We can still eat mussels, right? Just not the shell.
You're supposed to pull the mussels from the shell
Definitely don't eat her sculptures.
Did you read Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, the compassionate and scholarly version of 'Understand a Trump Voter'. (I read it before I stopped giving a fuck about understanding Trump voters.) One of her chapters talks about the "Team Player", who bemoans environmental costs, but says you just gotta make sacrifices for a good economy. There was an example of someone out riding a horse in the Mississippi bayou, a known dumping ground for the local industries. The horse slipped, fell in the slough and died on the spot. When they retrieved it, the parts that had submerged were plasticized. So that was an example of something the Team Player knew but had chosen to accommodate. Strangely, so was the death from cancer at age 9 of her child's best friend. So I am left with my conviction that knowledge is irrelevant to the diehards and they must simply be overruled.
Of course, not everyone is a diehard, and I do agree that a home toxicology test would be interesting and perhaps inform some people.
So I am left with my conviction that knowledge is irrelevant to the diehards and they must simply be overruled.
I totally agree with this.
I'm picturing more the people who are tuned out in general until an issue is salient enough that they notice it.
That's obviously sad and scary, but while we're meant to worry about the environment here, I can't help but think that maybe the doctors who noticed all the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning should have prodded a bit harder rather than dropping that line of inquiry when she uttered the phrase "natural materials". And while it's a bad sign that you can get lead poisoning from anything "natural", very few people spend 12 hours a day for decades grinding mussel shells from Chinatown. She's not the average person who eats shellfish.
Maybe I'm blaming the victim, but I can't help but imagine all the problems a retail mail-order broad-spectrum toxicology report wouldn't be a problem for 99 percent of 23andme users. The crazies who would seek it out because they're convinced that all their problems are due to "toxins", the fact that almost any result would require talking to a doctor to make sense of, the fact that toxicology reports are pretty complicated...
Consumer toxicology sounds nice to me, of course with a format suitable for less informed people. I'm not sure how to suggest preventing "Your at risk!!!! Only our specially formulated fish oil will help" scams though.
On a policy level, both the US and the EU spend billions identifying ways to cure existing cancers, but in comparison very little on programs to investigate compounds that might cause them. It's a little quixotic to talk about EPA funding and leadership with this administration. This (totally sensible) bottom-up uncoordinated proposal should also generate outrage at policy blindness.
8: Nonsense. I bet that nice young lady from Theranos is available to start this up right away.
Speaking of, apparently this is good.
1. You boil the mussels briefly in a sauce made with onions, tomatoes and white wine, which you then sup using the shell as a spoon. So it's mildly alarming, Cyrus' points notwithstanding.
Personally, I'm worried about the archaeologists of the future excavating the shell middens of the present.
Isn't toxicology screening really expensive? This seems like it might be hard to do at scale. I suppose DNA testing is also expensive, so maybe not.
Anyway, now I want to go to Point Brugge.
The more rare items you test for in more people, the more false positives you get. I believe some allergists decry routine screening for multiple types of allergies (in the asymptomatic) for this reason.
Is that true of environmental pollutants, though? Being asymptomatic of a carcinogen is different from being asymptomatic of allergens, in terms of what's going to kill you.
I don't know about pollutants, but cancer screening guidelines are drawn to prevent screening populations where the cost of false positives will overwhelm any benefit.
8.1: I agree the doctor should have tested sooner. It's not like you need to cut open the skull and look for heavy metals.
But that's because false positives would drive unnecessary treatment for cancer. This is untethered from a disease that demands immediate treatment and much more like testing your drinking water or wall paint for lead levels.
This is a great idea if done well, but "Free!! Testing*!! *tests provided by Bob's patented deluxe water filters" is a possible outcome.
21: That makes sense. But maybe testing the environment more would get the same benefits?
21: I guess that makes sense. But what exactly would one be putting into the prepaid sample container for shipping to a lab? Paint scrapings? Soil? Art supplies? The more variety, the harder it is to offer to the masses affordably.
If you present with symptoms of heavy metal exposure and have no likely source of said exposure and your doctor doesn't even consider that somebody is trying to murder you, you need to find a doctor who reads more detective fiction. Medical schools are becoming lax.
Now if LB had become a doctor instead of a lawyer she'd be just the one to go to.
One problem with a $99 toxicology test is that rich people would get the test while poor people, who are a lot more likely to live in a high-toxin environment, would not.
My solution: A $59.95 toxicology test.
Maybe you could means-test it so you can get the discount only if you prove you are poor.
25: a friend of mine had a patient who was poisoned slowly with arsenic. They thought she had psychiatric issues, because she kept saying that she thought her husband was trying to kill her, but after a while there were symptoms that were suspicious. Unfortunately it wasn't confirmed until she had died.
25: a friend of mine had a patient who was poisoned slowly with arsenic. They thought she had psychiatric issues, because she kept saying that she thought her husband was trying to kill her, but after a while there were symptoms that were suspicious. Unfortunately it wasn't confirmed until she had died.
I don't know which is more shocking, 30 or 31.
You know who wanted to do this kind of thing? Theranos.
DNA testing is unusual in that it can be done just with saliva. Once blood is involved there's no way to get around nurses and labs.
Didn't Theranos say their fake technology was going to let them do every clinical test under the sun? Toxicology would have been included only because it is one of those tests, not out of any specific interest.
Didn't they want to kill half of everyone?
With Kissinger and Mattis on their board? 100%.
31: It was under investigation when I was told about it but she was still presenting it as a poster.
Who the fuck is responsible for the Seahawks uniform?
On topic because the color of toxins.
Grabbing the old mace gets you kicked out of lots of things.
Is C.K. Lewis like the author of Masturbating Narnia?
35/6 Theranos wanted to poison their clients with arsenic? No wonder they went bust!
They were inevitably undercut by low-wage competition from Bangladesh.
You know who wanted to do this kind of thing? Theranos.
The problem was they didn't actually want to do this, surely. They just wanted to pretend to.
Whereas the Bangladeshis are the real deal.
44: Since Boris Johnson is now being compared to Aslan ("The era of the ice queen is over. The thaw is coming."), this seems entirely appropriate.
Was I the only one with a hopeless crush on Jadis?
50: wtf. Who is comparing that sack of guts to Aslan?
I was drinking was last and got confused with Louis C. K.
Even if you could get around the need to draw blood issue that would keep most people away, the dose makes the poison, and quantitative screening is not straightforward. You need to optimize a separate measurement procedure for each compound you want to screen for.
DNA sequencing is massively easier and cheaper than the sort of tox screening you're describing.
But as others have noted, some aspiring Elizabeth Holmes type will be happy to provide such tests in exchange for a few billion in startup $$.
52: Some anonymous Conservative backbencher to the Sunday Telegraph, whence it reached Twitter. Conservative Home is now trying to cast the rest of "The Liar, the Witch, and the Backstop."
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God damn it. My godmother, who was in the accident 6 weeks ago, died. She was getting better and looked to be headed towards rehab, but then there was disseminated inteavascular coagulation, the etiology of which was unknown.
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Very sorry to hear that. My condolences.
I'm so sorry to hear that, Res.
Both houses of Parliament have a mace, but only the upper has a woolsack.
I was dissuaded by a more sensible person from getting stuck into an Aslan/Boris Johnson crossover but she's gone out now:
"I'd follow you anywhere", Lucy said. She felt the Lion's sweet breath in her ear; his great paw on her thigh."You know when I blew you to Narnia," said the Lion: "Now it's your turn to return the favour"
"But but I thought you had died on the table", said Peter. "Oh, that old thing!" the Lion laughed and all the trees and stars seemed to dance at the noise. "No, really: I found a Romanian circus lion and persuaded him to go in my place. I said I had a plan to free him just as soon as the witch was dead, and" -- here the Lion had to break off and laugh once more -- "the plucky little chap believed me."
Though I am a little ashamed. I went and reread Prince Caspian on the commuting trains yesterday. I had forgotten how powerfully some of the stories in it still work on my imagination.
"Lucy, Susan: follow me!" said Aslan as he walked away from happy gathering of friends around the fire and into the trees. "He's not a tame lion" whispered Susan to her sister. Then she giggled.
I just got interviewed by a DOD person about a potential employee, a former student of mine from 2012-2015ish. I had the student for a lot of classes, but mostly I don't have concrete memories or much to say about them.
On the question of whether I have any reason to suspect them of breaking the law, I said no. I don't think acquiring a giant tattoo of a mushroom necessarily means I ought to harbor any such suspicions, but that's the most vivid memory I have of the student.
It was a mushroom *cloud*, obvs. Totally DOD material.