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Cleric Chih's quest to record the tragic history of a famine succeeds all too well.

A Mouthful of Dust (Singing Hills, volume 6) by Nghi Vo
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Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 4 “Romantic”: 3rd movement


Royal Flanders Philharmonic Orchestra


Gunter Neuhold, conductor


More info about today’s track: Naxos 8.550154


Courtesy of Naxos of America Inc.



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Find Me at UWEC GEEKcon on Saturday!

Dec. 3rd, 2025 03:41 pm
[syndicated profile] crosarth_feed

Posted by Trae Dorn



Well the world is dark and cold, which means it’s time to do something fun — and in this case that something fun is go do a convention.

This Saturday, December 6th, I’m going to be at UWEC GEEKcon at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Davies center. I’ll have print copies of UnCONventional and the Mia Graves books (including book four, Buried Memories, which doesn’t officially come out until the 15th). It’s a fun con, and If you’re a student, entry is free with showing your ID. If you’re not there’s a suggested donation of either $3 or 2 non-perishable food items.

Also this time around there will be some familiar faces also vending there. My Peregrine Lake collaborator Ethan Flanagan is also tabling at the con, and Nerd & Tie‘s Gen Prock also will be there.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, little cons like this are some of my favorite shows. It’s just a fun vibe driven by something other than commercial interests. People come to these shows for the joy of it, and it’s just a good time.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

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Wednesday reading

Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:52 pm
redbird: full bookshelves and table in a library (books)
[personal profile] redbird
Books read in the last couple of months:

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories:. This is odd and somewhat disjointed, set in the same secondary world as A Stranger in Olondria (which I read ages ago and remember very little about). The threads all come together at the end. I’d been displeased earlier because I thought we’d lost both the first narrative voice, which I liked, and the continuity of the narrator's story. The book does get back to her story, or at least her sister and cousin’s stories.

James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks: read aloud, because Adrian had never read it. Still delightful, a fairy tale set in a world where people have at least heard of fairy tales.

Lorraine Baston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Baston talks about rules as measuring devices, as sets of instructions, and as models, and various shifts in meaning over time. She talks about thick and thin rules, thick rules being ones with (more) examples and details, and which anticipate more exceptions. A about the change in how people learn/are taught all sorts of things, including math. I enjoyed this, and if that description sounds interesting you probably will too.

Edward Eager, The Time Garden: Children's magical adventures while spending the summer with a relative because their parents are in London, working on the premiere of a play. Another read-aloud, this one was new to me, and fun.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The state, as of 2023, and possible futures of the ocean and ocean life in the Anthropocene, according to an oceanographer. I asked the library for this because I liked the author's book about mollusks.
[syndicated profile] notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read When The Breakroom Has Seen Things…

I've moved to a different floor in a large office building. I'm in the breakroom, and I see a long list of prohibited items on the microwave.
Me: "Wow, this is a long list."
Coworker: "Yeah, all of those tell a story."
Me: "Why is Red Bull on here?!"

Read When The Breakroom Has Seen Things…

Touch Me Tonight

Dec. 3rd, 2025 06:51 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
This song started, like so many songs do, with the chorus arriving and demanding to be attached to the rest of the song. It just took a while to figure out exactly what the rest of the song was, along with getting the tune into some stable state. But once you get the first verse down, everything starts to make sense...

And it's in the key of G! The nice normal key of G. Pay no attention to that Em7 and Cadd9...

Anyway, I hope you like it!
Lyrics inside )

Eye Candy Alert!

Dec. 3rd, 2025 07:15 pm
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[personal profile] rolanni
Repeat: We have Eye Candy!

Art by Sam Kennedy

Asked For Coffee, Got A Roast

Dec. 3rd, 2025 11:00 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read Asked For Coffee, Got A Roast

Worker: "Okay, sir. I don't know what your problem is, but every time you come here, you always have an attitude with me. Now, I don't know if it's because you're sexist, racist, or if you just are a bitter person, but here's the deal. There are fifteen other sister locations in this neighbourhood. No one is forcing you to come here."

Read Asked For Coffee, Got A Roast

even more of the same...

Dec. 3rd, 2025 05:01 pm
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[personal profile] jennlk
now with added snow and cold (gosh, you'd think it was December or something). Yesterday there was a large hawk hanging out in the trees in the backyard. The only other birds out there were the sandhill cranes, who just don't care about hawks. Even the neighbors' chickens were staying in their pen.

I was late to FCB rehearsal on Monday -- traffic came to a halt on 96E, a quarter of a mile past an exit. The wreck was at the next exit, 2+ miles down the road. 30 minutes later, I get to the scene of the crash, and all that's left is a sedan about a foot narrower than it should be, a flatbed tow truck, two fire trucks, four police cars, and about 30 feet of missing guardrail. Roads were clear and dry, so I dunno....

LCCB rehearsal went pretty well (good thing, because the concert is Sunday!). There is one passage where I'm not gonna try for all the notes. I'll go for the afterbeats that the other two are missing, and say "good enuf". The biggest issue with the mambo bass line now seems to be the tempo that the director wants to take it at.

Have nearly wrapped up the November election. Tomorrow, I'll track down the last bits of information I need to submit the reimbursement request, and then I think I'll be done with that. whee!

Sunday starts the busy slog into the holidays. Two concerts, two rehearsals, two work meetings, one concert to usher, two days worth of baking because the day after the FCB concert we are off to NC to spend most of a week with Mum. And two different performances at church. One will be fine, one will not. Probably.

Medium Rare Is Rarely Right

Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:00 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read Medium Rare Is Rarely Right

Boss: "[Server], the table sent their steaks back again. They told me they wanted medium rare, but the cooks say you wrote down medium well."
Server: "Yeah, because that's what they always mean when they say medium rare. The customers never actually know what they want."

Read Medium Rare Is Rarely Right

Forty Years

Dec. 3rd, 2025 01:26 pm
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[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 Like a lot of queer people, Shawn and I are sort of flexible about the day we call our anniversary. We both dated other people as we figured out our love and how the hell it was going to work. It was a messy time, but we were together as "roommates" in college since December of 1985--somewhere in there we both left our assigned roommates for each other, so it's kind of our U-Haul day. Or, as I sometimes like to joke, the day I moved in and forgot to ever move out. 

So, yeah, if you do the math, we have been together a STAGGERING number of years. 

We usually, officially, celebrate on the first of December, but this year a dear friend who comes for Friendsgiving arrived life-threateningly infected and so we spent that day with him at United Hospital. Someone else might say that our anniversary was "ruined," but that would be a lie. What would have ruined our anniversary is if our friend had died. So, you know, the hospital was right where we all needed to be! No regrets. None whatsoever.

But, I don't want forty years together to go unremarked. So, today I ordered some flowers for Shawn that I hope will be delivered to her office before she leaves for the day at 3:00 pm. I'm going to maybe make something special for dinner tonight. Who knows? But, hopefully, we can think back on that trip to Target for holiday gifts back in 1985 and feel like it was all worth it.
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


This new Worlds Without Number Bundle presents Worlds Without Number, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of far-future sword-and-sorcery adventure from acclaimed designer Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing.

Bundle of Holding: Worlds Without Number

Another GLP-1 Alzheimer's Trial

Dec. 3rd, 2025 01:14 pm
[syndicated profile] in_the_pipeline_feed

Well, here’s another report of a GLP-1 agent being tried in Alzheimer’s patients (after this recent post was written). The last one didn’t show much, so let’s have a look.

In this trial, 204 patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s were treated with liraglutide (daily injection) versus placebo for one year. The doses started at 0.6mg and worked up to 1.8mg, which is the typical starting dose for diabetes therapy working up to the maximum approved one. The primary outcome was looking for changes in cerebral glucose rate, with secondary endpoints of safety and cognitive assessment changes. That primary endpoint is there because of a good deal of research over the years suggesting that glucose metabolism in Alzheimer’s brain tissue is abnormally low. This may well be linked to insulin resistance in tissues overall, which has led to some characterization of Alzheimer’s as “Type III diabetes” (given the complexities of both conditions, that formulation makes me a bit nervous to tell you the truth). But there are numerous studies in human patients and animal models alike that point towards both those effects, and thus the interest in GLP-1 agonists as potential therapies.

The results are. . .mixed. The primary endpoint first: there was no change in cerebral glucose metabolism between the treated patients and the placebo group. It has already been shown that liraglutide does reach pharmacologically active doses in the brain, so that doesn’t seem to have been the problem here. Given these results, one might want to treat the secondary endpoints with some caution, because the underlying hypothesis for the whole trial seems to have been undermined. At any rate, there does seem to have been an improvement in one of the three cognitive tests systems used (ADAS-Exec) but not in the other two (ADCS-ADL or CDR-SoB). I always wonder what to make of results like this, which are distressingly common in Alzheimer’s trials, and I cannot shake the belief that a robust treatment would not be so dependent on questions being asked and the scoring methods used in the evaluations.

Looking at the individual scores (Figure 3 in the paper), the latter two evaluations do indeed look almost identical to placebo. The ADAS-Exec differences seem driven by a few patients that did indeed score better in the treatment group, versus a slightly larger cohort that scored notably worse in the placebo group: otherwise, the bulk of the individual patient scores overlap in what to me look like similarly-shaped clouds. That’s not to say that these results aren’t real - for example, it could be possible that the disappearance of the longer tail of poor performance as seen the in the placebo group is due to the treatment - but at the very least they do not appear very strong.

The team also looked at volumes of various brain regions via MRI. Volume measures on the hippocampus, entrorhinal cortex, and ventricles did not show any differences between the two groups (all lower), but the temporal lobe showed lower reduction in volume in the treatment group. This was significant (mean and standard error) although the 95% confidence intervals appear to overlap in the individual-patient scores. What this means is unclear; I’m not sure if anyone would have picked the temporal lobe beforehand as the most likely place to see a significant effect.

So there are some effects, although none of them bowl a person over, and (as mentioned) evidence for the main hypothesis that a GLP-1 drug would improve cerebral glucose metabolism did not turn up here at all. I think that the “Type III Diabetes” pitch itself (at least in its strongest and simplest form) is taking some hits here with the results of these GLP-1/Alzheimer’s trials. But so far, Alzheimer’s has not yielded to any simple explanations from any direction.

Analysis Paralysis

Dec. 3rd, 2025 05:00 pm
[syndicated profile] notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

Read Analysis Paralysis

Me: "Love the enthusiasm! Make sure you keep focused on the end goal. When I first started my own projects, it was easy to get sidetracked by every good idea, and I got delayed by some major project creep."
Coworker: "Oh, I'll be fine. I already have everything laid out in my mind.
And so, he spent all day making elaborate lists, color-coded files, and creating detailed and complex spreadsheets that covered every eventuality, even those outside of the project's purview.

Read Analysis Paralysis

Out and About

Dec. 3rd, 2025 04:57 pm
[syndicated profile] sharonlee_feed

Posted by Sharon

Wednesday. Grey and looking cold outside. I have not yet been outside by reason of the plowguy (All Hail, the Plowguy!) came by when I was still  snuggled in bed under a pile of blankets and three coon cats, to plow the drive and clear the steps.

Looking out over the Long Back Yard, it does seem like we might have gotten another couple/four inches after I threw the towel in last night, so the weatherbeans have redeemed themselves. A Long Slllloooowwww Snow.

PT at 8:00, then the grocery. I need gas before I go to Brunswick, but that doesn’t have to happen today.

Let the calendar show that today was the First Official Donning of The (short) Snow Boots, and the winter jacket (not to be confused with the Big Coat).

And that’s all I got for the moment.

Hope everybody’s having a good morning.
#
Aaaaand back.

It is now sunny and bright and the snow is melting off of Surfaces, which is all good until it freezes up this evening.

PT was PT — did a couple laps on the sit-down elliptical (it has a name — NuStep? — but it wasn’t important and I don’t remember it), had tutoring in at-home exercises. I do have an appointment next week, oh! and the week after. So, not so bad with the timing as I had imagined. That’s good.

After PT, I went to the grocery store, where I bought more than was on the list, though not a wreath, because really, Hannaford? Those are some flea-bitten wreaths y’all are wantin’ the earth for. Instead, I brought the groceries home, put them away, and went over to the Agway in Winslow, and bought a on-clearance wreath, then, since I was out and spacing around anyway, I put gas in the car.

Let the record show that I used the Google Wallet for the first time to pay for my wreath at Agway.

Came home and had a mug of hot chocolate and a cookie (I see cookie-making in the future), which maybe could spoil my lunch, if I had any idea what lunch was gonna be, but since I don’t, that’s not an issue.

The cats and I will decorate the wreath this evening.

Speaking of cats:

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