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Alorael at Large

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Everything posted by Alorael at Large

  1. But a lot of the design random walk is itself fads because in most ways it's hard to have some kind of objective way of evaluating good or bad for video games. (Like art, although that comparison has launched a thousand essays itself.) Is grind good, bad or neutral? Is random catastrophe good, bad, or neutral? It's all taste. Tastes have swung a lot over the years, but there's no way to know they won't swing back. Realistic graphics have certainly gotten more realistic, but there's now new appetite for retro everything, including graphics. I don't know of anyone really misses the really blocky graphics of early 3D... but I'm sure they exist. So even that's unclear. Music likewise has gone from chiptunes to at least the possibility of full orchestral scores, but there are plenty of composers and players who like the old bleeps and bloops of retro chiptunes and quite deliberately choose to use them. Sometimes in conjunction with more "advanced" music. —Alorael, who thinks video game nostalgia starts in the early to mid 90's. People want more games like that. There's much less pining for, say, the 1980's. Or the mid 2000's, for that matter.
  2. I just started Ancillary Justice. A hundred pages in or so, it's entertaining. There are some editing issues with the dialogue, namely the editor needed to make the author clarify who's speaking more often, but it's overall still very worthwhile and I hear that the sequels tidy up that issue. —Alorael, who enjoyed I Am Legend and is disappointed by the profusion of adaptations that never even attempt to capture the plot or spirit of the original.
  3. D&D has been fairly consistent in having a roughly 50% chance to hit a roughly average target, with a lot of wiggle room because hitters and targets vary a lot. But 95% isn't really a big thing. If anything, D&D has taken a lot of criticism for the "whiff" factor of misses dragging out combats. —Alorael, who would counter with miss-free games, a relatively recent phenomenon. It feels better to have hits and improved hits rather than hits and not-hits.
  4. The spiders who are not your friends make it obvious very quickly. They also do not think you are neat or cute, and will not offer to show you their pedipalps. —Alorael, who welcomes you to this corner of the internet. Leave your sanity at the door, as the traditional greeting goes.
  5. The Electoral College doesn't really have interests. Quite a few electors might well believe that the Electoral College is a terrible system and shouldn't exist. If there were enough electors who went against what they were elected to do and Clinton ended up as president, it would lead to a weird situation where there would be justifiable complaints about the whole Electoral College system, but the absence of the Electoral College would have had exactly the same outcome. —Alorael, who doesn't expect more than a few symbolic votes against Trump. No outcome thrown to Congress, much less actual changes in who is president.
  6. That's not a paper, that's 450 pages of papers. The first of them looks like the one you'd be citing, but it doesn't say that salmonella is a leading cause of death in children. So again, point me at where, exactly, you're seeing this. Kids don't tend to die. But of kids who die, cancer is a leading cause in the US, just after accidental injury. I already cited the CDC there. Genetics plays a role, but it's probably small; actually, heritable causes are relatively rare for cancer generally. Like adults, it's probably mostly spontaneous mutations, and most don't have any identifiable environmental exposure. Wikipedia definitely is hit or miss, mostly because its sources are hit or miss. But as a way to dig up sources of interest you can do much worse. For some medical literature things don't change all that much. The natural history of infection, for example. But treatment (Terapia) changes rapidly with advancements, and epidemiology also changes with changes in treatment, hygiene, and populations. I'm not sure what you're angry at, but I'm very sorry you got malaria multiple times. I've never heard of the cross system. Do you know any other name for it? —Alorael, who wishes you good luck with your exams.
  7. You only get to count the number of times your peer-reviewed publication is cited in peer-reviewed publications. —Alorael, who aims for the higher exaltation that you get when your paper is so foundational that everyone stops citing it. They're often methods papers, and eventually tricks like SDS-PAGE (to name a familiar one) stop being interesting and start being like, "We used electricity to power our lab equipment."
  8. I have been lazy about my sources, haven't I? It's in part because epidemiology varies so widely. I've been mostly using the very rigorous method of looking up various papers on PubMed, or WHO/CDC data, squinting, and kind of roughly averaging it for things like total infections and case fatality. Okay, no, that's a lie. I've been doing some of that, but also turning to Wikipedia and then going to the cited sources. Which are usually on PubMed or WHO/CDC data themselves, but it saves me the work of finding them. —Alorael, who actually does this more than he should probably admit. For medical and scientific articles Wikipedia is actually quite good at providing interesting and relevant information. And he finds it oddly gratifying to find an article that he read show up in the ultimate public space of Wikipedia. Somehow it feels like science has really made it and become real when it's a little blue superscript number.
  9. Bacterial sepsis is usually due to a combination of ill health and bad luck. Lack of medical care contributes, but you need the other two to even catch a bacterial infection. Poor sanitation is a huge contributor and keeps bacterial contamination way down in the developed world; as I've said, most of us don't need medical care for bacterial infections very much. Tuberculosis is something of a class of its own; it's much slower and more indolent than most bacterial infections. As Lilith noted, most bacterial infections are rather accidental. Once bacteria get inside us, we're basically nutrient soup and they go nuts in a way that kills us but then often kills off the infection (because dead humans are no longer good sources of nutrients, at least to the infection). Some pathogenic bacteria are instead parasitic and evolved to inhabit us, and tuberculosis is one of them. It takes a long time to kill. Syphilis is also like that. (And back when the revered William Osler was inventing things like medical curriculum and medical residency he considered knowledge of syphilis to be a cornerstone of medical education.) I said child mortality too. Children are up to the age of 18. But you're right, a 5 year old won't commit suicide. That particular cause of death doesn't make the top ten the 10-14 age group, when it shoots to number 2 and stays there until middle age. There are plenty of cancers of childhood. They're not the same cancers that kill adults, for the most part, but cancer is in the top five causes of death for every age group past neonates. You're still wrong. Gut infections are much more likely to kill kids than adults, that's true, but in the US it's exceptionally rare for anyone to die of them. The developing world is a different story; hygiene and water sanitation may be poor, and safe rehydration is harder to come by. But in the US death is very, very rare. So is serious GI infection, for that matter. You can have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) with native gut flora. It's unpleasant, and occasionally dangerous. It's also rare and unrelated to ingestion. You can also ingest pathogenic bacteria, and then the exceptionally potent immune defenses of the gut will almost always kill the bacteria. This isn't an "imbalance," this is part of normal life in a bacteria-laden world. It's not an illness at all and is completely asymptomatic. Colds are unpleasant and a perceptible deviation from normal health. Fluctuations in gut flora aren't. I'd like to see it. It's always possible that I'm missing some major trend in health, but it's one I'm completely unaware of. Saying it's available is nice, but no Googling I put in could find it. What I could find was CDC estimates of about 450 deaths to non-typhoidal salmonella annually, all age groups. The young and old are overrepresented, presumably, but that's still nowhere close to a leading cause of death. —Alorael, who glanced over the Wikipedia list of most lethal diseases. Maybe unsurprisingly, lots of stuff becomes very bad news if it's in your brain. Viral meningitis is the odd one out here, and sticks with Owenmoz's hypothesis by being the intracranial process that gets you sent home with ibuprofen instead of admitted to the ICU for moonshot therapy and crossed fingers. Sometimes, at least. If it's herpes encephalitis, you still get the ICU and antiviral treatment, and you're probably never going to fully get better. And if it's rabies, you get an induced coma and if you live you make headlines and maybe some doctor's career.
  10. That's not exactly true. There are some viruses that are quite treatable, others that don't really require treatment (colds!) and lots of people die in the US of bacterial infections. Some of the problem is that when people get sick with bacterial sepsis they get really sick. Antibiotics, fluids, pressors, and all the other tricks of modern medicine help, but they only help so much. The Black Death probably killed a third to a half of Europe's population, somewhere around 100-200 million. It's true that there's no other disease that has that kind of total population mortality. (It's also not totally clear what it was, although bacterial Yersinia pestis is the leading suspect.) In terms of total deaths, it's probably close; the growth in population means that some of the big killers of today are probably close, if they haven't already caught up. Leprosy is gruesome, but it was never a major cause of death. It's not highly infectious. Cholera pandemics are virulent, but relatively rare. Except during mass outbreaks it wasn't a leading killer. Sources please? I doubt there has ever been widespread resistance to respiratory viruses, and the common cold probably has never been particularly virulent. It's to the viruses' reproductive advantage not to be! That's simply untrue. Salmonella is nowhere close to a leading cause of death. I'm not sure why you think the USA is overcome with bacterial infection, but it isn't. Injury, suicide, homicide, cancer, and respiratory infections, in roughly that order (depending on exact age group). GI infection doesn't make the top ten in the developing world and hasn't for a long time. I'm not sure what you mean here. Respiratory viruses are highly transmissible and airborne. E. coli is both a part of native gut flora and sometimes a pathogen, and while we ingest bacteria, including pathogenic bacteria, all the time, we mostly don't get infections. Certainly not multiple times a year. —Alorael, who is a physician. He doesn't specialize in infectious disease, but it's a big part of his education and training. And a big part of his practice, honestly, in a hospital setting. He sees a mix of acute bacterial infections (they're bad and land people in hospitals) and mostly chronic viral infections (HIV and hepatitis kill, but very slowly even untreated). He thinks he has some idea of what he's talking about.
  11. I'm not exactly sure how the counts stack up myself; it depends in part on how you count. Total incidence (how many new infections per year)? Prevalence (how many total infections at a given time)? Do you count asymptomatic transient colonization or only illness? But my hunch is that viral infections are in the lead, by a significant margin, by almost any measure. Total infections, infections per year, mortality, you name it. The exception might be if you just count pathogenic entities, but even then it's probably not a big difference and depends on how you count. Is each rhinovirus strain a separate thing? What about each E. coli subspecies? Tuberculosis (bacterial) and hepatitis B (viral) are almost neck and neck for most widespread chronic and lethal infections in the world, both affecting somewhere around 2-3 billion people and causing somewhere around 1 million deaths annually. Gastroenteritis (infectious diarrhea) has somewhere around 5 billion cases per year, mostly in children and again mostly in the developing world, and probably more than 80% of the cases are viral, and again somewhere around 1 million cases per year are fatal. Pneumonia (probably) comes next: about 300 million cases of bacterial pneumonia (various organisms) and 150 million cases of viral pneumonia (various viruses), together accounting for a few million deaths per year. And after that there's a big fall-off in numbers and I think it's mostly viruses: About 50 million cases of HIV with a million deaths per year. 150 cases of hepatitis C, causing a few hundred thousand deaths annually. Millions get influenza every year. But for sheer numbers, it's those common colds that outweigh everything. There are several hundred viruses that cause colds in humans, mostly but by no means exclusively rhinoviruses. Epidemiology is a little iffy because most people don't seek medical attention for colds, but estimates are somewhere around 15-30 billion infections per year. The vast majority are unpleasant but not dangerous; even with orders of magnitude more infections colds cause orders of magnitude fewer deaths than the other diseases I'm listing, and most of those are caused by the cold leading to another infection, like bacterial pneumonia. —Alorael, who writes this while recovering from a probably viral and definitely miserable gastroenteritis. He's never had a life-threatening infection, thankfully. He's had swine flu, regular flu, chicken pox, previous stomach bugs (probably viral), and a vast variety of colds. As far as bacterial infections go, he had a few ear infections in early childhood (and those were quite possibly viral and not bacterial, although he rightly or wrongly got antibiotics) and a mild staphylococcal skin infection. That's it.
  12. I think you said something not quite right there. Unless you're rooting for the viruses, ease of eradication probably isn't unfortunate. Most vaccines, particularly childhood vaccines, are against viruses. I'm not enough of a vaccinologist to say why; I think it's a combination of the prevalence and seriousness of viral infections and the ease of vaccine development. Bacterial infections are relatively uncommon. But treatment, as you note, is something of the reverse. We now have loads of antibiotics; while resistance is increasing, the shear number of options available is a traditional cause of consternation to medical students. Antivirals, in contrast, are relatively few in number and mostly target specific viruses. —Alorael, who ends on the hopeful note that while there may be no cure, there just might be a vaccine against the common cold in the pipeline one day soon. Amazing times indeed.
  13. Trump could have a logically consistent position of millions of illegal votes in places that he lost but that don't affect the results of the election. He isn't arguing that, but he could. —Alorael, who acknowledges that the recount will not change the election. It gives him little embers of hope, though. There's always the outside chance of the discovery of gross polling malfeasance resulting in a challenged outcome.
  14. I do have minions. My minion was driven back by ire and I was sent in. —Alorael, who isn't allowed to yell back. He is allowed to calmly tell people to behave like adults. It's sometimes surprisingly satisfying.
  15. It would have been less bad. Look, I'm literally being paid to be yelled at. I can take some yelling. But when I have to give up sleep for that privilege, well, the scales are a bit rebalanced. —Alorael, who rarely gets that kind of quality interaction in daylight hours. It's significant, p < 0.01.
  16. Herd immunity helps, but it's still cold comfort if you or your child is the unlucky one who gets sick. Get your shots. —Alorael, who spent a while a couple of nights ago being ranted at about, among other things, kickbacks he was getting for vaccines. He would very much like these kickbacks. Also not to be yelled at at 2 am about how cushy his job is.
  17. It's a game that we've loved to hate on these forums, like most of the third-party games Spiderweb dabbled in publishing (exceptions being Lost Souls and more significantly SubTerra). Having played only the demo long ago, I remember it as having clunky, too-fast combat, uninspired writing, and ugly graphics. Nothing in particular to recommend it. And I believe people who did play through it said it later suffers from vast, empty areas and a continuously uninteresting plot. —Alorael, who just realized (or maybe re-realized, it's been a while) that SubTerra was the success of external games and also shares a subterranean theme with Spiderweb's flagship series. Not much else, but hey, lots of caves. Maybe Spidweb is all about literal as well as figurative bedrock support by fans.
  18. Tyranicus hosts it right here. —Alorael, who believes that's the full version. He's never installed it to check. Enjoy, for certain values of enjoyment!
  19. (ᓄಠ_ಠ)ᓄ —Alorael, who is thankful for memetic presence. Or something.
  20. Both, kind of. Variolation, taking material from smallpox sores and injecting it to produce a milder form of smallpox and immunity, was the first immunization method, and quite possibly ancient. Vaccination, using cowpox instead of smallpox, was the innovation of the late 18th century, and dropped the risk of getting sick and dying considerably. But yes, it's still rather disgusting if you think too hard about it. —Alorael, who thinks the getting people to do it was much easier when lots of people died of smallpox. Like measles now, or polio; if you've never seen them, they're a lot less scary and the idea of skipping immunization feels more reasonable.
  21. Trump had a roughly average Republican turnout. Clinton received many fewer votes than Obama. You can dice the numbers a lot of ways, but it's reasonable to see this election as one where the parties appealed to the same people they always appeal to, but the Democrats didn't get their base to actually go out and vote. —Alorael, who finds himself disheartened that more eligibile voters didn't vote at all than chose either candidate.
  22. I'm apparently the only person so far with a strongly positive view of Clinton. She's a damn good politician. She has a comprehensive agenda that has a lot that I like. (Her chances of making that agenda happen are nil, like all presidential platforms, but she's aiming for the right goals.) She's not perfect, but she's very good. —Alorael, who finds Trump alarming in a way that few serious presidential candidates have been. But plenty of ink and keystrokes have been spilled over that already.
  23. Fair warning: exercise caution when Googling "hugemassive" or you might find objectionable material. —Alorael, who has never been particularly enmeshed in the Blades community. He knows Bob is a local term, but he's never come across hugemassive at all. And he also can't find it in other places. Is it much of a jargon term at all?
  24. Litalia isn't mad. Fervent and unscrupulous, sure. Overzealous, definitely. But she's interesting in her ability to recognize when her fanaticism is in the wrong and pick a new perspective for over-investment. And she's never really crazy. She'd be a lot less scary if she were just psychotic, but she's not. She's rational and willing to do what it takes to win. —Alorael, who appreciates her being the same person while evolving her views. And he's pretty sure that in the era after G5, in almost any ending, there are going to be scattered people (mis)remembering her and borrowing her name. One day it'll be the Litalans who are the bloodthirsty dissent from the ruling regime and main opposition.
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