🕹️ Unavowed was an unexpected surprise: beautiful 16-bit graphics, engaging, mature story, and just the right amount of 4th wall breaking. If only the puzzles were a bit tougher.
February 6, 2023
🍿 The Pale Blue Eye was big on feels, short on plot. For a murder mystery, that is a death sentence. I do want to see more of Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe but please, Netflix, let’s not turn this into another franchise.
February 5, 2023
One of the reasons why 24-hour time is better than the am/pm shenanigans the English-speaking world insists on is that it would avoid this type of embarrassment: a haiku competition submission form closing at noon when it was clearly meant to close at midnight.
The allure to report anything as a medical breakthrough is strong. So strong that even the Financial Times can’t avoid it:
New diagnostic technology that uses fibre optics to find the causes of heart disease has begun[Note:
Emphasis mine.
] clinical testing at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
The iKOr device, developed at Barts Health and University College London, measures blood flow around the heart. Researchers say it could eventually help many thousands of patients suffering from cardiovascular symptoms such as chest pains, whose cause cannot be identified with current techniques.
“This new device is a game-changer in how we manage heart disease, making it a lot easier to assess the health of a person’s heart,” said Anthony Mathur, clinical director for interventional cardiology at Barts.
Three patients have undergone testing to date, out of 10 planned in the first phase. Another 100 may, subject to regulatory approval, before the device could potentially become commercially available, if it’s demonstrated to work. There is, it goes without saying, no clinical data published to date.
How does this change the game, exactly, when we don’t yet know if it works? The use of undeserved superlatives in cancer drug reporting is well documented so it’s not a surprise to see cardiology, that other lucrative medical subspecialty, being much the same.
What is a surprise is seeing the usually reliable FT falling down to the level of The New York Times in spreding medical jingoism. How interesting that in both cases it was a local hospital — Memorial Sloan Kettering for NYT, St Bart’s for FT — serving as the source. So interesting that I have to think there were some personal behind-the-scenes goings on.
NIH has always made most of its lectures available to public. With the pandemic, the production values have gotten better, and more people have gotten used to viewing lectures online. Here are a few interesting ones scheduled for this month. Some of them are part of NIH’s Demystifying Medicine series which is open to public and tries to target the curious layperson
[Note:
Alas, not always successfully.
] to the best of presenters’ abilities.
Fact Stranger than Fiction: Adventures in the Genomics of Inflammation
At the very start of the textbook Fundamentals of Clinical Trials the authors make a distinction between clinical trials — comparing two or more different interventions — and clinical studies, which merely describe an intervention without comparing it to anything. So, there can be no such thing as a “Phase 1 trial”, since they typically involve a single drug at different doses and schedules. The only true trials, according to the authors, would fall under Phase 3, or Phase 2b at the earliest.
This is stupid, misleading, and not at all how the words “trial” and “study” are used by anyone else, including the biggest and most important drug regulatory agency in the world. There are many such pointless exercises of professorial power in medicine, including my favorite: whether the correct pronunciation of “+” in “7+3” is “plus” or “and”. They amount to nothing more than purity tests that award the wielders of the right language a false sense of precision. As Nassim Taleb wrote, nitpicking is the enemy of thought.
The rest of the book is good enough, but more on that later.
Yes, yes, America has terrible health care — even a tech podcast says so — while paying an order of magnitude more for it than other rich countries. But hear me out: what if the costs are so high because Americans are (unsuccessfully) trying to buy their way out of poor policy decisions, from dependence on cars, to the early 2000s’ promotion of opioids, to the widespread availability of cheap but nutrient-less calories, and no amount of fiddling with who pays for what in healthcare will be able to fix that?
Which is to say: it’s fine to look at specific costs and specific outcomes — I have done so myself — but what exactly is the action item after reading a report like The Commonwealth Fund’s cited by Ars Technica?
After a few months of intermittently kicking the tires on Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I’ve finally had the time to port over a few feeds from my preferred RSS reader. The wonderful thing about FeedLand is that you can easily follow my feed categories and read posts without having an account (which is fortunate, since new signups on Winer’s own server are on hold). The full list of feeds is here. There is even a feed of posts I liked! It’s feeds all the way down.
The Science category has your usual suspects but I had to dig deep for Medicine since many of the blogs I follow haven’t been updated in years and others have turned into HuffPost-level text mills. Fortunately, Substack enabled a resurgence of medical writing, with feeds enabled by default.
Did I mention NetNewsWire is a free, open source RSS reader available on MacOS and iOS, and can sync via iCloud? For the anti-Apple readers, Feedly is there, I guess?
The National Cancer Advisory Board is as big of a deal as it sounds, but have a look at their Charter — Description of Duties in particular — and try not to yawn. I suspect whoever wrote this also writes grant application instructions. May this in part be why science is bogged down?
In any case, the Board meetings are open to public. The next one is on February 9, 2023 at 1:15pm EST and can be viewed at videocast.nih.gov. That website is itself a trove of excellent recordings unrelated to federal body deliberations: just last week there was a lecture on bacterial immune systems, here is my old boss talking about interleukin-15, and hey what’s this?
