Teen mental health

It’s mostly Instagram  for girls 

On blogging in 2023

How to get started

First, here are things I’d like to have in the ideal world:

• Modern and minimalist yet functional design
• Markdown support to ensure the content is portable
• Accessible via mobile
• Photo galleries for particular posts and the blog itself
• Email subscriptions
• Affordable enough, so you don’t care about running it forever
• Effortless backups
• Connected to your personal domain

Turns out, it’s hard to find all of these things combined. Pricing is important to me at the ideological level. I can afford to pay $10+ a month, but I’m more likely to start wondering if I need to continue unless I suddenly have a very popular blog on my hands.

In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable. Especially if you want anything more than a series of relatively long text-focused posts. Choose the one you like the most and stick with it as long as possible.

John Snow project

Keeping a focus  on the continuing global pandemic.

The world is entering its fourth year of living with COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nearly everyone has had personal experience of catching the virus and many people are living with the lingering effects of illness. Governments around the world have abandoned national policies to curb transmission and have left the management of risks to the individual. “Learn to live with it” and “you do you” individual responsibility are the dominant mantras.

This individualistic approach to an airborne virus relies on people being armed with knowledge to understand the risks they face and the tools that help mitigate those risks. Many governments initially responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by holding official briefings, communicating the risks the disease poses and implementing emergency measures to minimize transmission. Three years on the pandemic is still with us but official communication and consequent media coverage has been reduced so that many people have resumed their 2019 lifestyles, largely oblivious to the ongoing risks posed by COVID-19. This information gap comes just as the scientific and medical community is learning more and more about the detrimental long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

The John Snow Project was started by individuals who grew concerned by the lack of attention being given to a virus that has killed tens of millions, and even after the deployment of vaccines and widespread convalescence, is still killing tens of thousands of people around the world every week and debilitating many more. The objective of the John Snow Project is to provide easily digestible information for the general public and policymakers to help them understand the risks posed by the disease and how to best manage those risks.

The John Snow Project editorial group is comprised of individuals who have an excellent track record of anticipating characteristics of the virus, the disease and the challenges it poses. Members of our editorial group published journal papers early in the pandemic, forecasting many of the developments that surprised colleagues who were advising governments. Members of our editorial group have expertise in epidemiology, immunology, microbiology, clinical practice, and public and global health. Many of the clinicians in the editorial group have spent the past three years treating patients with COVID-19 and are now treating patients suffering from both the acute disease and the long-term consequences of infection. We follow the evidence wherever it leads with the only agenda being to understand the disease and its impact.. We believe it is better to understand risk and react accordingly, rather than to try to ignore it.

Providing up-to-date, practical information, we hope to minimize the impact of COVID-19 can by cutting community transmission, reducing individual risk of infection, and delivering better treatments and improved vaccines to lessen the impact of disease. Members of our editorial group are involved in every aspect of impact reduction and are working proactively to help improve human health in the face of this novel threat.

Changing the system is hard

In fact, it’s hard to recognize the elements that are imposed and drill down to root causes…

Some thoughts by an organizer about radicalism

Cognitive biases

Gurwinder  explains why smart people are prone to bias, and offers some ideas

Climate, ecology

Apocalypse needed

We may be past the point at which ecological sustainability can be reached without a tremendous amount of damage and pain

A realistic view might be of trying to do the next best, right thing.  Unfortunately, status quo is appealing to many and believing the reality is challenging and painful, thus avoidance dominates, and the situation continues to deteriorate 

COVID, how it went wrong

important paper

This is an account that should be heard of an important struggle: the struggle of a large group of experts who came together at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to warn the world about the risk of airborne transmission and the consequences of ignoring it. We alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) about the potential significance of the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and the urgent need to control it, but our concerns were dismissed. Here we describe how this happened and the consequences. We hope that by reporting this story, we can raise awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the need to be open to new evidence, and to prevent it from happening again. Acknowledgement of an issue and the emergence of new evidence related to it, is the first necessary step towards finding effective mitigation solutions.

COVID and heart disease

The Today show has a good piece 

While doctors and researchers are only beginning to chart the longer-term health effects of COVID-19 on some patients, striking new data appears to show a connection between COVID surges and heart disease, particularly among younger Americans. NBC’s Erin McLaughlin reports for TODAY and senior medical correspondent Dr. John Torres breaks down what you need to know.

Galbraith on inflation

Quite a good 

discussion of economic opinions and Fed actions 

COVID public health emergency declaration set to end May 11,2023

Kaiser health news is concerned