they mean.

I'm not talking about jargon and vocabulary which are used in exclusionary ways. That particularly insidious form of manipulation - taking commonly used and understood terminology and morphing it to have a different, specific, and subtly different meaning - is often used as a two-pronged way in unfair, point-scoring debate:

1) To give people a retreat-spot in the debate, so that they can disavow their manipulation by saying "clearly you don't understand technical term A, which I'm using, rather than common-term B".

2) To allow the person to shut down their opponent in the debate. "Clearly you need to go educate yourself so that you know what A means, and it's not my job to do that for you - I don't owe you anything."

That's particularly lame, because no, sorry, it's everyone's job to teach - that's how we advance as a species, and it's matter of good-will and good-faith interaction with your fellow human.

There are cases where it's valid as a shorthand for saying "I'm not interested in debating stuff where I'm an expert and you're ignorant" - but you don't get to exercise it if you're arguing in public with random people; if you want to argue as an expert, it's your duty to "stoop to their level" and make sure you're understood.

No, I'm talking about simple "read between the lines" discourse. With many people, you have to infer what they really mean, who they're really talking about, what the subject is, what's really going on, what the underlying motivation is, and what the politics of the situation are.

This is so common that it's weird when you meet people who don't behave like this. I've found a few people over the years who just give it to you completely straight, flat, and don't hide their intent behind mountains of chaff and flak... (although everyone will hide a little for safety).

Unless you know those people really really well, you'll spend a lot of time trying to decode them, and in the process invent motivations and meanings that don't actually exist. Eventually a lightbulb will click on, and you'll realize that no, just take exactly what they said as baseline truth, and read no more into it and no less into it than what they specifically said.

These people choose their words carefully, and think before they speak.

Even when you know this is in operation, you're going to have a weird time of it, simply because everyone else is doing the chaff and flak maneuver... so by now, it has become automatic for you to fill in the gaps and blanks. For people who give it to you flat, straight and unadorned, you'll need to actively remember not to infer.

But once you do, it's magic.

How To Stay Competitive If You're Flat

There are disadvantages to this approach for those "flat" people though. And that's the résumé problem.

Most people, when they send off a CV or résumé, embellish. The inflation rate of the average CV is probably 30%. You present your best foot forward, and maybe a little white lie here and there. The same goes for reports, business interactions, so on and so on.

The problem comes in if you're a "flat" person. You'll give a perfectly honest, reasoned and detailed appraisal of what you did. Unfortunately, because everyone else is inflating their appraisals by 30%, you are now 30% worse-off than you should be, simply because you didn't puff up your chest and inflate your report as well.

You can't rely on others to remember not to infer when dealing with you, particularly if they're a recruiter (who deal with hundreds of résumés), or in a large business. Instead, you have to play the game as it's presented to you.

All you can do is be honest and truthful, but also focus on the wins, de-emphasize the losses, and join the rest of the people who are inflating. Present the information which is the most wow-worthy.

It'll feel wrong, or boastful... but when everyone else is playing a different game than you are, you can only lose.

Altruism in an Uncaring Universe, and The Good Place

2018-02-09T01:10:18-08:00

The last episode of Season 2 of The Good Place had a fantastic message buried inside of it.

Nobody is truly altruistic in the dictionary definition of the word. (But that's okay - we're only human, so we make human decisions).

Altruism does not exist in a vacuum. A good person doing kind acts will only perform those acts for so long before they stop doing them, if you kick them in the face every time they do them. Because they're good, not stupid.

More subtly, a good person in a truly brutal and uncaring universe will only keep doing selfless acts for so long, before they lose the ability to keep doing them. Because we get a fuzzy feeling of awesome from doing good things for other people - which is a reward. It's an old reward, one baked into our genetic code (and into the code of most mammals to a degree, but turned up in primates). It's the concept of /fairness/.

A highly altruistic person operates on this principle: I'll do good things for you out of the goodness of my heart, because it's the right thing to do. In return, my brain rewards me with a sense of being a good person, who helps others.

In an uncaring universe, that contract - a social contract between people with similar firmware - is broken. (This also happens in large cities, where people are stressed). The rewards are spotty if they come at all.

Without the reward, people get tired of it, and eventually stop - or turn against the behavior. The strategy isn't working, and has been proven not to work, and most people won't keep doing the same thing over and over again if there's pain involved - or if actions aren't reciprocated.

What does this tell us?

Thank people when they help you, or they won't help you.
Don't lash out at people for sincerely trying to help you - or they won't help you.

Our world is a pretty bleak place right now. Don't squash the helpful butterflies. They're part of the grease that keeps the machinery going forwards without grinding. Be polite. Treat each other well.

A lot of our world works because people are altruistic. If our world becomes entirely transactional - I'll do something if you do something tangible for me - it'll turn into a remarkably hollow, sad, and lonely place, partly because transactional relationships lead to attempts to game the system, or tilt the playing field in your favor. Right now we've got an altruism deficit, and that deficit is growing. So don't be that person.

(And I'll try not to be that person too, and we'll get along swimmingly).

Why People Share Articles on Social Media

2018-02-04T12:23:51-08:00

People rarely share articles to spread knowledge. More often they don't care about the details. They just care if the way the article made them feel matches the way they feel about the general topic.

This is why it's hard for people to keep a grip on facts, reason, or even basic journalism principles in an age when outrage, emotional responses, and clickbait are more important than fact, fairness, and judgement.

Even worse, it's a self-perpetuating cycle. People don't go on social media to read the articles. They want to feel outraged - or less often, happy - for their loose group of friends. (Although in many cases, those friendships aren't even close to real - it's like bar friends. With some rare exceptions, those friendships dissolve away the moment you stop drinking - not exactly the kind of people you could rely on to help hide a body).

Argue against those articles? That person's identity is now tied into them, so you'll get push-back. They weren't posting about the article - they were posting about how they personally felt, so attacking the article on its factual basis is seen as an attack on them. You'll likely get a stream of external data points supporting why no, the article is correct. (This is a form of post-hoc rationalization).

Or you'll be told "No, you're wrong... this list of things you're not party or privy to from the poster's personal life are why the article is correct" - even though the article has nothing to do with the person. Those reasons may be why they posted it, but the two are separate things - even if they're now in a state of quantum entanglement.

This is something I've seen before. In the Bush era, inventing stories was rife. Pre-Facebook, on places like Digg, my mantra was "Look, the asshat does enough things that are fact that you can skewer him on - why do you need to invent stuff? It just undermines your argument". For the record, I was anti-Bush. But I'm pro fairness and factual honesty in debate.

We're way past those times - not because anything has changed, but because our flow of information is so dense that no-one has time to verify and check every aspect of what they post.

Even worse, as a culture, we appear to be willing to take on aspects of what the Scientologists would call "fair game" - if someone is othered, and seen as the enemy, it's okay to do whatever is necessary to take them down.

Recently I've seen many people on the internet saying things about due process and the concept of "innocent unless proven guilty" that "this doesn't apply here... we're not in court!".

The EU has decided otherwise recently, saying that innocent until proven guilty is actually upheld even in public fora. This is a compelling argument, for one simple bedrock reason:

We are the court. We are the government. Little c, little g. All government is, is people getting together in groups to decide how we all act together. All court is, is how those decisions are enforced. So yes, this stuff matters. Look at the Salem Witch Trials for examples of how things can spiral out of control if we don't hold ourselves to a singular, well-considered standard.

Throw into this mix another problem:

It's easy to assume that everyone is by nature good, and in any situation, will do the best that they can do with the options given to them. This is a concept that came out of psychology in the US in the early 1960s.

There's a problem here: It's a concept which is objectively and scientifically untrue. It's fantastic in a therapy session when you're trying to work with a good person through some of their issues, and let them know that they're not innately evil - because even good people do bad things occasionally - but it was never meant to be slathered around as a general statement of pop-psychology pablum that applies in every situation.

Sociopaths, for example, don't follow the rules, and we know how prevalent they are in society. Mentally disturbed people don't follow the rules - because their thought processes are broken. Bad actors exist. Not everyone is good bar their own personal circumstances. Some people really are manipulative, some people really do put personal gain above right and wrong. There's always another mark, and there's always another grifter looking to make a quick buck from an unwitting stooge.

All I'm saying is measure twice, cut once, and know your cognitive biases and fallacies. In a world where empathy has been weaponized, slow your roll.

Long time no post… I wonder why? (Music, Politics and More)

2018-01-21T15:56:23-08:00

Hello everybody,

It's been quite a while since I last posted on the blog. Why? Well, it's a number of things:

Everyone's going nuts over politics, and has polarized. I'd post about political stuff, but I just don't have the heart for it. Partly this is because I've recently found that I lose friends when I talk politics (I don't automatically slew in the direction of my friends on every issue even though I'm a bleeding-hearty lefty - I prefer nuance, and right now there's none). I'm not willing to compromise my principles or ignore facts or skip analysis, so away from politics I go.

Work has been busy. I've been doing new and interesting things, some of which may or may not pan out... But as a result, I've been trying not to blog. I discovered many years ago that writing kind of shifts a gear in my head - and I don't want to get stuck in that gear. It can take weeks for me to shift back, so I've been avoiding it. Instead, I've been working on music.

I wouldn't have considered myself a musician until recently. I can barely consider myself one now - impostor syndrome being what it is. Especially if I compare myself to my favorite musicians. I'm just not on the same page. But there's one thing I do really well, and that's learn new things rapidly. So let's say I've reached the level where I can say that I'm relatively competent, if not an actual expert.

So far I've released 4 singles. There's more coming... I'm trying to build towards an album. Everything's being released under the name Fleeting Shadow, and you can find me on ReverbNation here: https://www.reverbnation.com/fleetingshadow , Bandcamp here: https://fleetingshadow.bandcamp.com/ , and on the music label Foxxy Music here: foxxymusic.com/artists/fleeting-shadow.

Or you can just listen here:

Writing music is pretty much the best stress-reliever I've found. It's more immediate than writing screenplays (a screenplay is not a finished product - it's a halfway point... so it's less gratifying). Even better, I'm enjoying the music I've written, which is great.

(I will get back to screenplays at some point, but right now? There's no point).

As part of this wonderful change in scenery, I've also started a music label with my wife Darci Morales - Foxxy Music, LLC. The first album we're putting out comes out in 5 days (1/21/2018) and isn't my music. No, this is from Alternative/Alt.Rock/Indie/Grunge(?) band The Happy Pill Academy. They've trusted me with their baby, so I'm doing my best to make sure it's well fed and looked after.

Their first album is Kerosene, Matches and Time, and will be available on streaming music and digital download sites. It might even show up on CD / Vinyl at some point, but that's further in the future.

There's a lot involved in running a music label - way more than I thought. It ends up there's a lot of moving parts behind the scenes before music makes its way into your grubby little mitts. Never mind the logistics of P.R. and press coverage, getting radioplay, getting songs into the charts.

(We can even create our own ISRC codes now... we're holding off on UPC codes for now, because they're a lot pricier).

Either way, this is an interesting new side venture. We'll see where it takes me. Maybe nowhere. Maybe somewhere... but at the very least, it gives me something better to do with my time than argue politics.

Creation and action beats directionless agitprop, every time.

Be the change you want to see in the world. I'm going to do that right now.

Lessons Learned from Camping

2017-08-23T14:10:22-07:00

Pooping is easier without pants, especially when you had to dig a hole first.

Try to poop before sunset. It's way scarier in the dark.

Bring a real shovel. Emergency snow shovels don't do a great job of digging poop holes. (I had a hunch.... so I brought a real shovel).

Ants will mostly leave you alone, even if they have a massive 15-foot across anthill, if you dump a small amount of food on the hill as a ritual offering.

It's difficult to get used again to the idea that you can't just pee anywhere after just peeing anywhere for 4 days.

It's easy to make gourmet meals when camping, because everything tastes gourmet when you're hungry. The hard part is stopping water from the coolers getting into the ziplocks with the food, leaving you with a cooler full of meat-water. Fortunately we had two coolers, and we didn't hit that problem until day 3.

Bacon should always be in infinite supply. It is the fuel on which camps are made.

There are about 40 different valves for air beds, and even if you buy a big pack of them, you'll always be missing the one you need.

Ropes, bungie cords, and tarps can be used creatively to create all kinds of awesome shade (thanks, Darci!).

Unless you're camping out in the literal middle of nowhere, take bottles of water to drink and cook with. Take 5-gallon containers of water for washing/dishes. It's easier.

If you're camping near a town, they will have a city landfill. Dump your trash there when you pack it out, so it's not with you for the trip home, making your car smell like a landfill. ($10, at Crook County landfill this trip).

Bring a bajillion flashlights and camp lights. Buy more every trip.

Totes are great for gear. Amazon Fresh totes they left you for free for no good reason are awesome too.

Don't feel like cooking on your campfire? Bring Duraflame firelogs. Easier to control, but not really for cooking on due to the wax.

Bring tables! If you've got more than 2 people, or more than 2 stoves (we have a grill and a stove), you'll want a nice big long table to use as a prep station. And small camping tables are always useful, even if you just want to play cards.

Bring a box of garbage bags - it makes it so much easier to pack out, and to double bag garbage if you need to avoid the smell.

One can of butane fuel lasts roughly about a day. Bring an extra two cans just in case.

Moths love citronella candles.

Occasionally you might hear ghosts in the middle of the night.

It's always more fun with good friends.

Leaving Quora

2017-08-14T09:31:31-07:00

Quora recently changed the site in some heinous ways. They removed the details from all questions, because they're trying to make sure that there's only one "canonical question" you can search for an answer to.

Unfortunately this destroys nuance - after all, there's only so much detail you can put into 250 characters.

So in response, I'm going to start migrating all of my question answers on Quora to my blog. It's going to take a while, but hey, more content for the blog.

The Paradox of Empathy

2017-08-11T22:50:12-07:00

The problem with empathy is that too much of it is bad, and too little of it is bad.

Too little empathy, and you're an uncaring sociopath who doesn't care about others' wellbeing.

Empathy is great when it comes to doing nice things for nice people when everything's going well. That's the easy scenario.

Too much empathy when you're dealing with people acting poorly, however, and you care so much about others' wellbeing that you only examine the problem in a shallow fashion, and will avoid doing what appear at first to be "mean" things that are better for the other person in the long-term, to avoid causing short-term pain.

In many ways, too much empathy is selfish.

Because you're not really being nice. You're avoiding causing yourself pain just as much as you're avoiding causing the other person pain. There's very little altruism involved here.

In addiction counseling, for example, you're not in the role of helper if you're doing this - you're in the role of enabler.

That's a hard lesson to learn. Especially if you consider yourself to be a good, noble and empathic person. You need to examine the long-term consequences, not just the short-term ones.