phobosanomaly (u/phobosanomaly)

phobosanomaly commented on She Ate Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away motherjones.com/criminal-... · Posted by u/stareatgoats

garciasn · 2 years ago

My daughter was born with some serious issues landing her in the NICU for nearly a week two or three days after she was born. Soon after, I was pulled into a small room with a social worker, several healthcare providers (nurses and doctors) and a police officer. I was peppered with questions about what drugs my then-wife had been taking during her pregnancy. I was honestly aghast; this was a woman who spent both pregnancies puking into garbage bags she carried with her everywhere because she refused to take the anti-nausea medication she was prescribed to keep things down and other than the epidural, she refused to take even OTC painkillers or drinking caffeine of any sort (decaf or not) during her pregnancy for fear of repercussions to the babies down the line. This was on top of her STRONG aversion to even cannabis and only occasional wine drinking in what most would consider only a slight step above teetotaling.

While I can completely and utterly understand the medical profession's careful monitoring of a situation, particularly when it comes to negative birthing outcomes in the US, the first response should not be the vilification of parents until they are 1099% sure they have evidence that supports such action.

But, then again, when we had our first kiddo and she received an incorrectly inserted epidural there wasn't even a single apology from anyone, let alone the anesthesiologist who let the epidural leak into her skin, eventually puffing up the skin to a noticeable bubble, rather than where it was supposed to be, leaving her in excruciating pain to the point where I had to scream at the nurse's station for 45 straight minutes until someone would listen instead of just telling me she was fine and we were overreacting. Or the doctor who was stitching her up afterward, lacking any and all bedside manner, by saying he should have taken a before and after photo of her vagina, in front of me and my wife, because he had done such a great job.

When it came to our stay in the NICU: we were asleep in a room on another floor, our first in 40+ hours, they performed surgery on our daughter w/o asking our permission or informing us first because they attempted to call the room we were in but we didn't answer--only later to find out that the room's phone had been removed and wasn't there. No one thought to come to the room or even call the nurses' station literally next to the room to have them ask/inform us of the surgery first.

But, sure, go ahead and add on immense stress in one of the most stressful situations of our lives through false accusations while protecting your doctors to the nth degree.

phobosanomaly · 2 years ago

I recently worked as a physician in a Labor and Delivery unit at a county hospital where there is an extremely high rate of methamphetamine and fentanyl use among patients, I would like to provide a counter-point that I have never heard of anything like this happening. Even in patients who are admitted actively withdrawing from fentanyl we go out of our way to treat them with dignity and respect. Social work will be consulted following delivery, but I have never seen police get involved, and there will never be physicians and nurses present during CPS' discussion with parents.

Again, just from what I have seen at county where substance use is a pretty banal, common occurrence and CPS often placed children in foster care straight from the newborn nursery.

I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience. Maybe it was at a hospital that doesn't deal with substance use issues much?

phobosanomaly commented on Covid drug drives viral mutations – and now some want to halt its use nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ssl232 · 3 years ago

Can you explain the mechanism by which vaccines injected into muscle tissue impart mucosal immunity? The humeral immunity these vaccines impart doesn't stop the virus replicating in the nose and throat where it can spread to others via respiration. Mucose is not connected to the blood stream where the antibodies from the vaccine are.

phobosanomaly · 3 years ago

Mucosa has vascular supply.

Naumova EA, Dierkes T, Sprang J, Arnold WH. The oral mucosal surface and blood vessels. Head Face Med. 2013 Mar 12;9:8. doi: 10.1186/1746-160X-9-8. PMID: 23497446; PMCID: PMC3639856.

It also has antibodies (humoral immune response).

Immunoglobulin A (IgA) is the most abundant antibody isotype in the mucosal immune system.

Li Y, Jin L, Chen T. The Effects of Secretory IgA in the Mucosal Immune System. Biomed Res Int. 2020 Jan 3;2020:2032057. doi: 10.1155/2020/2032057. PMID: 31998782; PMCID: PMC6970489.

And the vaccine triggers the development of those antibodies.

We evaluated the serum anti-spike (anti-S) IgG, anti-nucleocapsid (anti-N) IgG and anti-S IgA response following vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in a cohort of first-responders. Among the 378 completely vaccinated participants, 98% were positive for anti-S IgG and 96% were positive for anti-S IgA.

Montague, B.T., Wipperman, M.F., Chio, E. et al. Elevated serum IgA following vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in a cohort of high-risk first responders. Sci Rep 12, 14932 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19095-7

phobosanomaly commented on Ask HN: How can I break into retro computers? · Posted by u/agomez314

phobosanomaly · 4 years ago

If you don't have a strong electronics background, the XGameStation [1] with it's accompanying textbook The Black Art of Game Console Design [2] involves soldering up a primitive game console with a bunch of example game source code to go with it. The book starts with basic electronics theory and gets into some pretty bare-metal discussions regarding stuff like NTSC and VGA video output programming.

[1] http://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/xgamestatio...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Black-Video-Game-Console-Design/dp/06...

phobosanomaly commented on Western Media Aren’t Telling You the Truth About Iran wsj.com/articles/western-... · Posted by u/lovestays4ever

lovestays4ever · 4 years ago

I think this quote refers specifically to one of the Iranian/American journalists who posted just one tweet about snow in Tehran during the nationwide protests in November 2019 (aka "bloody November").

In any case, reports about Iran are a little different from the Kardashian discussion. The goal of reports about Iran is not to gain viewers, but to convey a false (good) image of Iran. At least that's what many Iranians believe. Check out #NYTimesPropaganda on Twitter or this [0].

[0] https://medium.com/@iranfactrecords/open-letter-to-the-new-y...

phobosanomaly · 4 years ago

This group has put so much effort into the open letter, but it's probably not receiving particularly widespread circulation.

Perhaps it would be more effective if this group gathered the detailed knowledge of all the people who signed the letter and published a really detailed book on the current political, social, and economic state of Iran with all the juicy details that they have insider knowledge of included? Surely it would be a richer source of information than the trickle of articles from the single journalist they're upset with.

If it provided deep insights into the nature of the regime, and wasn't just a screed about how the government is awful, this hypothetical book could have a significant political and cultural impact outside of Iran.

phobosanomaly commented on As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit' npr.org/2021/06/24/100791... · Posted by u/pseudolus

HarryHirsch · 5 years ago

That's baffling, haven't people got friends?

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

Apparently not.

As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.

In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-...

I'm excited to go back to work in-person. Working with my colleagues gives me a great deal of joy throughout the day.

phobosanomaly commented on The Sad End of Jack Ma Inc forbes.com/sites/georgeca... · Posted by u/wwilson

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

Isn't this just basic antitrust regulation? I don't like to use the word 'propaganda' unless it's tongue-in-cheek, but ... "Ma’s assets have been stripped, shorn, and degraded" ... come on, give me a break.

phobosanomaly commented on Trying to study textbooks effectively: a year of experimentation lesswrong.com/posts/79dP9... · Posted by u/youcould

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

I've tried breaking textbooks down into Anki cards, and it takes forever and afterwards I'm left feeling underwhelmed. But, if you're going to do it, I've found that my favorite method of review is TTS on the Anki app with swipe gestures, and I just go for loooong walks while grinding my flash cards, just holding the phone at my side and swiping with my thumb '1' or '3'.

One thing I tried that I liked was reading the entire textbook out-loud into a set of bluetooth headphones chapter-by-chapter. I then process the raw audio file using Audacity's 'truncate silence' tool, as well as increasing the tempo of the audio file by 1.5-2x speed. I read it mechanically, straight-through as quickly as I possibly can on the first run. Then I make 1-2 passes back through the entire book using the audio file of my own recorded voice sped up in order to pace myself.

That way I go through the entire book like 3 times. Once slow, twice fast. I might do my second or third pass months or years later. Doing it mechanically means that I can grind through nonfiction technical books that are hundreds of pages long pretty quickly, and I know exactly how long my reviews will take, since it's the length of my audio file. The largest book I've pulled it off with was 900 pages. It was a sufferfest, but if you smoke a little pot while you're doing it, you can get into a nice rhythm and it's kind of fun.

I don't remember every single detail of the book using this method, but I've found cranking through them relentlessly with some time in-between to be very, very effective from a practical perspective. It scratches the 'done is better than perfect' itch, and when I need a specific detail I know exactly where to look.

phobosanomaly commented on “AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing” statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/macleginn

Workaccount2 · 5 years ago

What gets me about doctors, and maybe I'm just unlucky/haven't seen enough doctors, is that I never get that "expert" vibe from them.

You know when you're talking to someone who does, say, database management. And they have been at it for 15 years, have a bunch accreditation and are well compensated for their work. You just get the impression that you can pull the most esoteric question about databases out, and they'll go on for 45 minutes about all the nuances of it. No matter how hard you try, you with a mild database understanding, would never be able to pin them.

I just have never gotten that vibe from a doctor. I always felt like I was only a question or two away from them shrugging, me googling, and me finding the answer.

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the database guy actually implements things in an environment that can be manipulated at will.

Doctors don't implement things in an environment that they control. Patients come to them with a chief complaint, and the doctor tries to resolve or manage it to the best of their ability with a minimal intervention according to a set of guidelines someone else wrote down.

A doctor can't sit there and play with the diagnostic/treatment process in the same way a database guy can go play with the database software. At best the doctor can sit there with a textbook or medical journal and try to memorize more facts, or take notes, but it's not the same as pulling apart code, running it in different ways, and seeing how it behaves.

Medical school is a continuous process of memorizing shit off of flash cards culled from a textbook. You don't actually build anything, or implement anything, or do anything in a real-world sense that would make you an expert in the same way as someone who was working with a system that they were able to take apart and play with and manipulate. There's no real way to develop the kind of deep knowledge you're talking about in that environment.

A diesel mechanic can pull apart and engine. Hold every part in their hand. Drive a diesel-engine vehicle. Observe all the things that go wrong. Simulate, and innovate. An individual doctor can't really do any of that. Medical schools are even axing dissections, so med students are lucky if they get to see what the hell peritoneum actually looks like.

phobosanomaly commented on “AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing” statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/macleginn

deeviant · 5 years ago

It's not about the patient reviewing their own data as much as it is about the patient having easy access to their data and can easily share that data with other consumers of it (i.e. some AI based interpretation service)

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

'Easy access' is scary for hospitals because it means increased possibility of HIPAA violations.

phobosanomaly commented on Remove left turns for less dangerous city traffic theconversation.com/sick-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

Lammy · 5 years ago

Yeah, and anybody who can't afford to buy a home in the city should just stop coming here. Maybe they should all have to leave by sundown too :)

phobosanomaly · 5 years ago

They can have multiple free-of-charge parking garages on the outskirts that are associated with a light rail system.

So you park, hop on the metro, and head into the city without having to worry about the nightmare of parking or the stop-and-go traffic.

I never, ever drive into LA. I use the free parking at an outlying metro station and ride the train in (20 min). You can even leave your vehicle overnight so you can go out for drinks and crash at a friends place (even if you don't train runs until 2am). It's a night-and-day improvement on having to sit in traffic on the freeway, spend 40 minutes finding street parking, worry if someone is going to steal your catalytic converter, etc.

An added benefit is that I go into the city much more often than I otherwise would because I know that the whole process is pretty stress-free.