What becomes epidemic can often be assumed as normal.

A Cautionary Tale: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome And The “enlarged” Thymus Gland

In the first half of the 19th century, physicians were becoming alarmed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Healthy infants would be put to bed and found dead in the morning. In 1830, pathologists noted that SIDS-affected infants had enlarged thymus glands compared with “normal” autopsy specimens. It seemed logical to conclude that these “enlarged” glands were in some way responsible for the deaths.

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If an enlarged thymus was leading to sudden infant death, removal of the thymus might be of preventive value. Radiology had advanced to the point at which physicians began making the diagnosis of thymic enlargement from x-ray films. After radiographic diagnosis, thymectomy was initially recommended, but the mortality rate was unacceptably high. Thymus irradiation became the treatment of choice.

The first “successful” use of irradiation to shrink the thymus was reported by Friedländer in 1907. Thousands of children eventually received radiation to prevent status thymicolymphaticus. Some physicians advocated prophylactic irradiation for all neonates.

There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly

The cadavers used by anatomists to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition. What was not appreciated at the time was that chronic stress shrinks the thymus gland. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Here is where the fatal mistake occurred: because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement

In a household or community where large numbers of people express the same symptoms, it is very possible for people to assume this condition to be the normal one and good health to be the abnormality. They may even conclude healthy people are in need of treatment to bring them back to “normal” patterns of behavior.

You can see this error repeated historically, from abusive parents assuming “being beaten by my parents toughed me up so I should do the same” to anti-vaxxers who think measles and whooping cough build character.

My Diagnosis

~ Rachael Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I was absolutely hooked on softdrinks through my teenage years. Then I had a couple of really painful root canals. Scared me to the point that I simply couldn’t touch soda without thinking about it.

Easiest thing in the world to not drink the stuff when you simply don’t have any of it in the house.

The flip side to this is “oh, snacks are in easy reach? Time to eat”

Also, the procrasta-snack. Where you go into the kitchen to look for food because it beats doing whatever it was you are trying to avoid.

If Diviner Wizards could force reroll on the random encounter table, it would be the most powerful class in the game.

Pretty sure I read this in a joke book one of my grandparents had

Druid: “Okay, can you explain what has happened?”

Druid Spell Target: “Oh, absolutely. But you need to do me one favor, first.”

Druid: “Anything, just name it.”

Druid Spell Target: “EXTINGUISH ME!!!”

Vast Lesbian Conspiracy to meet another girl at a softball game, move out to a cabin in the woods, and grow old together as insurance lawyers in Portland.

Quite a few languages use loanwords from neighboring languages.

Imagine being a native Spanish speaker and listening to English media. Blah blah blah macho blah blah blah cafeteria blah blah guerrilla blah blah adobe blah blah blah El Nino.

5 hp left, but I’ve got 30 AC. What are they going to do? Roll 20s?

Ah, balls.

At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety

Apparently the real old school Jews believes that Yahweh had a wife, who was a kind of fertility goddess. And subsequent iterations of the religion simply removed her from cannon.

eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels

That’s more New Age retconning of the Old Testament. Old Israeli Yahweh existed for a population that had no idea how big the world was. They literally just new this slice of the Mediterranean and the neighboring tribes. Even into the Roman era, knowledge of the outside world was third and forth hand, often translated through multiple tongues. It isn’t that Israelis thought foreign gods were demons, its that they don’t recognize these religions as “legitimate”. At its heart, Yahweh really was the One True God in the sense that no other gods existed.

It’s like the old joke about Atheists only believing in one less God than everyone else.

Prohibitions on idols and putting other gods ahead of Yahweh were meta-textual arguments against breaking the law by claiming “Well, my own personal Yahweh+ said disrespecting my parents and coveting my neighbors slaves is cool, aktuly”. We’ve got one god. It’s Yahweh. These are his rules. You can’t claim there’s a bigger better god with a different set of rules and use that as an excuse to break the existing code.

It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief.

It’s removing the social construct of religion from the text. The point of the rule is to preempt anyone from introducing “Ten Commands: 2 - Bigger God’s Better Rules”. Sort of the equivalent of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

Because so much of what all this was about was governing human behavior, with the expectation that properly behaved people resulted in elimination of human suffering.

Incidentally, its why Jesus’s New Covenant was so hotly contested by existing Jewish faithful. This new messiah wasn’t the first one to try to overturn the old rule. At the same time, the old laws having grown so stagnant and the institutions so corrupted by Roman occupation, there was an understanding that the old codex needed to be refreshed and rewritten. “The Messiah” was, in function, a godly ordained designate who could rewrite the laws. And everyone was supposed to wait around for his arrival, because his new rules would fix the bugs in the old ones.

But if you don’t like the new guy’s rules, you say he’s a fake. You blame him for the public’s suffering. And you politely ask your Roman friends in Jerusalem to have him executed.

humanity is so crooked they’ll basically kill a man for being too good while praising and pardoning a criminal

That’s also something of an allegory, in so far as Jesus’s great offense involved claiming to be “King of Kings” in defiance of the secular laws (which the Pharisees and Romans had co-mingled with the regional religious faith). This was all taking place during a historic armed and militant uprising of Jews against Roman occupation - one that failed shortly after the crucifixion.

So then you have Peter and Paul effectively reconciling with the Roman government and creating a kind-of religious third-way for the Jewish state. One in which you could be both a good Jew and a loyal Roman citizen, because you just tell yourself things look like shit now but when you die everything gets reversed.

Eventually, the cult of Christianity becomes so pervasive that even Romans start believing in the post-death reversal of fortune. And this climaxes in the Roman Civil War in which a general paints all his shields with the crucifix to prove how he’s God’s Favorite Underdog and wins. And then Constantine says “Why wait until you’re dead? What if Christianity gets its heyday on Earth starting now?” Kicks off the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. And effectively forms the bedrock of modern Catholicism as a globe-spanning 1700 year old organized church.

If they wanted a creation or a god, they could just come up with their own.

I mean, they did. And then Joshua showed up with his horn and his seven day parade march.

The first rule is “Stop worshiping fake gods, you’re making the real god angry” and the second is “Stop just making up new gods from scratch. We’re monotheists. Fucking act like it.” The third, incidentally, is often interpreted to mean “Stop saying my name as a swear word” but is more traditionally understood to mean “Stop claiming you’re me or that you’re speaking in my name”… which is fucking wild considering everything in the books that follow.

Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is

It’s not like they didn’t know who Yahweh was. They were Jews fleeing Egypt precisely because they held a faith that contradicted the Egyptian high priesthood. You have to go back to the context of the story and recognize Moses only goes up the mountain because he’s completely losing control of the refugees he’s leading. They’re hungry, they’re lost, they have no direction or purpose anymore, and the cohesion of the society is falling apart.

So Moses goes up a hill and says “Okay, God, you got us this far. Now what?” And God sets down commandments. Then Moses returns down the hill and announces “I’ve got new instructions” and a bunch of the refugees say “Fuck no, we hate Yahweh now. We’re going to worship this big bronze bull and steal and rape and murder one another and you can’t stop us”.

And then there’s basically a mini-civil war in the refugee camp that ends (like so many civil wars do) in a genocide of the losing side.

it’s easier for children to learn more languages than adults

Kids are also assumed to operate at a child’s language level. So an 8-year-old speaking both English and Spanish at the 1st grade level is impressive. But a 20-year-old speaking at a 1st grade level is considered remedial.

Even then, there’s a lot to be said for experience. Computers and languages alike benefit from years of exposure. A large English vocabulary will help you pick up Spanish faster. And many years of experience on an Apple will clue you into tricks a naive Windows/Linux user would never consider.

I remember my dad trying to limit my screen time by putting a password lock on the screen saver. He was shocked to discover that an eight year old figured out how to evade it by… restarting the computer. But then he enabled password on restart and got cagey when typing it in, and that slowed my Hackerman attempts down significantly.

Kids tend to learn basic things faster. But they lack the breadth of experience to recall and apply strategies and patterns they’ve accrued over a lifetime. So much of what we consider “smart” versus “dumb” in problem solving is just “how many times have you already seen the answer to this question applied successfully?” Figuring something out for the first time is always harder than applying the heuristic you’ve been using half your life.

I’ve seen so many people on the “Only Millennials know how to use computers” and just kinda forgetting how many of this cohort didn’t get their hands on a computer until that first generation of Apples and Dells ended up in resale shops or on eBay for deep discounts.

So many folks who see kids on touch screens and throw fits, because that’s not how a “real computer” works, were throwing fits at their parents ten years ago for not understand how intuitive a touch screen is.

Feels like its all an excuse for people to get mad at one another, while occluding the simple fact that using a thing for a long time gives you more experience with the thing.

I’m sorry to be pedantic

No you’re not.

Deadlift, lunge, squat

If they’re just lifting their own weight?

You’re arguing nobody at 300 lbs can squat the bar?

No. They’re just normal strong, on account of regularly lifting large amounts of weight.

Let’s see your average 300lb person do a pull-up.

Let’s see the average anyone.

Sure their legs will be strong from carting around all that mass

That’s correct.

Well this is s stupid argument.

Also, routinely untrue. Exceedingly common for Business School teachers to have side hustles. Hell, teaching often IS the side hustle.

nfl and nba coaches built like a pound cake with multiple championships

It’s weird to think knowing how to train and lead a team requires someone to be at peak physical fitness, especially when they’ve been doing it for upwards of 40 years.