brickhousewench: (WTFBBQ)
I read this a while back, but forgot to post it here. The NY Times wrote about how DOGE cuts will affect not just South Africa, but how those funding cuts will affect much much more than people might expect.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/health/south-africa-medical-research-trump.html

South Africa has for decades been a medical research powerhouse, yet its stature has been little known to people outside the field. South Africa’s scientists have been responsible for key breakthroughs against major global killers, including heart disease, H.I.V. and respiratory viruses such as Covid-19. They have worked closely with American researchers and have been awarded more research funding from the United States than any other country has received.

But a swift series of executive orders and budget cuts from the Trump administration have, in a matter of months, demolished this research ecosystem.

There are grim ramifications for human health worldwide, and also for pharmaceutical companies, including American giants such as Pfizer, Merck, Abbott and Gilead Sciences, which rely heavily on South Africa’s research complex when they develop and test new drugs, vaccines and treatments.

Pharmaceutical companies have relied on the country for clinical trials for decades. Some are now rethinking their relationship with South Africa, according to people familiar with the discussions.


And as just another layer of WTF racism, the US found a way to still keep experimenting on Black people, just not in our own country but overseas. *head desk*

“The implications of this are huge,” said Dr. Ntobeko Ntusi, chief executive of the South African Medical Research Council. “One of the biggest success stories to come out of South Africa in the last three decades, largely aided through the generosity of American people, has been the development of this high-caliber cadre of scientists who’ve led scholarship that has been seminal not just for South Africa but for the whole world.”

The first-ever heart transplant was performed in Cape Town in 1967. The CT scanner was invented in South Africa. So were many now-common surgical techniques. Vaccines and drugs that are widely used in the United States — including treatments for high blood pressure and the immunization for R.S.V. — came out of South African research.


And also, goddamn us for throwing all these highly trained doctors and scientists out of work.

South Africa’s research might is a legacy of its harsh history. Apartheid-era governments neglected the health of millions of Black people but invested in educational institutions and medical innovation for the white population. In the decades since the country transitioned to a multiracial democracy, those educational institutions have been open to everyone. But efforts to extend basic health care have been slow, which means the country still has a high rate of disease. That, in turn, makes for a grimly efficient place to conduct research.

Because the South African rand is a weaker currency — running about 20 to a U.S. dollar — running studies in South Africa costs a fraction of what it does in the United States.

(no subject)

Jul. 1st, 2025 09:52 pm[personal profile] anaisninja
anaisninja: (Default)
Flood plain full of bed birds, snowy egrets, Slim and his cadre of great egret flunkies. I looked at the snowies close to see if there was a juvie little blue hiding in there the way they do, but not today. I could really use a little blue right about now. I need to know everything's going to be okay.

Who am I kidding. Psychos are setting fires so they can shoot at firefighters, and that's just breakfast. Things are not remotely close to okay. Not enough to suspend disbelief long enough to feel like it might be okay.

A little better today, but I still miss him so much. I can't stop singing his little song to myself, and it makes me alternately happy and sad. Asked around at work to see if they new hires knew anyone with a large colony of dermestid beetles, and J actually did. They're up in St. Augustine. That's plenty reason for a road trip, and I've got new spark plugs and excess vacation time wanting to make some time on my calendar. I admit before I left work today, I went to the freezer to kiss my Qua's ears, boop my Qua's nose, stroke my Qua's fur, and pat my Qua's toes. I bury my face in his fur, and he still smells like my Qua. I feel like I can't put him in the ground. I'll find another way to keep him with me. Skeleton is the obvious choice. For now, the freezer feels safest.

Wednesday is garbage day, which means things have to go out Tuesday night. That was hard. Tossing the old food and meds, emptying the litter, putting the old boxes in the dumpster, vacuuming the floor and getting rid of the worn out puppy pads. Washing his dishes, putting the rest of the crunchies in my car to bring into work for the crows, the scratching pad he never used to maybe give to S at work. She got me two cans of Red Bull today. That was sweet of her, I appreciated the hell out of it.

I did keep his vet paperwork, and I did keep some of his meds. I have a bag of subQ supplies that they gave me at the vet that I'm going to bring back, I'm going to see if they'll take the mirtazapine back, too - I never even opened the box. Got an unopened bag of crunchies and a hoard of silky mousse that I'm going to see if I can return. If not, I'll see if Stanley and Stella want it. I don't know why I bought so much. Feeling overly optimistic. I wish I'd thought to ask about what signs to look for when things were getting towards the end. I thought it would be vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, hiding, none of which he did. I didn't know about build up of fluid in the belly. I thought his belly looked weird, but his regular vet didn't mention it when we went in last week. I'm more than a little salty about that. I have to let that shit go.

Got most of the cat accessories neatly stored and stacked up in the front room. I did leave the fountain next to my bad. I like to think if he decides to drop in on me, that'll tempt him to stick around a bit. Everything else I've got cleaned off, boxed up, and waiting hopefully in a place I can see them on the regular. It feels so fucking weird. I've been a cat person for so long, not having one with me just feels wrong, an uncomfortable kind of naked. I'm telling myself I won't look for another cat until I've got all the vet bills paid off, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want someone to find me sooner. Maybe a brother and a sister to keep each other company, one to be a cuddle bug, one to keep me in line. I'ma think on that.
brickhousewench: (Get 'er done)
First a little backstory, for the non-technical people in my reading audience. I’ll try to keep it brief.

You may have heard of virtual machines? They are software that mimics a laptop or server. So for example, you can have a Windows laptop, but run a Linux virtual machine on top of it if you want to. And the VM behaves exactly like a Linux laptop would. Well, the next software evolution from VMs is a container. When you create a VM, the virtual machine contains all sorts of things that you might not need. The same way a new laptop has all sorts of programs you might never use (in my case it’s browsers that I don’t use, and all those games). When you create a container, you only install the exact software that you need, and nothing more. So they’re much leaner/smaller, and you can run more containers than you can VMs on the same hardware. The most popular software to manage containers is called Kubernetes, and the most popular way to install containers on a Kubernets platform is using Helm Charts. OK, that’s the background.

At my current job we support Helm Charts for customers to install our software. BUT, we don’t use Helm Charts when we install our own software internally, we use something else. As a result, since we don’t use Helm Charts, the engineering team doesn’t really know diddly squat about them. And even our most experienced Engineer is intimidated by Helm, and complains that he doesn’t understand it. BUT our customers use Helm Charts, and they have to install our product using Helm charts. I’m sure you can see where this is going, can’t you?

When we have a release and update the Helm charts, we often do it badly so that there are bugs, or even worse the software can’t install. So our open source customers then have to log bugs. And they submit fixes because sometimes the problem is obvious. Or they write new features, because they need to be able to configure something we hadn't thought of. But the Engineering team pretty much ignores the issues, and somehow never get around to reviewing their code submissions until either I beg them to or someone from the community finds someone’s name or email address and pesters them personally. People tweet at us. One guy tracked people down on LinkedIn and sent them messages that way. It’s a mess. And it’s embarrassing and makes us look bad.

My Developer Advocate buddy Jay had an idea a while back to form a group of volunteers from the Community to tackle the problem. And then the idea went nowhere for a couple of months. When we met up at the offsite in Madrid, we decided to resurrect the idea and see if we could get the team to let us try it for a three month pilot program for a Helm Maintainers Group. This time we got the approval. Whee! We have two developer advocates, myself, and three Community Champions, people who we’ve already recognized for helping out in the Community, answering questions on the Community forum and Community Slack and submitting bug fixes. I don’t know much about Helm (yet). But it’s a skill I’d like to add to my toolbox, so I have a couple of books and I’ve signed up for a couple of online courses. For the time being, I’m around because I have permission to push buttons on the repo that only employees can push.

We had our kick off meeting last week (Tuesday the 24th) and then I spent the rest of the week going through and getting all the Helm Charts pull requests into a Google Spreadsheet so that we could triage them. Starting out we had something like 135 - 140 Pull Requests waiting to be reviewed. Between Jay and I, we’ve already closed about 45 as either too stale or no longer needed (because the fix was already in the code). One of our Community champions has started working his way through the spreadsheet, and I’ve already merged one PR for him. I saw him commenting on a lot of other PRs, asking for changes or asking people to update to the latest version of the code. So he’ll probably get through all the extra small ones this week.

I’m so excited that we’ve gotten so much done in only a week. Yeah, we do still have about 90 PRs to deal with. I’m hoping that we can get through all of the biggest ones in the next month or two, and then maybe we can work on some of the backlog of issues and bug reports.
matt_zimmer: (Default)
Read more... )
matt_zimmer: (Justice  League)
This is one of my better recent reviews. I hope you like it.

Read more... )
brickhousewench: (brain)
Particularly relevant right now after I only got about two hours sleep Sunday night...

https://www.inverse.com/health/all-nighter-rewires-brain-mental-health-treatments

Everyone remembers their first all-nighter. What’s probably more memorable, though, is the slap-happy, zombie-like mode the next day brings. That “sleep-drunk” feeling isn’t imaginary.

The researchers found that one all-nighter roughly had the same effects on the brain as taking the anesthetic ketamine.


Which also might explain Elon Musk's behavior. He is famous for 1) staying up all night working and getting very little sleep and 2) taking lots of ketamine, which probably magnifies the effects of not sleeping.

This isn’t an endorsement of acute sleep deprivation. “I definitely don't want the takeaway from the story to be, ‘Let's not sleep tonight,’” Kozorovitskiy says.

Insufficient sleep brings risk for myriad conditions and events, such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke, way up. What’s more, sleep deprivation can push the antidepressant effect too far in the other direction, triggering manic episodes in people with mental health conditions like bipolar disorder. Going a night without shut-eye isn’t the latest craze that will cure your depression, but rather, this insight could shake up our approach to targeting different areas in the brain when developing antidepressant medications.
brickhousewench: (Germany)
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a38146699/can-you-cure-motherhood-burnout-the-germans-seem-to-think-so/

By giving exhausted moms a paid time-out, the Germans may have found the remedy for what ails you—if what ails you is the stress of raising a child.

I had been parenting alone for the better part of two years when my doctor, after repeatedly treating me for fatigue, decided to write a unique prescription. A cure, as they say in German. Taking in the air, as we once said in English.

Whatever you call it, the treatment felt luxurious to this American: a three-week time-out with my kid on a quiet, car-free island, paid for by my insurance company. We would stay in a dormitory and I, along with 24 other exhausted mothers, would be taking classes on things like budgeting and stretching as a means of self-care. There would be day care and housekeeping and meal service, so we could concentrate on our lives beyond work and domesticity.


***

The cure, which got its start in the rubble of World War II, had been approved for more than 47,000 people the year before the pandemic; another two million people are estimated to be in need of one. Raising a child is clearly exhausting, especially under these circumstances.

Elly Heuss-Knapp, the wife of Germany's first postwar president, knew this firsthand; raised by a single father after her mother had been committed to an asylum, Heuss-Knapp introduced the concept of sending stressed out mothers to rural places for retreats in the early 1950s. In doing so, she enshrined the needs of women, hundreds of thousands of whom were widowed or dealing with traumatized husbands, into law in a newly formed country whose Constitution did not prioritize the rights of women. After such profound social disruption, the women (who were themselves often traumatized after surviving the war) needed a quiet time-out to grieve in peace and regain a sense of normalcy. Whole towns grew up around these dedicated "cure houses," and these retreats were enshrined in law.


I love this idea, that a culture can recognize that mothers are stressed out. And then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Time to get moving

Jul. 1st, 2025 08:33 am[personal profile] brickhousewench
brickhousewench: (Warrior pose)
Last year between Covid and having my gallbladder yeeted I lost around 25 pounds. And that was on top of the ten pounds I'd lost on purpose.

This year, in the past couple of weeks I've gained back a pound or two (but less than five pounds).

Time to get moving and make the scale move in the direction I want it to again.

First night of ESCape!

Jul. 1st, 2025 12:55 am[personal profile] sorcyress
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
I am at Pinewoods, is I think the way these entries start, and they are always happy entries to write.

I arrived at camp, and swung past my cabin in and amongst other tasks in order to open the windows and get it ready for me to bring all my stuff up. And upon opening the door, found the entire place covered in beautiful hanger fine art. There were probably about 50 hangers scattered across any hangerable surface, and a lovely wire sculpture dangling through the middle. My friends know me well, and I genuinely did use some of them to hang some of my clothes, so truly a win-win.

Unpacking was aided by a SamSam coming to say hello, and then off to the staff meeting, and then off to the porch. There are many people I adore here --more than I could easily spend time with all at once. That is one of the downsides of ESCape being so good and so popular. My affections have been a bit ADHD today, but I think I haven't left anyone feeling abandoned.

Dinner was delicious, dessert was vegan chocolate cake (I chose not to try and break my record from LCFD weekend, and only ate four pieces). And then there was some beautiful English dancing --I missed the first one but caught the other three, with kateface, then mom, then Robin. And then announcements. And then...

...my first night of calling, like as a serioustimes staff caller, holy shit. This is the biggest teaching assignment I've ever had, like, this could make or break my Scottish Country Dance career. (It's not gonna, there's enough other things I do that will also help, but this is a pretty serious event. It's still not the Big Goal, but it's well in the right direction).

And I nailed it. I got a _ton_ of compliments, including some from extremely well established callers themselves, and some of them with really lovely details that showed good attention and observation to what I try to do. At least one person told me I did a good job of not over-explaining, which is extremely funny to me to consider, given that I want to talk all the time endlessly about everything. But I do try and keep the dance floor flowing real fast --some of this is my training from my tutors, and some of this is my own kinesthetic learning (I want to _do_ the dance, not talk about the dance!)

I was a healthy four minutes under on my time limit, and they asked for an encore for the last one, and I said "yeah, this is a good thing to explain to the dancers anyways". I think I might've been just maybe a minute over after that, but not anything more (so I apologize if the dancers got a four minute break instead of five, or if Ben lost a minute of the contras). I will keep being hyperaware of the timing. I like trying to keep track of how long it takes to do things.

And then I was through the calling, five solid and rapidly done dances (and a very slight sense of smugness, because a week or two ago I got an email from the organizers being all "oh yeah, there are first night announcements and therefore your set needs to be a little shorter timewise than it normally would be, do you want to cut anything?" And I decided to be brave and sassy and said "you know, I _could_ cut the fourth dance if I need, but numbers two and three are 6x32 anyways, and I think I've got this. And I did!)

And the last dance I called was a bit of a stretch goal, a dance I absolutely _adore_ (Lords of the Wind), but felt like would maybe be tricky? And everyone did great! I called it well and clearly, and so the walk-through zipped along, and then we just did it and it went well and like I said, encored! I am getting more and more evidence for the fact that I can and should take the really fun slightly complex flowy dances and go ham on them, even with extremely mixed-level floors. Because I'm surprisingly good at calling them, and my confidence is carrying over so that my dancers can dance them.

(and my music was so good already, and I have three more days to listen to this! Amazing!!!)

After I finished, I got to look at a cool bug (putting a line in my bio that said "I love cool bugs show them to me" ACTUALLY WORKED!) and I chatted with mom some and I determined that I was extremely sticky and hot, despite not having dancing, so I'd better do a couple contras to really commit to being hot enough to jump in the pond after. A lovely one with Myles where we exactly crossed the floor from first to last couple, and then the last contra I danced with Mo and we did a social experiment around carcinization.

(It started as the usual kinda goofing around, with some nice gremliny deep knee squats on the petronella. I'm not sure who in the walk-through turned it into crab hands and sideways prancing around to the next place. But Mo and I committed, and did it every single time our way around, even though it was _exhausting_. It was a ton of fun, and I'd say over 75% of the neighbor couples did at least a little crabbing with us! And after, singleSam1, who had been the couple just in front of us, complimented us on the fact that they were chased by the delighted laughter of couples becoming crabs with us for the whole dance).

Austin and I waltzed, which was lovely lovely lovely, and then I managed to squeze between Austin and Tess for the song. Into the pond go I, which was surprisingly perfect. I still didn't stay long, but I didn't jump in and start cussing (which happens a lot to me) and when I came out, I was not immediately shivering.

Party and admiring tinfoil costumes and a polycool meeting and back to my cabin relatively on time to sleep. If I hurry, I could get six hours solid before having to go to breakfast! That'd be keen. Just have to dip down to the wifi shed to upload these, and then go brush my teeth.

Happy happy happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: "bells Sam" is not actually a differentiator, because SamSam also does bells.

(no subject)

Jun. 30th, 2025 09:05 pm[personal profile] anaisninja
anaisninja: (quack attack)
Eight months to the day from when I had to say goodbye to Ish, I had to bid farewell to my Qua.

His last round of blood work looked good, save for the anemia. The vet said it could either be an autoimmune issue, which should already be taken care of by the prednisolone, or a bacterial issue. They were still waiting on the lab results to determine if it was bacterial, in which case doxycycline should fix him right up. But his skin was jaundiced, his appetite was poor, and he wasn't getting around well, his legs seemed to bottom out on him. Sunday morning he climbed up onto the bed to give me cuddles, and actually got out of my room to walk around the house. I had been giving him the antibiotics that I was given at Fetch, and hoping they were working and that he was starting to feel better.

But when I woke up this morning and put my hand on Qua, I could tell things were not right. He was so weak. I gave him his meds, then I carried him up into bed and held him on my chest. He relaxed into my arms and purred, and I sang to him until the next med alarm went off. He started to move like he wanted to get up, so I helped him on down. I got up and looked up the vet that S had told me about, called to see if they took emergency visits. They did, I described what was going on with him, and said I would be on my way in.

I feel I was misled by our regular vet. He made it sound like this was something that could be easily resolved. When they did an ultrasound at the emergency vet, they said his belly was full of fluid. Apparently liver values can still show up as normal when in end stage failure. This I did not know. She said he was suffering, and I didn't need to hear anything else. There was only one call to make, and dammit, I thought I had a little more time, but it was time now.

I wish I'd gotten him another Popeye's Chicken Sandwich. I wish I'd brought his favorite blanket. I wish I'd been able to do this at home.

When the tech brought Qua to me wrapped up in a blanket, I could tell he was scared, and I knew there was only one thing left to do. I sang to him again. I sang the same song I've been singing to him for months, sang it as best as I could while trying not to choke up, while the vet gave him the meds to help him go. Maybe this is the Chiquago I've been singing about all this time? It didn't take him long to go. He was ready, and it was time.

I've been mourning Qua for close to a year; since I found out I would probably lose him to kidney failure, since before his brother passed in October. I've gotten a lot of crying out of the way, but I reckon I still have some more to go before it's out of my system. I queued up XTC's English Settlement on the way home - Qua seemed to really like that album whenever I played it - and I got the feeling from it that I had before. That it would keep my head above water. Between losing Qua and my bro losing Navaan, I'm gonna need all the help I can get.

Because I knew I would just sit at home getting morbid in my head, I went into work. Probably scared tf out of the new hires since I just shaved off my eyebrows. Asked L if he thought his dermestid beetles would be able to handle something larger than a rabbit skull. He doesn't have enough yet, but there's places I could find where I could do such a thing, according to my bro. Burying him doesn't feel right, not right now. At least I can keep him safe in Frank's deep freeze while I figure it out.

I stopped off at Quick Point Park after work, to see the rock wall where I had first found Ish and Qua some sixteen years ago. Maybe to see if another little face poked up out of the wall. I could go to the shelter for sure, but I kind of want to see if the Cat Distribution System has anyone in store for me.

I don't want to think about going to bed. Mostly I don't want to think about waking up at 4:30am alone. I really hope the CDS finds my sorry ass sooner rather than later. Surely there's a kitty out there who could use some love.

Really, brain? REALLY?

Jun. 30th, 2025 04:58 pm[personal profile] cupcake_goth
cupcake_goth: (GeeWay)
Last night my brain decided to give me a new stress nightmare, oh yay. In it I had taken all my bedtime meds on the drive to Seattle for next week's (!!!) MCR concert. I met up with [personal profile] minim_calibre , we found our seats, and during the opening act I fell asleep, missing the entire MCR show. 

WHAT THE HELL, BRAIN?!

This obviously won't happen in real life. But in that brief instant between sleep and waking out of the dream, I was SO UPSET. 

Twelve days until the concert! The Seattle show is the first one of the tour, which means the band should be all riled up. And that I'll have no idea what the tour merch is, so I'll have to make my purchasing decisions in real time. Yes, there's a part of my brain that says buy it allllllll, but I'm trying not to listen to it. No really, I'm trying to, because I know I don't need all the Long Live: The Black Parade merch. Probably. 

(buy it allllll)

Free power!

Jun. 30th, 2025 07:42 pm[personal profile] nosrednayduj
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
We just had some more solar panels stuck on our roof, since the original set is not keeping up with our demands, now that we have two electric cars and heat pumps. Last time when we got the solar panels completed, we had to wait until they were inspected before they could be turned on, and so until that happened, on sunny days we were just sad.

This set has inverters which are smart enough to know how much power they are making and to not give any to the grid, which we are not yet allowed to do. So, we get to use the power, as long as we don't push any to the grid. This is very strange, because on a sunny day it makes more than we generally use unless using the air conditioner. Usually we are pretty conservative about when we use the air conditioner. But now, as long as the sun is shining on the new panels, "it's completely free", because the excess electricity would otherwise be wasted. So we are doing things like waiting to charge the car until it's morning, so as to use the free electricity, and keeping the house cooler. This must be how people who are fully off the grid live all the time. If your battery is full, you'd better use the power in some way.

Hopefully this silliness will come to an end shortly. One inspection is scheduled for Wednesday, and then there some other thing that we hope will be fast, because we don't actually need them to replace the electric meter with a bidirectional meter; we already have one. But, they might be stupid and decide they need to replace our current meter with a different one.

Then we will go back to our normal conservative ways, where we minimize our use and push our excess to the grid where it would offset somebody else's usage and thus delay the need for a dirty peaker plant, and bank the extra for winter cost offsets. (Net metering is kind of a scam. A nice homeowner-centric scam. Thanks, MA, you did one right.)

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
alierak: (Default)
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Profile

anagramofbrat: (Default)
anagramofbrat

June 2023

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
111213 1415 16 17
18192021222324
252627282930 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 06:41 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios