Interesting Links for 30-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Dark Souls - Walking through memories (a video I bumped into, and want to be able to find again later)

(tags:games video memory )

2. The Illusionist: The Mind-Bending Installations of Artist Felice Varini

(tags:art optical_illusion )

3. Functional 16-bit CPU built and runs in Excel, 3Hz processor includes 128KB of RAM, 16-color display, and a custom assembly language | Tom's Hardware

(tags:excel computer impressive viaSwampers )

4. The Northern Irish government is fascinating and dysfunctional - the report here on how to reform it is very interesting (pages 33-42)

(tags:NorthernIreland politics government )

5. A fascinating and intriguing look behind the scenes of the audio version of Sandman

(tags:sandman audio neilgaiman )

6. A simple, cheap drug could prevent STIs. So why isn't the NHS providing it?

(tags:medicine sex infection disease NHS OhForFucksSake )

7. 'Tidal wave' of sex abuse in music industry, MPs told

(tags:abuse women UK music OhForFucksSake )

8. Patients say keto helps with their mental illness. Science is racing to understand why

(tags:diet health mentalhealth )

Comments

[lilysea]

Patients say keto helps with their mental illness. Science is racing to understand why

It might be due to reducing inflammation - previous research has shown that anti-inflammatory medications can reduce mental illness severity in a range of mental illnesses.

[autopope]

Doxycycline is one of the original 1950s tetracycline antibiotics, it's really important, and antibiotic resistance is a problem -- handing it out as a prophylactic would be the height of madness in public health terms because if you want to render it useless within a decade by producing wide-spread resistance in bacteria, that's how you'd go about it.

Much safer to wait for some eedjit to test positive for syphilis or chlamydia and then prescribe them a full course, ideally with followup-testing and a pep talk about how to take the medication.

[channelpenguin]

Not necessarily an eejit. And even if so, innocent other partners can suffer. But, yeah antibiotic resistance is Very Bad News. As noted, agricultural usage dwarfs human usage many many many times over. More humane conditions might alleviate that need quite a bit. (Or more of us becoming vegans!

All that said, antibiotic resistance is still Very Bad News and I've got no good solutions.

[andrewducker]

Covered in the article.

Edit: Which is to say, I'm totally fine with you disagreeing, but you basically didn't add any information to what was already in there, or explain why they were wrong in their assessment.

[autopope]

I should also note that there is a blanket Department of Health policy going back at least as far as the Medicines Act (1968) and probably to the 1940s that antibiotics should never be dispensed without a doctor's prescription, full stop.

[adrian_turtle]

Not reading the bit behind the paywall, I'm speculating that their assessment is either that we didn't need to worry about creating more doxycycline-resistant bacteria because the stuff is already overused in agriculture? Or is it that we don't need to worry about doxycicline-resistant bacteria because we have stronger antibiotics these days?

[anna_wing]

The Varini illusions are amazing. I wonder it it's possible to one oneself at home? The description of the process is a bit bare-bones: projected design and then painted.