vital functions

[kaberett]

(Oh hey, I never did catch up with last week's.)

Reading. In extremely piecemeal fashion: Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks. I wound up getting confused by the in-app info about when it was due (I hate "Due in 1 day" so much) so did not actually manage to finish it. (The hold queue for a digital copy is estimated at 10 weeks. There's a paperback in one of the smaller library branches. It is possible I will be going on an adventure.)

I think I've convinced myself that the writing feels disjointed and difficult to follow because, in fact, it is. Evidence in favour: many, many footnotes, a significant proportion of which are so tangential to the sentence they're appended to that I have to flick back and forth between main text and footnote multiple times before I manage to hold how they're related to each other in my head for long enough to finish reading them without losing context. Some of it is definitely my ability to follow a thought, but really: astonishingly tenuous connections.

Obviously I'm intending to finish it, because there's a bunch of interesting stuff in there, even as I recall Katherine Foxhall's criticism of his presentation of the history of migraine.

Also had a lot of feelings about The Atlantic's recent write-up on Trikafta, which had totally passed me by otherwise. It's a cystic fibrosis treatment that for something like 90% of CF patients halts disease progression. People who are able to start the therapy in childhood, and to continue taking it, have projected expected lifespans of ~82 years.

Writing. Further progress on Explaining Admin: the LRP in wiki markup.

Watching. The 2024 Migraine World Summit. So far nothing that makes me go !!! the way that last year's managed, but this is going to be at least partly that I... know a lot more about migraine than I did last year, having For Reasons wound up reading quite a chunk of the primary literature. Some useful but fairly pedestrian info about gepants; the interview on migraine biochemistry has been the thing I've found most interesting so far. I was frustrated by today's talk on trauma and migraine, where the migraine was very much an afterthought and I prefer Perry's model of trauma to the one the speaker was using (which originated, I think, with Maté). Absolute lowlight thus far unquestionably "the blood-brain barrier is broken in the nose".

Playing. More Filament! I solved a bit of a problem that A was finding completely non-tractable, about which I am very smug, even though he then proceeded to put the rest of that level together.

Also smug about today's Redactle, which I got in one without even looking anything up. (Modally, plenty of other people are in that bucket with me.)

Flight Rising: FINALLY got an Ethereal Trickster from the Coli, and also managed to shake loose a Silkmith.

Cooking. Experimental sourdough waffles! Definitely Interesting, definitely worth making again, definitely sufficiently different to our default waffle recipe (A's modifications to smitten kitchen's) that direct comparison doesn't really make sense. Half-quantity was about right for us for brunch; used all plain flour this time but deeeeeefinitely plotting to have another go with 20% buckwheat flour.

Growing. Have moved the peppers and aubergines out of the propagator. Have not managed to get tomatoes started. Did do some Proper Weeding at the plot!

Observing. No bat yet...

Comments

[ewt]

It's a cystic fibrosis treatment that for something like 90% of CF patients halts disease progression. People who are able to start the therapy in childhood, and to continue taking it, have projected expected lifespans of ~82 years.

Wow! This is such excellent news.

[rydra_wong]

Also had a lot of feelings about The Atlantic's recent write-up on Trikafta, which had totally passed me by otherwise. It's a cystic fibrosis treatment that for something like 90% of CF patients halts disease progression. People who are able to start the therapy in childhood, and to continue taking it, have projected expected lifespans of ~82 years.

Oh. Oh WOW.

[simont]

I've not done many Redactle before, and so clicking your link this time was the first time I'd encountered the phenomenon where redacting an italicised word generates a parallelogram instead of a rectangle. That's weirdly cute :-)