Simon Cooke's blog of life the universe and everything.
If one were to design a combination therapy for neuroprotection and neurosupport following a major ischemic stroke, they might decide to do something like this in continuous IV delivery form: To limit reperfusion injury, and limit apoptosis cascades, and provide immediate support L-Glutathione, Vitamin C, N-Acetyl Cysteine, and Sodium Butyrate to help limit reperfusion injury, and limit the…
This news flew around the web a bit about a month or two ago, but just in case you didn’t see it, I wanted to rebroadcast it here. Propionic acid is a relatively common preservative (also known as E208, or Calcium Propionate). It’s an anti-mold/fungal agent that is added to some baked goods and cheeses to increase their shelf life, and also created in the body by some kinds of gut bacteria under…
I’ve just spent the last ten years of my life working inside of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, a merry team of techninjarocketsurgeons known for being air-dropped into games companies to help them optimize their games for the Xbox console, and in doing so I’ve worked on thousands of games, from AAA to Indie titles, and helped everyone I could wherever I could. Including helping Xbox get…
People often speak in coded language - some more than others. The problem with coded language is that it requires a secret decoder ring to figure out what they mean. I'm not talking about jargon and vocabulary which are used in exclusionary ways. That particularly insidious form of manipulation - taking commonly used and understood terminology and morphing it to have a different, specific, and…
The last episode of Season 2 of The Good Place had a fantastic message buried inside of it. Nobody is truly altruistic in the dictionary definition of the word. (But that's okay - we're only human, so we make human decisions). Altruism does not exist in a vacuum. A good person doing kind acts will only perform those acts for so long before they stop doing them, if you kick them in the face every…
People rarely share articles to spread knowledge. More often they don't care about the details. They just care if the way the article made them feel matches the way they feel about the general topic. This is why it's hard for people to keep a grip on facts, reason, or even basic journalism principles in an age when outrage, emotional responses, and clickbait are more important than fact, fairness,…
Hello everybody, It's been quite a while since I last posted on the blog. Why? Well, it's a number of things: Everyone's going nuts over politics, and has polarized. I'd post about political stuff, but I just don't have the heart for it. Partly this is because I've recently found that I lose friends when I talk politics (I don't automatically slew in the direction of my friends on every issue even…
Pooping is easier without pants, especially when you had to dig a hole first. Try to poop before sunset. It's way scarier in the dark. Bring a real shovel. Emergency snow shovels don't do a great job of digging poop holes. (I had a hunch.... so I brought a real shovel). Ants will mostly leave you alone, even if they have a massive 15-foot across anthill, if you dump a small amount of food on the…
Quora recently changed the site in some heinous ways. They removed the details from all questions, because they're trying to make sure that there's only one "canonical question" you can search for an answer to. Unfortunately this destroys nuance - after all, there's only so much detail you can put into 250 characters. So in response, I'm going to start migrating all of my question answers on Quora…
The problem with empathy is that too much of it is bad, and too little of it is bad. Too little empathy, and you're an uncaring sociopath who doesn't care about others' wellbeing. Empathy is great when it comes to doing nice things for nice people when everything's going well. That's the easy scenario.