pknight

is this working with a local session on the user's device? How does it handle authentication with sites?

Very interesting, thank you for answering!

I've come across plenty of evidence in the literature but there are lot of variables that can prevent any positive effects from taking place. If you're taking probiotic supplements in isolation and the rest of your diet is suboptimal in terms of bacteria-friendly nutrients, it's unlikely that you'll get results. It could be the case that many people are throwing money away if they're taking probiotic supplements without addressing their diet and lifestyle.

There's so much variety between people, one formulation for one person might work well for one person but have negative effects on another even if they have a supportive diet and lifestyle. People might simply have to trial multiple formulas that have the right mix of strains before they find one that works for them.

Prebiotic foods seem to have more consistent results on gut health, according to some studies.

(not medical/health advice disclaimer)

Weird question perhaps, some research suggests that bacteria source nutrients from the cell lining in the gut if there is an absence of sufficient nutrients from the food coming into the digestive system. (example: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31464-7)

That made me wonder what the triggers might be, since the studies see the corroding effect appear in diets deficient in polyphenols/insoluble fibres. At what interval do microbes need nutrients and is simply eating a highly-processed snack that has nothing much to offer bacteria in the gut a possible trigger in itself?

What was your diet like when you were taking them? It's been observed in some studies that delivered mixed results that responders had better diets (i.e. more bacteria friendly components in the diet such as indigestible carbs from vegetables/legumes/fruit etc) whereas non-responders had weaker diets in terms of providing the gut microbes nutrients.

The “mother of all short squeezes” theory has been debunked over and over again

Could you post a link to a good piece that debunks?

Alcohol consumption was pretty common in the NBA, with some even drinking during halftime. Some of the biggest stars of the league in the past decades drank a lot of alcohol, though much less now with more stringent policies in place. There are players that led the league in scoring despite drinking well into the night all the time. Lebron James is a famous wine drinker. He drinks every day and his longetivity and conditioning is unmatched, but he may be from a different planet.

These were some random facts from an NBA fan who doesn't drink.

I agree, if you had to get a team together with the sole purpose of crushing people's spirit and grinding people down with opinions while appearing to be somewhat wellmeaning, the guardian would be a stellar example of that.

Compassion/self love is what made me change my lifestyle and overcome excuses. If you have compassion for the work that your organs are doing, you are going to be more motivated to do the things that keep those organs healthy, while doing less of the things that damage them. One day I heard someone talking about how the heart has to work harder pumping blood around if you sit all day. I couldn't shake the thought, so eventually I started moving more and adopted a cold shower routine despite hating the cold. I started giving a shit about my cardiovascular health as a result of compassion. I didn't have to crack the whip either, making lifestyle adjustments just felt like the right thing to do.

Compassion is not about making people feel better for not taking care of their situation/body/work/goals/life/relationships, it's about acting with a level of care for the things that matter most.

In the UK over 300 hundred thousand adverse events have been reported to the yellow card system, with over a 1000 deaths. I've heard that VAERS underreports because medical professionals don't have the time to make the submissions (I don't really know if that's true or not). It's impossible to confirm what the precise risks are and whether those reporting systems are over- or understating the real picture, but it's irresponsible, I think, to handwave about risks to someone who clearly had a bad response.

I know someone who had both the myocarditis as well as a severe allergic reaction, which could have been fatal if she hadn't received benadryl in time. After that, she was advised by her doctor to not get the 2nd shot. But because the social pressure being placed on people is so high, she is still minded to get the 2nd shot even when her own doctor advises against it. I don't think medical decisions should be swayed by peer pressure from people on the internet, or an employer.

I don't understand why this batch of vaccines is being compared to vaccines for other diseases as if they are the same thing. Other vaccines are generally mandated for children with extremely high efficacy, have an extremely low chance of adverse events, prevent community spread perfectly or almost perfectly, have an exactly known quantity of doses required and are deployed as prevention (not in the midst of a pandemic). Importantly, they treat diseases that cause extremely bad outcomes in children at very high rates. This current generation of covid vaccines is more like a drug that works well for some and not so for others, doesn't prevent transmission, aims at moving target, requires an unknown amount of doses, only modestly discourages continued spread and represents one of many ways for society to treat, tackle and prevent the disease. This is a disease that is trending downwards in its mortality rate, while being of fairly low risk for the majority of the population, with the lowest risk found for young people. The diseases we mandate children to get vaccinated for are not declining in their disastrous health effects as far as I know. The risk of adverse events from the current set of covid vaccines is lowish but not particularly low. All that doesn't make the vaccines we have for covid any less important, but the comparison really does not wash and is a highly dubious way of engaging around the topic of body sovereignty.

There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.

Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.

Am I an odd case? Nowadays all my side-project code is to scratch an itch, fix a problem or create a solution I want to use that doesn't exist yet. I'm not motivated by the tech itself and the money is not a primary driver either.

The data on Time Restricting Eating shows that you most probably will experience benefits even with a feeding window as wide as 12 hrs. I do 10hrs and it's been very good for me.

Forcing content out off mainstream media quite plainly does limit the spread of information and does limit radicalisation, we have plenty of examples of that. Conartists rack up millions of views because they can use free infrastructure of companies (companies that in turn convert human attention into profit via advertising, the sale of user data etc.). Without access to the infrastructure they can't have their business flourish as it does.

The link with Brexit and T you make doesn't make sense either, both of these phenomenon got plenty public exposure, with all information available to those who wanted to find it. The central theme tieing both those developments was the ability for people to use the architecture built by digital corporations to quickly spread misinformation unopposed. People receive the information in isolation, they don't get it side-by-side with other views. People engineering the spread of misinformation know it's not a fair contest, that's why it is so effective.

And that's the point being missed by people who say keep the content up and let bad ideas be exposed by better arguments, the problem is that the ideas aren't being opposed or presented in a robust way. Hosts like Brian Rose and others for instance interview in a way that don't challenge their controversial guests, instead they add credibility to their guests. And because we are thinking of these characters as individuals expressing themselves and exchanging their personal views, people are distracted from the fact that they are businesses operating a money making scheme. And they are only able to do that on this scale because they can use other corporate infrastructure for free.

The BBC ran a piece designed to explain why the Govt policy was kosher and the logic behind it, it said there were no scientists in disagreement. Then it corrected the article to say no epidemiologists rather were in disagreement, which is ostensibly false as well. Now it says that at the time of publication no UK epidemiologists had spoken out in mainstream media. They basically admit they didn't do any due diligence when they wrote the piece (they were in a rush to give the Govt cover).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51874084

and here was the first published version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200313155320/https://www.bbc.c...

An interesting read, but the article comes across as an unhinged attack piece brimming with silliness. Better to get a take from a proper scientist with more balanced views.

Point number one of his list of 'egregious' errors is the idea that shorter sleep does not imply shorter life span, but all of the recently published meta-analyses make that connection convincingly (for the population sleeping <6 hrs). Anyone can look up these studies. And Walker does not advise people to sleep 9+ hrs (which is also thought to be a risk group on a population level). The author of the piece from the outset is quite evidently arguing in bad faith.

There is criticism to be had on Walker, he overstimulates his readers with fear-inducing statements which can definitely backfire.

Have you tried Time Restricted Eating(TRE) and limiting food intake to daylight hours? Did you notice any changes from that?

As someone who was fortunate to fix a self-created sleeping disorder where I managed to completely f up my circadian rhythms, I wish I had known about TRE years ago. As far as I know it's not (yet) part of the usual list of sleep hygiene/CBT advice, but for me at least it's been the most comprehensive change I've made to my lifestyle that has benefited my rhythms and sleep quality.

Thanks! And yes, with simplified sharing it would be ideal to only have the player with just the track targeted and nothing for the person receiving the link to guess. So if you send someone a sports highlight, or a specific sketch from a comedy show, or a specific exercise explained in a tutorial, they only need to press play and it would only play the track, not the whole video.

Your app definitely has a lot of utility.

Thanks! It took me a while to digest how that tagging workflow worked with the hotkeys, but now I get it. That does work! I think one of the things that tripped me up was the lack of visual feedback on the second press of a key.

Am I right in thinking that the hotkeys don't work while the video is paused?

I guess the other thing I'd love to see is a more dedicated 'share' mode so that you can create a link with a simplified screen that starts playing the track section of a video when the user presses play.

Love what this is trying to solve. If the UX could improve, it would be amazing. While watching it would be great to press a button to generate timestamps and to then compose tracks by selecting any two timestamps, with the ability to add tags to timestamps or tracks while the video is still playing or after. This way you could watch a video in one fluent sitting and work out how to organize with the timestamps you created while watching.

One usecase is the ability to link to a comedy sketch from a longer clip and send it to a friend with the link just playing between timestamp a and timestamp b.

Not an expert, and I don't think this is a factor at all, but the cold showers are in part meant to help you tap into a natural ability to stay warm (without shivering), so you're not get an appreciable dip in core body temperature in the first place if you do it right.

I believe it is thought that long term Tau accumulation in the brain is what worsens or accelerates alzheimers in patients, but a healthy person is clearing Tau build-up all the time, primarily during sleep. Any behaviour that improves sleep quality is therefore likely to be a boost in preventing and decelerating the development of alzheimers and cold showers promote good sleep and help keep our circadian rhythms aligned in a way that encourages good quality sleep.

One of the reasons why a hot bath before bed is good for sleep is because it decreases body temperature.

You've put unnecessary tension between the collective/society and individuality and individual achievement as if they are at odds here. Lucas didn't need the whole of the collective to believe in his vision from the start, he just needed some measure of support in his life coming from another person or people. This is especially true for someone making films, as that involves hundreds of people combining their individual talents to a project. (ps he's donated 6 Billion into helping people get good education, a support system for people to help get success)

Superstar athletes get to shine with their superior talents only because they had some measure of support in their life to encourage their career and open up the possibilities. This is especially true for countless NBA athletes, many of them having come from poor backgrounds. You won't find a single NBA star who doesn't acknowledge that their success was made possible through the sacrifices of others in their life. Their childhood peers who kept them away from gangs, a parent who drove them to games, a mentor who kept reinforcing their belief in their talent. Not to mention the infrastructure that was laid before them by the pioneers before they were even born.

If you have eaten a good meal and you have some fat reserves you can spend a long time without having to ingest food (barring some minerals that you need every day), but that doesn't mean your body has become independent of its need for nutrition. You can do things that make it so you can last longer without food, but ultimately, the idea of independence from nutrition is ostensibly silly. Distorted views of self-reliance, in this analogy, is like believing that you can go without nutrition because you've become strong enough to do it.

There is an enormous pile of scientific evidence indicating this directly and indirectly. For direct examples you can for example look at studies involving touch. A hug, for example, can lead to a multitude of beneficial physiological responses in part because you get a release of oxytocin, which itself is a sign that our physiology is wired for 'coregulation'. Touch receptors are one of the ways that our body picks up on these kinds of cues. For a broader theoretical basis for this idea that cues of support are pivotal to ongoing health and wellness in adults, there is a groundbreaking theory called Polyvagal Theory which is well worth looking into.

We also have a vast number of examples of negative evidence in the literature (because scientists tend to hunt for what makes things go wrong). For example it is very well established that social isolation leads to worse health outcomes. The basic principle at work is that humans require coregulation to maintain physical and mental health and it doesn't matter what phase of life you are in, those feedback systems are operational from start to finish. Because humans in particular are social creatures, we have physiology that is designed to pick up on social cues, because it is through group participation and social bonds that our species obtains better chances of reproduction and survival. If we have poor social bonds and lack of social support/connection, the body picks up on that. You will get feelings of loneliness for example, which in a way is hoping you to drive you back to seek out a social group to belong to, as it increases your chances of survival. That's your body saying it is reliant on others.

Social disconnect is also a influencing what our immune system and the profile of our autonomic nervous system functioning is up to. If the body does not get cues that is safe - and for mammals like us that means perceiving social connection and social support - it is going to favour stressful physiology which over time deteriorates our health. Note that giving support (rather than receiving it) is also a cue to our body that we are in a social group that is positively affecting our survival and reproductive chances. But, note that to get these cues you are still relying on others to get that positive feedback loop working for your physiology. There are a lot of studies showing this dynamic as well, doing community work and altruism boosts all kinds of markers of mental and physical health, giving a massage reduces stress and promotes oxytocin release in the giver as well etc.

The bottom line is that our physiology makes us coregulators, rather than self-regulators and that is such a key distinction that is frequently missed.

Those who are self-reliant and capable of independence are, all else equal, those who are most capable of helping others.

The people that in practice help the most are the most skilled and able coregulators. To become the strongest, or as I like to think of it, the most resourceful person, you don't get there by self-reliance, you get there by being an effective coregulator. To get close to maximum impact, strength and health you have to strong connections with others - you can't get there on your own, others are required because our physiology recruits the outside world as a means of regulating its own state.

And lastly, one of the perks of having a secure feeling about your social connections and sense of support, is that it opens up an ability to explore more freely and roam more widely. Many of the multi-million dollar making basketball stars in America who've come from poor backgrounds share the same story, while growing up they had at least one person and more commonly a whole group that supported their path to the NBA - it was their support that made their success possible. It's not uncommon to hear how their childhood peers kept them away from bad people because this person had a shot at something special. In just about every success story, whether it's a rags-to-riches scenario or the story of how a group of athletes largely from middle-upper class assembled one of the best teams in basketball history (GSW) you can trace back the critical role of enduring social support.

Those who grow in strength are able to do so by receiving the support of others. It's a causal relationship.

The myth is that we arrive at strength through overcoming the need for support, having grown our metaphorical muscles through force of will. Many have it as a goal, in fact. They think that the measure of strength is the ability to function without external help of some kind and to indulge in the fantasy that it is their unique individual application of their mindset that is the source of that strength.

This illusion is actually quite easy to penetrate by looking at our biology. Our body grows and heals to the degree it perceives it has external support. There's a built-in biological feedback system that requires these external inputs for our bodies to function to the peak of our abilities. At it most extreme it can be seen in babies. If they are deprived of touch and attention, their brain development stunts, they don't grow as healthy. It has a lasting effect through life. People think that reliance only is required at these more vulnerable phases of life, but not, say, as we become adults. But that's a fairy tale, our physiology continues to respond positively to cues of support, growing in strength when in receipt of support through all stages of life, On the other hand it declines in the face of lack of support. The effects are large and predictable, we are social creatures and our physiology is setup that way, we don't have a choice over it. The concept of self-reliance tries to tell a story that defies and in a sense denigrates our basic nature.

Rather than questing for self-reliance to indulge in the fantasy of independence, it is far more empowering, to me at least, to live in the knowledge that as individuals we have the ability to make others stronger.

I've been researching this a lot lately. I think the following list (in this order) is the best general advice for tackling/preventing chronic inflammation:

1) Invest more time in compassion/self-compassion

2) Cultivate better social connections (quality more important than quantity)

3) More regular exposure to green natural environments

4) Less junkfood

5) Spend time building up habits that help relax you, such a breathing exercise etc

6) Do work that is meaningful and makes a visible social contribution

7) Varied physical exercise

Chronic inflammation happens because the body feels it has to adopt a physiology that has a short term focus of dealing with threats vs a physiology that has a long term focus that promotes rest, growth and rejuvenation. The latter is only possible when the body feels safe and secure and that element is missing in many people's lives, many people's bodies are in the former mode most of the time. Most of the things in the list either promote parasympathetic states enabling the latter, or help build your ability to deal with stressful situations without promoting chronic inflammation.

One of the most interesting findings I've come across is that hedonic happiness does not help with inflammation, in fact, people who get most of their happiness through hedonic pursuits actually have genes that express themselves to help bring about inflammation. People that achieve happiness/satisfaction through meaningful endeavors have been shown to have gene expression that is not promoting inflammation. This suggests for example, that spending an afternoon volunteering beats having a fun night out at the cinema, as far as physiological benefits go. Steven Cole (expert in genomics) has some very interesting presentations on this.

You naturally inhale essential oils when you walk through a forest and some of those (i.e. phytoncides) have been studied and linked to a range of positive health benefits, by for instance boosting immune system function and reducing negative stress. Those health effects have been reproduced by adding wood essential oils in the air of indoor environments. Example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20074458

However, different essential oils may have adverse effects as well and it seems like this is definitely understudied. It wasn't until I started looking into essential oils that I realized that almost every type of commercially available essential oil is toxic to cats. I would exercise extreme caution when using diffusers and stick to the few essential oils that have been well studied and considered safe for humans & pets.

Patel's stated intentions imply the extension of all of the hostile environment measures. She wants to end freedom of movement instantly, even though it had been presumed to be effectively applied for an interim period even with no deal and no transition. She wants to explicitly kill the notion of a grace period, which had been presumed to apply before.

The reporting is light on details, because the 'how' has not been drawn up yet. What has been newly decided is to immediately kill freedom of movement in practice. And the UK does most of its border controls behind the border, by making landlords, banks, hospitals and doctors do checks. Even if what Patel means to implement is purely what border officials at airports do to check people's status as they come in (and I very much doubt this is all she intends), it reinforces the message to employers, health service providers, banks and landlords that EU nationals are a higher liability if they turn out not to have the required status. The Govt may very well even advise landlords for instance that they won't hold them to account with the usual criminal penalties for accidentally renting to a EU national without settled status or other valid migration status, many landlords will simply eschew EU nationals going forward because it's safer. Messaging like this underlines that a EU ID is no longer a sufficient signal that a person is in all likelihood a legal resident and that a tough line is meant to be taken against EU nationals.

Nobody should be pleased about applying in the first place, as it formalises a lesser status than people had previously.

And it may take 15 minutes if you have had continuous employment or have been drawing benefits with no gaps at all for five years AND they are able to verify that in an automated way. Hundreds of thousands will be spending much more time on their application. And although the overall process is pretty lenient and fairly well done, many people are going to have trouble with it.

If you fall under a less certain scenario, you may be reluctant to apply at all, because it doesn't guarantee you'll get approved and the consequences of not being approved are daunting.

Under no deal, failure to be accepted for settled status equates to being officially recognised as a resident with no workable legal status and that is a very, very bad place to be in. And if you don't apply by the end of 2020, you lose out altogether under current plans. Note that with 3 million EU citizens, plenty of people are simply not even aware of the consequences or the need to apply in the first place.

A tiny minority of those that fall under the settled status scheme (non-EU family members of EU citizens) may possess a physical biometric card. The overwhelming majority have no document to present.