Yeah, that's what's mapped in my head to "sanitizing input" in these cases, as it's the correct way to handle them. I should've unrolled my brain shortcut for the discussion.
In a book release event for Stefan Fatsis's book on tournament Scrabble players, Word Freak, the host posed the "megachiropteran" anagram as a trivia question for a book giveaway.
One of the top players in my club _instantly_ replied "cinematographer," and added, "but megachiropteran isn't in the OSPD [Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary], so it doesn't really count."
Why do scrabble players care about words that long? Beyond fun trivia.
What's the longest word ever played in an actual game of Scrabble? And though this is hard to get data for, what's the longest word that ever could have been played but missed?
Either just by having developed their brains in a way that word facts just stick, or by constantly seeking out new word facts because that's what they love doing.
I believe that the gentleman in this case instantly saw the word 'cinematographer' hiding in 'megachiropteran' because his brain is a highly trained anagramming machine, and knew that it wasn't allowed because he knew all of the allowed 15-letter words, just in case he might get the opportunity to play one.
High-level players memorize staggering numbers of words. All 2- and 3- letter words is entry-level. All X-J-Q-Z, all Q-without-U, all words you ending in -MAN, all 70+ 7-letter words of the form SATINE+... top-level players know the 4000 4-letter words, the 5000 5's, and way, way more.
Had to start researching this when a family member was recently diagnosed.
Parkinson's has many forms and many causes.
There's a big divide between Parkinson's _disease_ (idiopathic Parkinson's) and Parkinsonism from a variety of sources - stroke, drug-induced, and so on.
There are also other conditions, like progressive supranuclear palsy, that are considered either to masquerade as Parkinsonism or to constitute another cause of Parkinsonism.
Recommended treatments differ by the root cause of the symptoms. Some of the treatments that are recommended for one form may be contraindicated for other forms, or for different stages. For example, the recommended dopamine agonists are also the primary cause of Parkinson's hallucinations, so you have to trade back some strength and mobility if those start.
Something like 80% of Parkinsonism derives from idiopathic Parkinson's Disease.
Overall, it feels like we're really just getting started on these conditions. For decades, it's been thought to be primarily a motor disorder, but it turns out that there are scads of cognitive symptoms that develop years earlier than motor symptoms.
A lot of my family were farmers. I've had close relatives die with severe Parkinsons, primarily those that farmed their whole life. Their theory was that it was really exposure to a lot of toxic farm chemicals. I can imagine Parkinsons turning out to be several different conditions with similar symptoms.
My grandmother had 10 siblings. They grew up farming and they picked cotton every summer. Of the 11 siblings, I believe 8 of them have parkinsons. They have long thought exposure to whatever pesticides were used on the cotton may have caused the parkinson's late in life. I believe the siblings that don't have parkinsons were those that for whatever reason, had much less exposure to the cotton. Both parents lived pretty long and neither had the disease. There are two sets of twins, one identical, one fraternal. I'm not sure which of those have it. I've long thought that a case study could be made just about that family of 13.
The carnivore doesn't sound so idiotic viewed under that lens. The thing about mammals is that they have liver and kidneys, which are remarkably good at filtering toxins. Certainly much better than a plant.
I wonder if the reason many feel better eating only meat is that they avoid pesticides that wreck havoc on their body. I know I do feel like a million bucks after just 10 days, even though it's extremely boring.
On the flip side is bioaccumulation, in which contaminants and toxins are concentrated in organic material, particularly animals, and most especially for predators-of-predators.
The reasons for high mercury levels in tuna, shark, and swordfish is that each of these is both a predator and often eats other predatory species. There are numerous other examples of both species and contaminants, including even natural and even vital substances, e.g., vitamin A toxicity in carnivorous livers.
That's a good point, though we (humans) tend to eat only herbivores and not many carnivores/predators, probably because of that reason. I can't think of any actually, apart from fish.
The reason has far more to do with metabolic efficiency of conversion of biomass into food than with bioaccumulation --- you'll see roughly a 10-fold drop in food production at each trophic level. There are exceptions amongst hunter and trapper cultures, though even there herbivores are generally more abundant than carnivores, and are less treacherous to hunt. You will find ominvores occasionally included in diets: bear, racoon, and members of the rodent family on occasion.
Fish (amongst other sea life) are an exception specifically because humans aren't concerned with that efficiency, and carnivorous fish tend to grow larger which poses efficiency benefits when line- or net-fishing.
Another class is birds, notably fish-eating species, which may be 2nd- or 3rd-order carnivores (carnivores of carnivores, or carnivores of carnivore-eating carnivores).
Roundup/Glyphosate is such a nasty chemical. Farmers use it in practice regularly for crop desiccation [1] in order to yield more harvest cycles. Why do we still allow it knowing what we know?
There are actually a number of different pesticides that are linked to parkinson's. It's especially strong for farmers who get a much larger dose than the people consuming the food - simply type "parkinson's farmer pesticide" into google scholar. One example is Paraquat, which is already banned in numerous countries but not US [1]. Aside from this Parkinson's link being established in farmers who use Paraquat, it's found it rats too.
No, none are "confirmed causes". There are mild associations between the use of certain pesticides and Parkinson's, but much lower than the overall genetic risk factors, and there's always the possibility of confounding factors in the studies.
What's your source, if you don't mind me asking? I ask because some pesticides are well established to be linked to increased risk of parkinson's. Including carbamates (3.5x), organophosphorus (2x) and organoclorine (2x).
Maybe. The correlation is weak. If you're looking for a stronger correlation, try obesity.
People who are very overweight or obese in middle age (35-55) are significantly more likely to develop Parkinson's after 60, even if they lose the weight prior to diagnosis. Now this could be a pure lifestyle-correlation, but my spidey sense suggests it's causative, knowing how causative obesity is for SO MANY other degenerative and chronic diseases.
The best advice you can give anyone, at any time, for the prevention of nearly every poor health outcome we have a name for is and always will be: don't get fat; if you're fat, stop being fat.
My father, an agricultural engineer who worked with herbicides and pesticides for some 30 years, passed away a few days ago from advanced Parkinson's at the age of 82. Now he wasn't exactly in his teens anymore but his 87 years old brother who was a teacher is in fairly good shape for his age while my father became a ghost of a man (in end stage you cannot even swallow anymore).
Once it asked for my phone number and then tried to verify the fake one I put in I bailed. I'm patient but not gonna share my personal info with absolutely no context about why.
Then don't take a salary. Nobody is forcing you to work for a nice salary. If you want to be paid by the hour so that every hour is accounted for then go for it.
Of course, in practice that is not a possibility for most people. You can't just choose to work hourly if nobody is willing to hire you on these terms. Without regulation the balance of power is strongly in the hands of capital and inevitably leads to employers working employees to death. We have plenty of examples of this in our past.
You can go work at McDonalds right now for $20/hr where I live. You can structure your work as a consultant and bill hourly. No you can't walk into a company that is looking for a salaried employee and tell them you're going to work hourly (I mean you can try, it might work). But you have plenty of options and there's plenty of work out there.
I don’t think they were complaining about being paid per hour or not, just the expectation in many salaried jobs you work arbitrarily long hours in a competition with the nerd next to you for how much you can sacrifice for your employer.
I later in my career learned you can actually invert it by just being really effective in a shorter number of hours and work 6 hours a day and just leave the nerd next to you to expire from burnout. But it helps being later in my career and knowing how to be more effective in a shorter time.
The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since.
It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.
And, for all the talk of timelessness, the list was already quite reactionary in 1922. Vaguely Amish, in some sense, tbh.
I do really like the pedagogical approach. I just wish that approach to learning and teaching could move on from a very particular cultural moment in pre-war Britain/America. All those crusty Oxbridge guys who had Strong Feelings about reading tons of Euclid were reacting to their own cultural moments and have now been dead for half a century :)
