I enjoy following SF writers here because they're always on the lookout for cool ideas. Greg Egan (@gregeganSF), Bruce Sterling (@bruces), Charlie Stross (@cstross) and Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) are my faves.
For example, Sterling just pointed out the idea of a 'wastebasket taxon'. When biologists are trying to classify forms of life, this is a group they invent just to put organisms that don't fit anywhere else.
Pretty pathetic, eh? It's like how I have a desk drawer where I stick all the shit that I can't figure out where it goes.
There may still be a few wastebasket taxa in use, like the one containing miscellaneous long-necked dinosaurs. But luckily most of them listed on Wikipedia are no longer in use.
For example:
"Vermes is an obsolete taxon of worm-like animals. It was a catch-all term used by Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for non-arthropod invertebrate animals."
Or this:
"The order Insectivora has traditionally been used as a dumping ground for placental insectivorous mammals (and similar forms such as colugos). While the core components (moles, shrews, hedgehogs and their close relations) do in fact form a consistent clade, Eulipotyphla, other mammals historically placed in the order have been found to belong to other branches of the placental tree: tree shrews and colugos are euarchontans related to primates and sometimes grouped in Sundatheria, while tenrecs, golden moles and elephant shrews are all afrotheres."
I love stuff like this - now I get to learn about colugos! Ever seen one? If you're sick of doomscrolling, I recommend checking out Wikipedia pages about biology.
@johncarlosbaez An interesting variant on this term is the "wastebasket diagnosis". There's a few diagnoses often given by doctors that have fancy medical names but in practice only seem to accumulate just everyone with a "well, SOMETHING'S wrong" problem.
I think the polite way to frame this is "symptom-based disorder" but if you've ever spent a long time trying to interface with doctors about a medical problem that they don't actually know how to treat, you kinda stop feeling polite.
@mcc - my mom had tingling and numbness in her feet that she could never get properly diagnosed, much less treated. She even went to the Mayo Clinic. Eventually she fell down due to lack of sensation in her feet. Now I have tingling and numbness in my feet and I feel kinda hopeless about it.
So yeah, there's stuff that doesn't fit anywhere.
@johncarlosbaez I'm very sorry about that.
I'm going to ask an unhelpful question that you may just sigh at. Do you take vitamin B supplements?
(The reason I ask because if the answer is "yes" my reply might be "stop immediately".)
@mcc @johncarlosbaez Interesting, could be the opposite: a friend had tingling/numbness in his extremities, and taking B12 at a doc's suggested stopped the process (meaning it stopped getting worse, not that he regained the feeling that had already been lost).
Sympathies on the "wastebasket diagnosis", that's all too common.
I am not a doctor but what online sources say:
B6 is the one that builds up in the body and *too much* can cause peripheral neuropathy.
B12 is the one that *not enough* in the body can cause peripheral neuropathy.
So you want B12 but *not* B6.
But vitamins are generally unregulated, and it is hard to find any B vitamin except as a "B complex", and the B complexes usually contain unsafe amounts of B6.
So that's what you have to watch out for :(
YMMV, but I never found it hard to get supplements of B12 only in Poland or Switzerland (I mostly eat vegan, so I need to take them, eat things fortified with B12, or both), but had to specifically ask (and specifically ask for a nontiny dose).
@robryk @mcc @akkana - it's easy to buy vitamin B12 on its own here in the US, so while shopping for groceries at Trader Joe's today I picked up 100 tablets each containing 1 gram of B12. It claims to be 41,667% of the daily requirement, which seems like a lot. If I took this seriously I should take one pill every 114 years, but I'll do it more frequently.
@johncarlosbaez @robryk @akkana That sounds good to me!
Several people have commented to me while I was posting about this today that sometimes B12 is not absorbed as well as it should be and very large quantities of B12 can be a recommended means of addressing this. I cannot confirm this, to reiterate, I have no medical training and a doctor would likely have helpful opinions on this.
@mcc - don't worry, I'm not using you as a free doctor! I just realized that my B12 was low in some earlier tests I had done, and I'd never gotten around to trying to correct that. I've heard that for some people the problem is inefficient uptake; that must be part of why they sell such high doses. I will take a bit and make sure I don't take too much. If I keel over, I won't blame anyone but myself. 😏
@mcc - oh, and I never answered this:
"I'm going to ask an unhelpful question that you may just sigh at. Do you take vitamin B supplements?"
No, I do not. Thanks. At my doctor's recommendation I'm taking vitamin D and iron, since both were low in my blood tests. Those are the only supplements I've been taking.
When I tried to make sense of reasonable doses (fwiw I take 1mg/day in a supplement and my milk, yoghurt, and cheese replacements are fortified to levels iirc similar to the originals) I've encountered descriptions of reasons for low levels. There is apparently an efficient food->blood transport that's broken in some people (in whom this is the reason for the low level in blood). There's also a ~100x times less efficient transport by, afair, just straight up diffusion, so one approach (but the least well studied iiuc) for those people is to give them absurdly massive doses orally (the better studied approach to treating those people is IM injections).
@robryk My experience in the US and Canada is that B12 can often be found on its own, but B1 and B7 hard to find except as part of a complex with B6. As far as I know B12 is the Important one but I was recommended B7 by a doctor and struggled to find it.
A Wikipedia page I found after posting the above is that European governments are noticeably stricter about how much B6 a particular supplement should or may contain. That may impact what you encounter in the EU.