I just wrote 8 pages when I haven’t written in months and was beginning to think I’d never be able to again. Idk what it is, but I am sharing and manifesting this energy for every writer who sees this. May you write 8 quality pages effortlessly and find joy writing once more
Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
No wait I looked this guy up and this shit’s amazing
It’s so incredibly humanizing to see people from the very distant past in such authentic color
And like. look at these landscape shots!! They’re so vivid!! Even aside from the historical value, these are just legitimately beautiful photographs
Oooh but you cannot NOT mention Sergei Makhailovich’s photography in the snow ! The colours on these are incredible
btw all of his works can be found in high definition and neatly catalogued on the library of congress website
We had a large print of the Rabbi and students (2nd image) in my house growing up. One of those boys could have been friends of my great great grandparents. (my family has long geneaological records and Im afraid none of them are my ancestor).
i got a 100% on this bostonian-to-english quiz but i grew up near boston….. i’m curious what you guys get. there’s a couple things in here i didn’t even know are regionalisms + a couple things i hadn’t heard before but could parse pretty easily from context. tag/reply with what you got and if you’re familiar with the area or not!
Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the technology.
Their initiative, dubbed Poison Fountain, asks website operators to add links to their websites that feed AI crawlers poisoned training data. It’s been up and running for about a week.
AI crawlers visit websites and scrape data that ends up being used to train AI models, a parasitic relationship that has prompted pushback from publishers. When scaped data is accurate, it helps AI models offer quality responses to questions; when it’s inaccurate, it has the opposite effect.
[…]
Poison Fountain was inspired by Anthropic’s work on data poisoning, specifically a paper published last October that showed data poisoning attacks are more practical than previously believed because only a few malicious documents are required to degrade model quality.
The individual who informed The Register about the project asked for anonymity, “for obvious reasons” – the most salient of which is that this person works for one of the major US tech companies involved in the AI boom.
Begging on my knees for the non-jews who follow me to 1)read this and 2)reblog this without removing me from the reblog. Please. The Jewish people in your life are not okay. They are in danger. I LEFT AMERICA because I saw this coming. And I was RIGHT. I’m asking you please reblog and read it, non-Jews. Please. Just this once. Take the time. It’s not accusing you of anything. It’s just asking you to consider opening your heart to us. We are telling the truth about how bad things are. We really are.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Before that, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence.
For perspective, I’ve been diabetic for about 25% of this discovery’s history. When my grandparents were born, this treatment did not exist. If you ask me, “what time period would be fun to go back to?” I can’t even speculate more than one hundred years back, because I know I couldn’t live in that world.
Today, I’m going to pick up four boxes of insulin from my local drug store. My endocrinologist is renewing my prescription, so I’m set for several months to come. I lead a more difficult life than someone without Type 1 diabetes, but I do live, and so do my relatives and friends with the condition. Thank you, Banting, Best, Macleod, and Collip (and all those dogs), for letting me do that.
One hundred years later, after insulin’s discoverer gave his patent away for $1 so as never to profit from the discovery, pharmaceutical companies are forcing people to ration insulin or go without entirely due to unchecked price increases. This is particularly true in the US, and is a major reason why I did not stay there after graduate school. There, and in much of the world where insulin is expensive and scarce, people are dying. Things are starting to change, but not soon enough. It’s been one hundred years, and we need to do better when the alternative is death.
Insulin is worth being grateful about, and its exploitation is worth being angry about. One thing to be aware of is that it is a treatment only, not a cure. Diabetes is still high-maintenance, and I still have a very complicated relationship to it.
Today, though, I’m choosing to focus on my gratitude, and being alive, and being able to go for a walk with my friend in the rain-scented air, do some trivia, see a show.
They say the change in the first child to receive a dose of insulin, 100 years ago, looked like magic.
Today (January 11, 2022) is the 100th anniversary of the first insulin injection being given to a human patient, 14-year old Leonard Thompson.
It wasn’t a perfect solution - Thompson actually had an allergic reaction to the first shot, probably due to an impurity - but, twelve days later, they had refined the dosage enough for a successful, magic-like change. I cannot emphasize how much Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence before this moment, and what an incredible gift, an incredible second chance, insulin was, despite its imperfections.
It’s important to note that Thompson successfully took insulin for 13 years, but still died at the age of 26. This was not directly because of diabetes. Insulin gave him the chance to live. Pneumonia killed him. Diabetic bodies are still more vulnerable to illness and anything else that compromises homeostasis.
It would have been my friend’s 40th birthday yesterday. He also had diabetes, and was in the hospital for related complications, but COVID (which he caught there) is what killed him.
My (out, proud, and brilliant) friend’s motto was from Tony Kushner’s masterwork Angels in America: “More Life.” It’s a play in large part about the AIDS epidemic, which was overlooked or even celebrated by many because the people who died from it were considered undesirable, expendable, broken.
Insulin gives me more life. Its costs still shorten the lives others. We, along with other marginalized groups, are still in many respects considered expendable.
I’m still grateful for so many things, and I’m still angry about so many others.
More Life.
It’s the 101st anniversary of the first insulin shot today.
Jon should have turned 41 yesterday.
This week, my diabetes tech failed me twice; first, my continuous glucose monitor went defective and rogue, giving completely incorrect readings which determined my basal insulin dose and thus made me ill, a roller coaster of highs and lows as insulin was cut off and delivered at random, until I stopped the sensor. Why didn’t I cut it off immediately? Because a ten-day sensor costs at least $100, and once you shut it down, it’s done. I was hoping it would fix itself, as sometimes happens.
On Monday, my pump site failed just before I started teaching. I was so busy for the three hours that I didn’t notice, until the alarm sounded that I was out of insulin. My pump had delivered everything it had left, none of which wound up in my body, in a desperate attempt to lower my blood sugar. After only three hours without insulin, my blood sugar, which had been resting comfortably between the “diabetic normal” of 4-8, had risen to 20. All I had consumed that day was water. I was sick for the rest of the day.
For a Type 1 diabetic, and for many Type 2s, a lack of insulin is a death sentence. At the same time, in our current reality, each new advancement, each little bit of magic, comes at a cost.
Despite its imperfections, it’s still an incredible gift.
I just wish the gift were freely available to everyone.
It’s the 104th anniversary (January 11, 1922) of the first insulin injection given to a human. Jon’s 44th birthday would have been yesterday. He was born only 60 years after this medical advance, so close in living memory that it’s a little frightening to think about where I and many others would be without it.
I started the Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor two weeks ago, after being on the G6 for a few years. Startlingly, my blood sugar has been in range more than 90% of the time for an entire week. Talk about magic.
If the system can be trusted, that is–another company’s CGM has recently been implicated in at least 7 deaths (none in North America, though, chirp the articles–only 57 injuries in the US). When you pair the monitor with an insulin pump, letting it control your baseline insulin delivery, it is an incredible act of trust that you can’t think about too much lest you turn into an anxious mess. Check your sources with another meter if things seem too uncharacteristic. But a rogue sensor can kill in the night.
Gratitude, though. A few nights ago, I came home incredibly tired. I made myself a sandwich, took insulin before eating the sandwich (because you’re supposed to do so at least 15 minutes before you eat for optimum insulin efficiency–yet another consideration), then fell asleep before eating the sandwich. A potentially fatal error that I haven’t made in years and years. When my blood sugar crashes, I almost always wake up. Not this time. The Dexcom worked its magic, stopped my basal insulin, dragged me up from the depths. No medical attention required. Gratitude [it looked like magic].
On the other side of 40, I’ve noticed the first wisps of what might be aging, what might be diabetes complications. Anger: this disease has stolen so much. Gratitude: I’m still here to feel these things.
Getting on the new CGM was an insurance nightmare. Dexcom stopped its delivery service and discount program, cutting us off in its rush to get us all on the most updated version. It is a business, after all! Prescriptions wouldn’t transfer. Discount codes expired. Three different insurance programs had to be notified, begged, at the most hectic time of year. There was a gap and I had to buy emergency supplies out of pocket (hundreds of dollars that I can thankfully currently afford).
I apologized to the trainee pharmacy student behind the counter for all the stress. “No, no,” he said. “This is good, I’m learning a lot.”
Leonard Thompson would have died a skeleton in 1922 at 14 years of age. I just had to call my insurance company a few times. It’s not the same, yet the underlying fear is.
The advances are great; so are the costs. Advances don’t mean anything if they don’t come with access.
“you can’t hate ICE agents for wanting a fat paycheck” ah yes. people who are willing to disregard all morals for cash. congratulations you played right into their hands you uneducated piece of shit
you couldn’t pay me an amount even feasible to do this evil shit. you are lower than dirt
This. You can and should judge people for working for ICE, they’re people who willingly signed up for an American secret police force that’s violating the rights of people constantly in order to act as enforcers of a fascist government.
Basically everyone is not an ICE agent. Like, virtually all of us, the entire population, are not ICE agents. No matter how steep our bills are, very nearly every single American is not an ICE agent.
We can, and should, judge them forever. It should be the sort of thing their grandkids are ashamed to discover. The sort of thing that hamstrings a career forever. “What were you doing in 2025-26? Oh, you were with ICE? Thank you for your time, get out right now.”
They should all be judged and shunned for the rest of their lives.
The funniest thing I’ve learned in the last day is that the “$50K bonus” only pays out after 5 years of service.
Like, lmao, you thought Trump was gonna give you a big chunk of cash? Silly.
I wonder what the actual pay is, and whether that additional 10K a year makes it a livable wage.
99% of them will never get that money regardless bc agents are washing out and quitting faster than they can handwave more through because, well…
If “in a galaxy far far away” is the opening to Jedi fairytales then does that mean that the entire Star Wars saga is a story specifically being told by a Jedi somewhere? Is it a Jedi far into the future long after the chaos of the Skywalker line has settled and faded telling little initiates a bedtime story?
(Did the Skywalker saga actually happen or is it simply a warning to younglings on the dangers of the Darkside? Is it both?)
(We already knew it was a story being told long after that fact. But we never knew who was telling the story.)
ALT
ALT
