Moftasa's blog since 2005. No ads, trackers or AI-generated content.
Yesterday, I sent a friend who works in a hospital in Scotland the Egyptian Ministry of Health's guidelines for managing psychiatric inpatients during heatwaves. These guidelines were developed and circulated following the deaths of 10 patients from heat-related complications in 2015. These are mostly low-cost interventions like: keeping patients hydrated provide cool areas limit sun exposure…
Five weeks passed since the US and Israel started their unprovoked and illegal war on Iran ( it is illegal according to UN experts ). With how things are looking the war seems to be dragging on for much longer than Trump stated. He said it will only take 5 to 6 weeks. Yesterday, he had a major tantrum on Trash Social. To date, the war has achieved nothing but death and destruction to all parties…
This is a list of psychiatry podcasts that I have found useful. This post is part of a series of on digital resources for mental health professionals . Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast by Dr. David J. Puder is in my opinion the best psychiatry podcast online. It has been running for a very long time and has covered excellent topics with great care. He also interviews a wide array of experts.…
Update: Unfortunately, we won't be able to take part in the event due to the illness of a family member. We have signed up for this year's Galala Challenge which will take place on Friday, November 7th. Probably one of the largest cycling events in Egypt. There are three distances 50, 90 and 150kms. It is a non-competitive ride with different tiers for different levels of riding. There is a 10km…
Post by @sarahalsherif@mas.to View on Mastodon
This issue keeps being discussed in conferences and online. I want to put my position here so I can just forward the link because I am really bored by the repetitiveness of it. Our profession, at its core, is based on caring. A machine will never be able to genuinely do that. If you think it can care, you are being mislead by marketing hype. Other problems with AI include, very large amounts of…
My Kindle is from 2012, it is a 5th generation Kindle Paperwhite, and it works perfectly. I don't need to buy a new one. Unfortunately, it is no longer supported by Amazon (it won't receive new updates). So if and when its hardware fails, I would like to have the option to buy whichever brand of ereader I like without feeling locked in the Kindle brand by my previous purchases from Amazon. I first…
Update : It is online again. Mastodon Online is down for an hour or two now. The status page has identified the error and the admins are working on getting it fixed. This sucks of course because this instance hosts my mastodon account . So I can't post or read my timeline. Due to its decentralised nature, Mastodon and the wider fediverse are still functioning normally and all other servers and…
I can't believe we are still calling for Alaa's freedom in 2025. Particularly on the 14th anniversary of January 25. He finished his last sentence more than 100 days ago. His mother has been on a hunger strike since. Alaa was arrested in 2019. Two years later, he received a non-appealable 5 years sentence from a state security court for sharing a Facebook post about prison conditions in Egypt. He…
I wanted to write 150 blog posts this year, but clearly that was way too optimistic. This is the 52nd post of the year and probably the last one for 2024. Not bad honestly. Next month this blog will be 20 years old! Alaa's mother Dr. Laila Soueif is entering her 81st day of her hunger strike to free her son. Her protest seems to be ignored by the Egyptian and UK governments . She lost …
24 years ago, I came home from medical school with a borrowed CD-ROM of the real-time strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun. I got home at 4pm, put the CD in the Creative CD-ROM drive tray and suddenly it was 4am in the morning. I am not a big fan of RTS games but they are incredibly addictive and fun. Just recently that I found out that older Command & Conquer games are being kept …
Last Wednesday, we had a case presentation at the hospital that was held live on Microsoft Teams with the Maudsley Hospital / IoPPN Grand Rounds. It was hybrid, meaning some psychiatrists participated online (103) and some did in person at our conference room (25) and at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre in London (80). We were invited by the Academic Lead for the Maudsley Grand Rounds, who was chairing…
I enjoyed reading this trilogy so much. It was full of massive ideas, mind-bending twists and turns, and the story was full of awe-inspiring and mind-blowing moments. This sci-fi trilogy has a large number of fans online, but if you read the reviews you will find that they are mixed, and the reason for this is that although it is a hard sci-fi book, the author decided to break some unbreakable…
While reading The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which I am enjoying very much, I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I wanted to read more about our Sun, this led me to reading a bit about nuclear fusion which in turn made me read a bit about deuterium which then sent me indirectly to this paper about the 'D Switch' . Di Martino, R.M.C., Maxwell, B.D. & Pirali, T. Deuterium in drug …
This post is part of a multi-series of posts on digital resources for mental health professionals . As clinicians we are required to keep up with new knowledge in our fields. However, this isn't always possible as a lot of research is published in journals that don't offer free full text of their articles. Not all of us work in places that can afford institutional access to scientific journals and…
I had some time to kill one evening so I edited the CSS of this blog. I removed the sidebar and simplified the navigation. I think it is also more mobile friendly. I only tested it on Firefox and Lynx though. It is a big departure from the Pelican theme I started with . Editing themes on Pelican is much easier and more forgiving than on Drupal and the process of tinkering with HTML templates and …
ما عندناش في البيت طبق استقبال القنوات التلفزيونية الفضائية (أو ما يعرف بالدِش 📡) ومكتفين بنتفلكس ويوتيوب و بلكس ، لكن قبل الأولمبياد كنا عاوزين نعرف لو فيه خدمة ما على الأنترنت ينفع نشترك فيها علشان نتفرج على المسابقات المختلفة في الأولمبياد السنة دي. رحنا أحد المراكز التجارية الكبيرة علشان نشترك في بي إن سبورتس لمدة شهر لكن للأسف أكتشفنا أننا لازم يكون عندنا دِش ونشتري جهاز مخصوص ثمنه خمسة ألاف…
Drawing by Gianluca Costantini , slightly modified to minimise file size. Update 2026-01-29 : Ashraf Omar is still detained with no end in sight to his ordeal 😓 Update 2024-10-28 : Omar's detention orders keep getting extended every 15 days. Each time via video link. He hasn't seen the prosecution face-to-face since his arrest. Update 2024-08-19 : ✍️ Friends and supporters of Ashraf Omar started…
مع انتشار شاشة الموت الزرقاء BSOD المايكروسوفتية في مطارات وبنوك العالم، انتشرت في شوارع حي التجمع بالقاهرة الجديدة شاشة "حتى لا ننسى" على كل الشاشات الإعلانية المطلة على شارع التسعين، بثت الشاشات فيديوهات بروبجندا لإنعاش ذاكرة المواطن المصري بجرائم جماعة الإخوان مصاحب لها بالبنط العريض جملة "الإخوان جماعة إرهابية" ومشاهد دموية عنيفة في صباح يوم العطلة الأسبوعية قبل الصلاة. بث شاشات شارع التسعين…
This is part 6 of a series on document creation. Which is part of a multi-series of posts on digital resources for mental health professionals . Free and Open Source software (FOSS) It may not be a priority for you if you work in mental health care to think about the licence of the software tool you are using. But I really think you should care! It is so important to make sure that you rely …