Seems this newfound ability to detect cancers earlier than we thought possible could be used to develop better treatments to boost the body's innate ability to eliminate cancerous cells before they turn malign: 1) identify thousands of people with traces of cancerous DNA that are too weak to merit immediate action and who are willing to participate in a trial. 2) Divide them into two groups, one group gets for one month a daiiy dose of auricularia auricula fungus extract or whatever that is believed to possibly prevent cancers from developing, the other group gets a placebo. 3) Run the early-detection test again at the end of the month to see whether or not there is a difference in cancerous DNA signal strength between the two groups.

That sort of thing would be awesome. I suspect it’d have to be community driven. Perhaps with some academics but who knows if IRBs would approve.

Doing this same idea but with inflammation monitoring would be enormously valuable as well.

Just an idea: Could the effects of trauma from slavery be trans-generational, via biological or cultural channels, and impacting ability to compete in the workplace?

I've only read some of Bly's poetry, as well as his famous essay "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry". The latter is an amazing critique of 20th century American poetry as a whole. It identifies a certain branching off, starting with T.S. Elliot and his contemporaries, in the general consensus of what poems should do and what makes a poem good. If you ever felt like you can't get into the poems of celebrated poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos WIlliams and others, this essay may help you understand why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrong_Turning_in_American_Po...

Decentralized finance, in theory at least, undermines their power to determine the rules of the game: the decentralized nature of DeFi potentially dimishes the ability of financial lobbyists and the revolving door to influence regulation and policy. It also enables the lightning-fast rise of what would be serious competitors for JPM's customers. That's why I think that, if DeFi were to actually get big enough, companies like JPM would for a change start crying for MORE regulation. All in the name of protecting easily-swindled retail investors, of course.

"Patients admitted to private equity-owned nursing homes are 50 percent more likely to be placed on antipsychotic medication. By sedating patients rather than applying behavioral therapy, nursing homes can reduce staffing needs...."

The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get" poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I don't think the getting could have happened at all.

As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.

Cerebral understanding can help carry you further inside how a poem works, and increase your enjoyment of it. It's a lot like the scientist who asks in wonder "Why does it do that?"

But you first start with the sense of wonder coming to you unaided, and the author makes a mistake in assuming that. You're absolute right that you can't think your way into that sense of wonder.

There are poems that inspire it, though they vary from person to person. And it will change through your life. If you feel it, you can be like a scientist, and study it, increasing the feeling for yourself without losing that sense of wonder.

It may increase your taste for the more exotic and abstruse, but the author makes a mistake that those exotic ones are better and more meritorious. The more exotic they are, the more personal the appeal will be. It really sucks that some people get to be elites and tell you which ones are the good ones -- and then they get to write the textbooks.

Glad to learn about this site, thanks.

I'm wondering how popular media sites could apply to their comments sections some of the things Wikipedia is doing. For example, imagine commenters divided into two opposing camps over a controversial issue discussed in a news report. A separate discussion is organized to create a report on the issue using the Wikipedia process and rules. Any commenter can contribute, and it is guided by (perhaps volunteer) editors. Such reports then get aggregated in a separate section of the site...

Could something like this actually 1) create value for the media by engaging users and generating content 2) elevate the discourse between readers and 3) actually make the media less biased over time as it is repeatedly called out for partisan slant in its editorial and reporting?

I don't believe they'll maintain editorial independence either. But the reason is not so much guanxi as the need to cower to the will of the central government, especially on anything relating to national image and social stability. It's not a 'scratch my back I'll scratch yours' situation, but rather a 'central gov says scratch my back and I will or god knows what's going to happen to me'.

That said, there is another angle to this that I think worth mentioning. Ma and his partner claim their motiviation for the takeover is to counterbalance the bias they see in western media coverage on China, and I see no reason to doubt that. However, it doesn't mean they can't have other motivations, and a leader of a high profile Chinese company like Alibaba may have ideas or motivations that are better left unsaid until the time is right. If they were buying the newspaper to give more voice to government critics, do you think they would come out and say it?

The word 'wormhole' suggests to me that there would be no loss of field strength or signal strength, irregardless of the distance in three-dimensional space. A device that could tunnel its magnetic field between, say, Tokyo and New York, with no energy loss -- that's my idea of a wormhole.