O, ja! We always do it at the end of season before it is stalled in a hall. Sad thing is that we have not sailed a meter yet this year. Maintenance, new auto pilot installed and very bad weather. On Thursday we give it another try😎
A cautionary tale for doctors and those training to be doctors: The story of @Zoe O'Connell
About 15 years ago, Zoe was in the army reserves and very fit, She left, and around that time started to put on weight. The weight gain continued even as she stayed fit (and by stayed fit, I mean we were climbing actual mountains in the Alps and suchlike).
Around 10 years ago, Zoe's health started to suffer a lot. She started getting increasingly fatigued. It was sufficiently bad, that she started looking for medical advice.
Lots of tests done. None of them turned up anything conclusive. Maybe Lyme disease? maybe now? Zoe was getting to the point where she was thinking of having to stop work.
Then, around 6 years ago, a friend happened to say, "you have western Irish ancestry. Have you been tested for coeliac disease?"
She had not. Zoe asked her doctor for a coeliac blood test. It came back positive. A biopsy subsequently confirmed that Zoe ha
... Show more...
A cautionary tale for doctors and those training to be doctors: The story of @Zoe O'Connell
About 15 years ago, Zoe was in the army reserves and very fit, She left, and around that time started to put on weight. The weight gain continued even as she stayed fit (and by stayed fit, I mean we were climbing actual mountains in the Alps and suchlike).
Around 10 years ago, Zoe's health started to suffer a lot. She started getting increasingly fatigued. It was sufficiently bad, that she started looking for medical advice.
Lots of tests done. None of them turned up anything conclusive. Maybe Lyme disease? maybe now? Zoe was getting to the point where she was thinking of having to stop work.
Then, around 6 years ago, a friend happened to say, "you have western Irish ancestry. Have you been tested for coeliac disease?"
She had not. Zoe asked her doctor for a coeliac blood test. It came back positive. A biopsy subsequently confirmed that Zoe had coeliac disease.
"Ah-ha!", said the doctors. "We now understand why your health has been deteriorating! You have coeliac disease! Adopt a strict gluten free diet and all will be well":
This was 2019. Zoe adopted a strict gluten free diet. There was some small improvement, but overall her health continued to deteriorate.
Zoe started paying for private blood tests to find out WHY. The coeliac was under control. her gut was recovered. Her numbers were good. But she was getting more and more unwell.
Finally the tests started to show something. Her prolactin was off.
The NHS sent her to an endocrinologist. He confirmed her prolactin was off, but decided it was not worth treating.
Frustrated, Zoe paid to see a private endocrinologist. An MRI subsequently confirmed that Zoe has a 14mm wide benign tumour in her pituitary: a prolactinoma.
Based on the size, it probably started growing around the time her health started to deteriorate.
Zoe has been on drugs to shrink the tumour for a month now. She is seeing the most rapid health improvement in years (she doesn't think so, but to an external observer the improvement is very very obvious).
Doctors: beware of diagnostic overshadowing. Yes, she had coeliac disease, but that was not why her health was so utterly screwed.
The bit of middle age where you fall asleep on the sofa because you’re too tired to get up and then randomly awake fully clothed feeling like arse at 2am … hate that.
@Charles ☭ H I am a creature of simple tastes, Charles. I know what I like, and self parodying unpleasant arseholes making fools of themselves in public and showing the world what an utter joke they are is one of those things.
@Susan Lewis They broadcast their daftness with complaints roughly of the form “Miss! Miss! Sarah said I was a pubic louse and Jeff laughed please put him in detention.”
By the way, I know you're reading this because you can't help yourself, so I have a message just for you, Ms H, and I know you're reading it from my profile, so the formatting will be preserved. I have a message for you:
Interesting question just came up re driving in the UK on Reddit. Someone wants to go from the M11 to the A3 and asks which way round the M25 they should go. These roads are pretty much equidistant regardless of whether you go clockwise or anti-clockwise round London.
That’s the route we take to Scarlet, so I have opinions on this. Go clockwise from the M11 and you encounter the Dartford crossing. This is a toll crossing, and is often very congested.
Go anti-clockwise and you pass the Heathrow section.
For me, there is no contest. Pay the damn toll. It may be annoying to have to put up with the Dartford crossing, but the Heathrow section of the M25 is the very arsehole of hell and to be avoided at all costs.
@Pyroéaon 🏳️⚧️ in reverse I still choose Dartford. There are usually queues for the tunnels, but Heathrow is still Satan’s very arsehole and I just can’t be doing with it.
This post is addressing a specific TERF. I’m pretty sure she hate-reads me, and I think it’s important to note that, and I want to be very clear on this:
I still think you’re akin to a bedbug or a pubic louse.
You come at the queen or her friends, you better not miss, asshole.
Pretty sure that, while this server is hosted in the European Union, were it in the uk, my view that TERFs are akin to bedbugs and public lice would be a protected belief, thanks to the outcome of Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe.
@Sarah Brown @Sylvia Knight I assume most Americans aren’t terrified by this state of affairs and would think it’s us who are weird for not waving lethal weaponry about.
I see your smirky sailor, and raise you a smirky stageworker / theater lighting tech.
It's definitely one of those skills when you see someone doing it wrong it's a hard fight not to fling yourself across the room and tackle them "NO NO NO NO NO! WRONG WRONG WRONG! GIMME THAT"
@SftwareTheron I wouldn’t have asked what people saw if I thought them telling me would be wasting my time!
This does present a handy way for long form blog posts that preserve formatting though, essentially forcing a click through for software that doesn’t support rich content.
Reddit can be a useful knowledge base, but there are certain subject areas where the consensus voice will confidently, clearly, emphatically state something that is simply wrong.
My current irritation is r/sailing, which has a large number of people who have clearly never sailed beyond the yacht club bar, or maybe a small lake, and have precisely zero clue about the interplay between wind and current (because they never experience the latter), spouting off bullshit with authority.
And there’s no point arguing with them, but my god, the extent to which they are smug about being wrong is irritating as fuck.
@saramg @thelocalecho @ajlanes Abseiling 120' down a waterfall into a river in flash flood, then walking out past the "route closed" signs was a memorable one.
@ajlanes @thelocalecho @saramg I figure it was fair you did the running, after all, I'd done the abseil into a flooded river with the possibility of having to climb back up a very slippery waterfall.
@ajlanes @thelocalecho @zoe Crib Goch wasn't near-death either, but I still felt profoundly unwise wandering along a steep spine of wet, slick rock in dense fog over a 500m drop to either side.
Those are very tasty. Enough that I’ll choose them over many other non-gf M&S sandwiches. (ISTR @zoe being surprised at this - “you didn’t have to buy GF sandwiches just because you were going to eat them at me”)
The barely concealed glee from climate doomers with their crescendo of “look at the graphs! We’re all going to die, and it was totally your fault for putting an aluminium bun case in the black bin that one time” is, I have to be honest, kinda getting me down.
@Sarah Brown I think we must allow us to be humans and make those occational mistakes. What is important is the direction, not the bumps on the road. I recycle a lot, but there are days when I am less thorough. I don't drive an electric car because.. well money but also because I have no place to charge one. Instead I've chosen one as small and light as I can live with. It's not perfect but it's what I can currently do.
@Maria Karlsen Lots of us do what we can do. The reality is though that none of it makes any difference. Our actions on an individual level are irrelevant. It would be like trying to build a 747 by individuals making paper aeroplanes.
The people who can fix this are governments and massive industries, and they don’t want to.
There is literally no point in the constant moralising and insinuation that we’re all fucked because we didn’t believe in fairies, er I mean recycling, hard enough.
It’s just terrifying people for the sake of terrifying people.
@shimriez I used to feel the same way, and still largely do. The actions and choices of individuals can not meaningfully shift the impact on the climate. I also don't believe in any sort of shaming. It's just a terrible motivator. You don't want people to feel like "climate" is about finger wagging tree huggers who feel superior to you because they recycle.
But I also think that individual action matters, because in a more sustainable future our lives will look differently, we might as well get a head start. And it normalizes caring about these things, and helps to start conversations on the topic. I think it can help create broader public support for tough climate action, which will help politicians to take their responsibility.
So yeah I guess I largely agree, doomerism and shaming are counterproductive. That's not how you mobilize people.
There is also the social value of the alternatives: biking or taking public transportation enables a different relationship to the world.
When I bike, I notice things that I don't see when I drive or take the bus, while taking transit allows me to be in a space with other people--it takes me out of my personal bubble and forces engagement with the world.
Personally, I feel that the shift to individual EVs misses on the opportunity to restructure our world.
@Sarah Brown While I agree that it's the governments and industries that are the biggest polluters and have the most power to change things - if they want to. I still think that what many millions of people do or don't do also matters. If nothing else to keep hope up and despair down.
@Maria Karlsen When I say none of it makes any difference, I'm specifically talking about the effect individual actions have on climate change. To a first approximation, this is zero, and has little scope for it to be any other number.
I agree that we can very definitely make a difference in how people feel, and this is the source of my complaint: the constant stream of "we are all going to die, because we are filthy eco-sinners" articles just make people feel like shit.
It's basically doom and gloom protestantism, but with the climate playing the role of their god.
!Friendica Support I accidentally removed a thread locally. The thread is ongoing on the original server and I'm quite keen to get it back. Is it possible to do this? If I paste any of the URLs from the posts into the search box, I just get an error page.
Ah, alas I was hoping we might run into each other again, but I can#t blame you for going to Portugal. If I thought I had a snowball's chance of finding an academic position, I'd follow.
To be honest it's such a simple marque it does not surprise me that it's already in use. I would have expected some social media business to have used it by now. Trying to find even complex names that are unique is very challenging.
It's almost like Twitter was actually a valuable brand . . .
I have a theory that Musk is actually bipolar to some degree, at least prone to mania. He seems to go from simply being a jerk (not a bipolar or autistic trait, just who he is) but not crazy, to doing utterly bizarre things for a period of time, then calm down a bit. Certainly a fascination with a letter and tearing through a business over it without regard to the consequences seems like that. If so, presumably he only manages to do it without intervention because these aren't listed companies, since surely others would get wise to what was happening,
Hi from bsky. You need an invitation to get here. The website link is published through telepathy. We have twelve active users and a nightly circular firing squad. You can’t link to posts anywhere, but you can verify yourself by visiting your favourite domain registrar with your compsci degree.
Today we will be talking about why fediverse is so hard to use and why it will never be popular with its fifteen million users.
Bluesky is developing a very weird dynamic. In the day it fills up with shitposts and then I got to bed and wake up, and the bodies of the circular firing squad crew are all over the place. It’s like two entirely different social media sites and which you get depends on your time zone.
It's a deep rot. Heck, if the centre ground ish politicians in Europe had *any* sense of self preservation, let alone decency, measures like votes for all residents would be much, much higher up the political agenda. But the average European social democrat, centrist-liberal, or christian democrat politician still consider giving us votes more off the table, more beyond the pale, than letting actual fascists into government.
This entry was edited (Saturday, July 22, 2023, 9:11 AM)
so-called left wing parties: we're uhhhh anti Brussels? we want affordability? hold corporations """accountable""" in some vague undefined way? anyway sorry can't talk about immigration, nationalisation or climate collapse because guess what, greedflation's happening so it's time for more austerity
The LGBTQ+ charity also appears to have softened its stance on the issue of single-sex spaces, as Mr Anderson said he supports exemptions that can be used to exclude transgender people from women's prisons and toilets.
I never got why it's ok to refuse someone to use a toilet based on their gender. It should be about being polite and leaving the space safe and clean for the next person, instead of all this gender stuff. Where did the idea for gender based toilet access come from anyway? Isn't it just daft and ignorable?
Forty years in the tory party. I suspect someone has rattled one of his skeletons. He was interviewed by Nick Robinson in February. thepinknews.com/2023/02/13/lgb…
IIRC I think that was when Ben Summerskill was CE. They were as transphobic AF. Summerskill weirdly was opposed to marriage equality for LG people too 🤪
I had a horrible feeling that Nancy Kelley's resignation was to do with backsliding on trans rights.
Anderson was involved with the Tory government until recently.
I think it took a very heavy toll on her. I have a great deal of respect for Ruth, and I think her force of will was maybe more important than any of us (her included) realised.
How is it that people like this look at how right wingers act and treat them and think they’re willing to be compassionate, empathetic or decent human beings? The right thinks queer people have no place in society. Nothing that you do is going to change that. This stance is suicidally stupid.
Ozzy
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Ozzy • •Shimriez
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •