Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
From "Crash Landing" (1979) a pleasant little science fiction movie about how the crew of a damaged space freighter work together to repair their ship and get home in time for the third officer's daughter's eleventh birthday.
I'm a #patriot, not a #nationalist, and often get into the weeds trying to explain the difference. This simplified version covers the most important parts, especially the first panel. "Patriotism is pride in who you are, nationalism is pride in who you aren't" deserves to be an internet law.
An addendum: at Staunton, a young woman was running back and forth along the stretch of trail we were on. She passed us a couple of times in each direction, giving us a cheerful smile each time. At a guess, she was timing herself, maybe race training. Good steady #5k or #10k pace.
Each time, we smiled and waved back, and I felt a ferocious envy. #Running is the only exercise I've ever enjoyed for its own sake. #Weights and #martialarts were means to an end—get stronger, fight better. #PT and #roadmarching were not to get yelled at. But running was a gateway to a better world.
Never again. My leg won't take it. These days, the only world to which it would be a gateway would be the emergency department, maybe followed by the operating suite. While I miss the #ER too, for quite different reasons, I'm not in a hurry to get back to it ... like that.
Of course I enjoy #hiking for its own sake as well, but I don't think of it as exercise. It's the best kind of #medicine. Losing my gut would be a bonus, though.
Two #hikes this week: Wednesday was the Forest Loop at the #LookoutMountain Nature Center, and yesterday was about half of the Davis Ponds trail at #Staunton State Park.
Lookout's an old friend. Staunton was new to us, and we'll definitely be back—it's spectacular, and highly recommended. Also, Becca added a whole bunch of species to her #iNaturalist life list.
Neither was challenging by our old standards—particularly the Forest Loop, which is about the easiest #mountain #trail in the state—and both kicked our asses. It's impossible to overstate how sad and angry we are about losing our ability to look at any trail on any mountain and say, "Let's do that!"
We know how and why this happened, and we know what we need to do to get it back. Or some of it back, anyway: in our mid-fifties, with Becca's fibro, and my leg reminding me of the Big Snap, we're not going to turn the clock back to our early forties. Half would feel like a miracle.
Yeah, it's not our fault. But it's not okay.
Our goal is to enter our sixties limited by time rather than space. Let the main question about any trail be "do we have enough daylight left to finish this hike" rather than "will search and rescue have to pluck us off the mountain if we try this?" Which doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Say, Echo Lake to Lower Chicago Lake. That's a most-of-the-day hike: seven klicks out and 250 meters up, with a whole lot of up and down on the way, and you're *starting* at an altitude where most people can't live comfortably long-term. But lots of casual hikers make the trip just fine.
That used to be well within our capacity. Mountain gods willing, it will be again.
Recent conversations about #writing have reminded me that the #writers whose work I like the best, and the writers whose work *they* like the best, are often very disjoint sets.
Which seems kind of odd to me, really. If I like their writing, shouldn't I also expect to like the writers whose work influenced theirs? But it doesn't always or even usually work that way.
On #writers' problems: "Those ideas that rattle around in your head for years can be deeply frustrating. I think the Station was conceived ca. 2014, hatched in 2016, and didn't leave the nest until 2024. But oh, it's a wonderful feeling when you watch them make their first kill." ✍️ 🚀 🦖
Happy #Antifa Day to all who celebrate.
#Musk's cult may actually be larger than #Trump's, and more vocal thanks to #Xitter, but Trump has all the hard power. So I suspect Musk is on his way to a nasty case of #windowcancer or #teatoxicity. I won't be sorry if he does some damage on the way out, though.
https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/06/six-types-dinosaur-eggs-found-one-place/
The story is less dramatic than the headline (try to contain your shock) which makes it sound like multiple #species sharing a #nest. That would be tremendous news, implying amazing things about #interspecies behavior. But it's still a very nice find. And I love some of the site names on the map.
Also, the journal article is linked from the story, which IMO should be mandatory for all #popular #science #reporting. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0314689
What the find does seem to show is a diverse ecosystem with multiple species sharing nesting *grounds*. Some of them were related, like various kinds of the unfairly-named† #oviraptors, while others weren't even #dinosaurs at all! That's still pretty nifty.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: no more than today, the #Mesozoic was never All Killing, All The Time. Dinosaurs did, of course, hunt and eat each other, and no doubt destroyed rivals' nests as well. But most of the time, they were living their lives in relative peace. Modern dinosaurian behavior is as good a guide as any here: even the meanest #birds tend their nests more than they fight.
†#Oviraptor was discovered on a nest, and the initial assumption was that it was stealing the eggs for food, thus the name "egg thief." Subsequent discoveries showed the eggs were its own—it was brooding, not raiding. But the species and all its kin have to bear the slander through their afterlife.
If I had a nickel for every time I've realized I'm a member of a group which popular culture often (a) fetishizes, and (b) portrays as entirely female, I'd have ten cents. Which isn't very much money, but it does seem a little weird that it's happened twice.
"Sorry, our #medical systems here in the West have ZERO incentive to cure, only #treatment and #sustaining #patients long term in order to milk them. Even if they found a #cure, you wouldn’t get it. That’s just bad business."
"Go fuck yourself."
I think I handled that appropriately.
A friend points out that the success of the #Ukrainian #drone #attack on #Russian #airfields has to have the US and other large #defense #industries rather jittery. All those big high-tech megabucks systems ... something something ten-rupee jezail.
My suspicion is that the age of drone supremacy will be short-lived: as long as they rely on human #pilots on the ground, their #signals can be jammed, traced, or hacked. Best-case scenario, the drones become flying bricks. Middle-case, the ground control facilities become #artillery targets. Worst-case, the drones are turned against their erstwhile controllers.
Those systems already exist in embryonic form—note that #Ukraine had to rely on old-fashioned #infiltration to get close enough for the strikes to work. You can bet every major #military power on the planet is already putting a lot of money into R&D for much more sophisticated approaches. Of course the alternative is autonomous drones, taking off with a set of mission parameters and the same decision-making authority as pilots in crewed #aircraft. That, uh, presents its own set of problems.
With all this said, drones are going to be a big *part* of everyone's arsenal going forward, and yeah, it's going to disrupt current #doctrine considerably. Assuming Ukraine survives the war, which I'm increasingly confident it will, veterans will be in great demand as consultants—at least in smart countries. I wonder if the US will be one of those.
Joni #Ernst is a year younger than me. Like me, she probably has decades of life ahead of her. She is also probably aware, as I am, that we're at the age where things start ... just happening. Not to everyone our age, or even most people. But to some. To *enough* to be a source of worry.
A nagging #cough. A #mole you don't remember being there the last time you looked. The sensation of an irregular #heartbeat. Moments of inattention and confusion. Fear that never quite goes away.
If she has any of these symptoms, I hope they're nothing significant. Really, I do. There is a short list of people I truly want to see drop dead, and she's not on it. However vehemently I disagree with her politics, if she were my patient, I'd give her the best possible care. Like I always have.
But when she goes in for her next #medical appointment, if she mentions any of these or other worrisome symptoms to her provider, goes through the usual battery of tests—
—I really do kind of hope the good doctor says "well, we're all going to die" before giving her the all-clear.
Map of US #job losses due #federal #research #funding cuts, on a county-by-county level. Not shown: the number of jobs lost to knock-on effects, of which mine could well be one. And oh yeah, since so many of these grants are #medical and #epidemiological, the number of people who will FUCKING DIE as a result of this lunacy.
And here it is. "Kill kids and future mothers first" is an odd strategy for a natalist party, but expecting consistency from these loons is a mug's game. I bet I know how they make it fit together in their heads, and so do you. https://endpts.com/rfk-jr-ends-routine-covid-vaccine-guidance-for-kids-pregnant-women/?u=e79ec92b-641d-4704-968d-efd571e586b5
The lengths to which people will go to defend the #TrolleyProblem are both hilarious and terrifying. Bonus points if they accuse you of "not understanding thought experiments."
No, sweetie, I understand fine. I just don't want to be part of your circle jerk.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
