DrBob
@DrBob@lemmy.ca
Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 3 days ago:
We just call that a donation. And it goes through a PAC and it’s legal. The supreme Court has removed all the guard rails so unlimited donations and direct coordination with a PAC is now possible.
- Comment on What's the difference between ignorance and stupidity? 4 days ago:
Ignorance is not knowing. Stupidity is not applying what you know. Think of the friends meme…
- Comment on Has their ever been a movie or documentary that shows a person running for an office at the very beginning, the show the middle (and if they get bribed) then to the election night? 4 days ago:
What good is bribing a candidate? And by bribe do you mean blackmail?
- Comment on How bad were the asylums that Reagan closed in his tenure? Were they really that bad? Did no one take a look at the staff and bed side manner? Or was it really like Born On The Fourth of July? 5 days ago:
There is a lot of nuance that gets lost in the discussion of asylums, particularly if you know about them primarily from fictional sources. Historically they were actually a great improvement over the model that existed up to the late 1800s. That model threw the mentally ill into a general prisoner population which included debtors, criminals, and anyone else deemed appropriate. There wasn’t a keen understanding of mental illness or how it differed from cognitive dysfunction or how either of them differed from bad morals. It didn’t matter because there wasn’t really any treatment anyways.
There were attempts to separate out those who couldn’t care for themselves from those who wouldn’t. Bethlehem Hospital is an example of this and that did not work out particularly well. It gave us the word bedlam in english which means loud confusion. It was a popular tourist attraction as well with the well-to-do paying fees to watch the capers of the mentally ill while they suffered. So prison or a sideshow.
Against this backdrop the asylum model was pretty humane. By the early 20th century medicine was getting a hand in mental illness, and there was general agreement that we shouldn’t make their lives miserable for our own amusement. At its best, an asylum would be in a rural location with an associated farm. Residents would work if they were able tending animals or gardens, or maintaining the buildings or working in the kitchen. The produce would provide some income and partially supply the kitchens. What developed then was a self contained community with some residential staff.
One of the best documents for this model is Erving Goffman’s Asylums published in 1961. It examines the asylum model in great detail. It is worth mentioning that there was anti-psychiatry movement at that time that continued build steam through the 1970s. Goffman writes with an eye towards that movement that often portrays the staff as being the beneficiaries of the institution. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest shows this in a setting reminiscent of bedlam like torture. Inherent Vice portrays it in a humorous fashion with psychiatrists dining on linen table cloths and eating gourmet meals prepared by patients. Both are fictionalized exaggerations, but it’s true of any institution that lacks strong oversight that they will be highly variable depending on the specific adminstration and culture at a locale. This is true of prisons as well.
So that was kind of the situation in 1980 when Reagan came into office closed them all down. The mentally ill now live on the streets. I worked in this area for many years. It’s funny to me how a modern best practice would have a stable community setting with residential staff and meaningful work for people according to their capacity. Sound familiar?
- Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe? 6 days ago:
That’s me lurking until I have something to contribute.
- Comment on How Come Latin Didn't Spread in the Middle East as Much as it did in Europe? 6 days ago:
Any of us can ask AI and throw slop into a conversation. If you don’t have anything substantive to add maybe read and learn.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 6 days ago:
Who cares about Dallas, Houston or Atlanta - do people actually go those places when they don’t have to? I mean travel there by choice rather than necessity.
- Comment on modern humour 1 week ago:
Fourth.
- Comment on How did Voldemort actually die? 2 weeks ago:
I was a full grown adult when these books came out. I had to hate read them because of nieces and nephews etc and I have always known that they sucked and that Rowling was a lazy, shitty writer. It used to be an unpopular opinion. It’s nice to see the world caught up.
- Comment on When the first Black Hole was discovered in 1971 what did the scientist actually think it was at first? How come now it seems that it destroys everything it ingests? Why is it not a funnel of sorts? 2 weeks ago:
You misunderstand what a theory vs a fact is. If a fact is a lego brick,a theory is a what you build.
A theory collects facts and builds a cohesive narrative to explain why they are. Most importantly there will be gaps, so a theory makes predictions about facts that we don’t have yet. When a new finding fits expectations, then the theory is supported. When a new finding is unexpected or doesn’t fit, it’s time to reclaim the bricks and build a new structure.
So black holes were predicted and fit the theory very well. It increased our confidence that the theory was moving in the right direction.
- Comment on What is the hate against Pit Bulls? Everyone I've met are super friendly like my BC. Or are they the new Doberman for this cycle? 2 weeks ago:
Pitbulls are the hollow points of the dog world. There is nothing wrong with them per se but the consequences of one being misused are so much worse.
- Comment on Russian Roulette. 2 weeks ago:
Dick measuring contest 😋👍
- Comment on people who take zoom calls in coffee shops are insufferable 3 weeks ago:
The ones I’ve always seen seem to be targeted to remote workers and solo practitioners - people who need some support space on a regular basis so there are service tiers and payment plans. I just need someplace to sit when the bat phone goes off. And yes I use headphones.
- Comment on people who take zoom calls in coffee shops are insufferable 3 weeks ago:
ITT people with jobs where they have to be available vs those who do not.
- Comment on people who take zoom calls in coffee shops are insufferable 3 weeks ago:
They do, and neither work in most cases.
I have used libraries before and they are great for this when they are close by. I’ve never used a co-working space - do they have drop in desks where I can just slip in to one in a storage city and give them $10 to sit for 30 minutes?
My need typically comes when I’m travelling and something comes up. Coffee shops are quick and convenient and they have always been used for this kind of thing. Right back to their historical origin as trading houses.
- Comment on people who take zoom calls in coffee shops are insufferable 3 weeks ago:
Sorry my dude. Sometimes there ain’t no option. If internet cafes were still a thing I’d do them there.
- Comment on clean that up 3 weeks ago:
Boomers are older than the 1970s. The baby boom started at the end of the Second World War and ran until the early/mid 1960s. By the late 1960s we were deep into what used to be called the baby bust but eventually came to be known as GenX. People at the end of the boom from around 1960 to 1964 or so identify more closely with X and sometimes refer to themselves as Jones. I could write more about all of this but it is probably dull. One of the hallmarks of the break between the generations though was the availability of services, notably related to student grants and loans.
- Comment on Valid point 3 weeks ago:
Well…there is something to the life stages/cultural currency bits. I say that as GenX.
Growing up everything was about Boomers - 50s nostalgia was huge, every gritty character had been in Nam, movies were people in their 30s looking back to college, TV was about having babies. None of it meant anything to us. Kennedy was shot years before I was born. We didn’t remember Nam, Nixon or the Beatles. It just didn’t feel like there was cultural space for us and our issues weren’t worth discussing in public spaces.
- Comment on Valid point 3 weeks ago:
What’s an antiFamily card?
- Comment on clean that up 3 weeks ago:
Also GenX. Go fuck yourself.
- Comment on If the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas was made today in these times would it be too meta on the current society? Or would it be seen as trying to push an agenda? 3 weeks ago:
He was proto-MAGA in the film. We just didn’t have a name for it then. He was a engineer working for a defense contractor whose life fell apart because he was an asshole, and there was a peace dividend. Instead of embracing change, or reflecting on macro-level impacts, he goes apeshit and takes it out on fellow citizens who he views as being out of step with his vision of the world.
- Comment on Since Endorphins and Serotonin are two completely different chemicals which give the biggest "High"? And does the release of some of one of them overcompensate for the other? How come? 3 weeks ago:
This is related to what I used to study. I’d say the difficulty with the question lays with how we interpret “biggest high”. Stimulation of those systems produces a qualitatively different user experience, and even more so depending on the dose, mechanism, and selectivity of the agonist. So serotonergic activation can produce experiences that range from relaxation to full blown psychedelic experiences. Activation of the opioid system can produce warm comfort to catatonia.
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 3 weeks ago:
I knew someone at a bar who would use 4 foot lengths of PVC tubes. They’d fill the tubes and freeze them. The bottom half would be clear and the top half would have all of the impurities etc. (or maybe the other way?). The dirty half would get smashed for the well and the clear part would get polished into spheres.
- Comment on That's some mighty fine lanes you got there! 3 weeks ago:
I used to do ERK! Back when half the literature referred to it as MAPK which confused all the microtubule associated protein people.
The fat caterpillar band is exactly what you see when you’ve overloaded the gel. You should drop the load and pull on an appropriate gel to able to see the gap between the 44 and 42 kd species. You may have an effect on just one.
The other issue is that if the lanes have that much protein your controls are all at ceiling. The effect could be due to variable loading but you can’t tell because one lane is at 10x ceiling and the next is at 2x ceiling. The controls look equal but you produce an effect on the target lanes. This isn’t even lab meeting quality. This is promising at the end of a shitty day quality.
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 3 weeks ago:
How does that work?
- Comment on That's some mighty fine lanes you got there! 3 weeks ago:
OP doesn’t know what a good Western look like. You could surf on those waves between lanes. And the wells were overloaded - just look at the fat, blurry bands.
- Comment on "Guess what's in my ass!" 3 weeks ago:
Shock. I have no idea who this guy is. You mean he might be into it?
- Comment on "Guess what's in my ass!" 3 weeks ago:
What’s left of a glass jar.
- Comment on Why can’t we swap our minds today? 4 weeks ago:
You have a category error that makes this hard to follow. Brains and minds are different things. The brain is a physical organ made of cells. A mind is the conceptual something that occurs when a brain is functioning.
- Comment on Mighty fine 4 weeks ago:
Swell piece of French art.
