"Invisible second patients"

 Most people know about this, but may not be aware of the extent or severity of the problem...

"Not long after his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Tom Lee picked up a book on caregiving, one of the many he’d devour in those early, frightening weeks, when the future felt suddenly impossible to imagine. Amid all the information and advice, he read a line that stopped him cold. “It said, make sure you take care of yourself, and leave at least 15 minutes to yourself every day,” he remembers. “I thought, 15 minutes? Are you kidding me? That’s not even enough time to open a book. When I read that, I really started to wonder what I was in for.”

He first noticed something was wrong in 2017, when Antoinette was 69. She started repeating questions and sometimes struggled to grasp complex ideas. For years, she’d done the couple’s taxes, but that fall, for the first time, she had trouble with the calculations. “I sat down with her, and we went over it a dozen times,” Lee says. “And she just couldn’t get it.” By the following summer, they had a diagnosis.

Six and a half years later, she is in what doctors refer to as mid-stage Alzheimer’s. “That’s when things start to really fall apart,” he says. Patients begin forgetting who they are and where they live. They become moody, withdrawn, combative. As their sleep and circadian rhythms unravel, patients sometimes stay up all night, requiring their caregivers to stay up, too. Routine tasks such as getting dressed become difficult without help, and speech gets more confused. “Toni went through a period where about two-thirds of her words were uninterpretable,” Lee says. “They were words she made up, and she would rhyme things as she spoke.” These days, almost nothing she says makes sense. “You ask her if she’s hungry, and ‘no’ could very well mean ‘yes.’” This middle period is also when patients begin to wander, or fall. One day last summer, Antoinette walked away while Lee was out watering tomatoes in the garden. He found her a quarter-mile down the road, talking to a neighbor’s mailbox.

“As a caregiver, you watch bit by bit as your time slips away,” he says, “and then one day you look up and realize that things you once took for granted, like finding an hour to read or listen to music or go for a run—all that’s gone. You become totally absorbed in caring for this person, making sure they are safe and secure and that their basic human needs are met.”

Across the country, there are more than 11 million people like Tom Lee: unpaid caregivers for someone with dementia. Usually, that someone is a family member or a loved one—the burden falls disproportionately on women—and the majority of caregivers spend one to three years in that role. Often they spend many more.

They are all part of an accelerating crisis. Nearly seven million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia. As the population ages, that number is growing—to a projected 13 million by 2050...

I have been a caregiver in similar circumstances (and the same precepts would apply to families who have children with special needs).   The difficulties are intense and unavoidable, and they push you to the boundaries of your compassion.  The discussion excerpted above continues at length in the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine. 

I will add that in my opinion, the people who have the power to effect changes in the system (executives in businesses, state and national congresspeople) tend to be wealthy and are able to turf these caregiving responsibilites on to paid helpers, and they have very little personal incentive to enact meaningful changes in the status quo.

Your living room couch is like a "block of gasoline"

Like everyone else, I've been reading the accounts of the fires in California, and have been amazed at the totality of the destruction.  This observation was quite striking:

Plastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum burns fast and hot. A retired Maryland state fire marshal told Newsweek that, from a fire perspective, a typical couch is akin to a block of gasoline... 

In 2020, the Fire Safety Research Institute set two living rooms on fire, on purpose. Both were identical in size and full of furnishings in an identical arrangement. But in one room, almost everything was synthetic: a polyurethane-foam sofa covered in polyester fabric sat behind an engineered-wood coffee table, both set on a polyolefin carpet. The curtains were polyester, and a polyester throw blanket was draped on the couch. In the other room, a wood sofa with cotton cushions sat on a hardwood floor, along with a solid-wood coffee table. The curtains and throw blanket were cotton. In the natural-material room, the cotton couch appeared to light easily, and then maintained a steady flame where it was lit, releasing little smoke. After 26 minutes, the flames had spread to the other side of the couch, but the rest of the room was still intact, if smoky. Meanwhile, in the synthetic room, a thick dark smoke rose out of the flame on the polyester couch. At just under five minutes, a flash of orange flame consumed the whole room all at once. “Flashover,” firefighters call it—when escape becomes impossible. In the natural-material room, flashover took longer than 30 minutes. Perhaps that difference helps explain why, although the rate of home fires in the U.S. has more than halved since 1980, more people are dying in their homes when they do catch fire.

The Newsweek link strongly urges readers to have automated sprinklers installed in their homes.

Embedded photo of Palisades fire residua, credit Noah Berger / AP, via The Atlantic.

"Gated reverb" explained

In a Zoom session I attended this morning, one of the participants discussed "gated snare/gated reverb,"referring to a sound of the 1980s that was totally familiar to me, but using terminology I had not previously encountered.  A brief search led me to this video, which offers a concise and amply illustrated explication of the genesis and evolution of the sound and its technological basis.

Why does this exist ? - updated with some answers

At Target recently I saw a display for holders for lip gloss that attach to the back of one's cellphone.

I don't use lip gloss but I understand that some people do, and that in some professions it may need to be reapplied frequently.  What I don't understand is why it would be stored on the back of a phone.  Perhaps for influencers taking selfies?  It seems distinctly odd, but it's not my generation, so perhaps someone can explain.

Addendum:  reader Nuray found an entire iPhone case with a lip gloss holder incorporated into it:

The one at Target is a glue-on, like a PopSocket.  I found an article at Vox that discusses the trend in lip gloss:

By all accounts, it seems like lip products have become more than just cheap, everyday essentials to mindlessly throw into your purse. In the post-pandemic era, where our mouths are unmasked most of the time, they’ve evolved into miniature status symbols for influencers and casual “makeup girlies” alike...

Lee notes another important selling point for lip augmentations: “Fuller lips are not only a feature of beauty; they’re also a sign of youth.”... Right now, Gen Z seems to be experiencing a collective crisis over looking old, which has resulted in an interest in so-called anti-aging skincare for many tweens. That said, it’s not a surprise that young people are running to lip products that offer color and a sheen but promise dermatological benefits...

Aside from the skincare aspect, there seems to be excitement among people on social media who collect these lip products in large numbers. MacKenzi Nelson, art director at beauty PR company Helen + Gertrude, says this current hoarding of lip gloss represents a pre-existing consumer trend....

Additionally, Nelson says that the “sensory” element of these products has a lot to do with their popularity, as they provide “a moment of ritualistic self-care, comfort, and play.” Li agrees with this sentiment, stating that the lip products are “definitely habit-forming.”...

Other brands, like Topicals, include their lip glosses alongside other items you would find in a wealthy person’s bag, like a Louis Vuitton wallet and a roll of cash, on their Instagram... Chanel’s foundation can range from $55 to almost $80, while its Rouge Coco Gloss retails at $40. Non-drugstore but not-exactly high-end brands like Rhode and Summer Fridays offer lip balms and oils are under $30...

In a moment of economic downturn and general doom about the world, it’s comforting to know that we can impulsively spend money on the latest it-girl item and delight in the same vain activities as Kylie Jenner or Hailey Bieber.

Denmark's coat of arms includes an elephant

Denmark's coat of arms was in the news this past week because it has been redesigned.  

The Danish king has shocked some historians by changing the royal coat of arms to more prominently feature Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.

Less than a year since succeeding his mother, Queen Margrethe, after she stood down on New Year’s Eve 2023, King Frederik has made a clear statement of intent to keep the autonomous Danish territory and former colony within the kingdom of Denmark.

For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden.

But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear [upper blue arrow] and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.

There is some discussion of the geopolitics at The Guardian, but what interested me was the presence of an elephant [lower blue arrow] dangling from the coat of arms.  Had to look it up.  Turns out that is the Order of the Elephant.

The Order of the Elephant (Danish: Elefantordenen) is a Danish order of chivalry and is Denmark's highest-ranked honour. It has origins in the 15th century, but has officially existed since 1693, and since the establishment of constitutional monarchy in 1849, is now almost exclusively used to honour royalty and heads of state. 

The elephant and castle design derives from the howdah, a carriage that is mounted in the back of an elephant. This type of carriage was mostly utilized in the Indian subcontinent, and the Danish knew about and thus had the ability to adopt this design since they ruled certain parts of India as part of their small colonial empire. The unfamiliar Indian howdah has been replaced in this instance by a familiar European castle, although the Indian rider has been kept on the elephant.

Recipients of this award include Tycho Brahe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Niels Bohr, Sir Winston Churchill, and Nelson Mandela.

46,000 years old... and alive

I've annotated with a yellow star in the images above a rodent's nest, found underground in the permafrost of Siberia.  From that nest scientists isolated a roundworm (a nematode), which wiggled to life after being warmed.

Organisms from diverse taxonomic groups can survive extreme environmental conditions, such as the complete absence of water or oxygen, high temperature, freezing, or extreme salinity. The survival strategies of such organisms include a state known as suspended animation or cryptobiosis, in which they reduce metabolism to an undetectable level. Spectacular examples of long-term cryptobiosis include a Bacillus spore that was preserved in the abdomen of bees buried in amber for 25 to 40 million years, and a 1000 to 1500 years-old Lotus seed, found in an ancient lake, that was subsequently able to germinate. Metazoans such as tardigrades, rotifers, and nematodes are also known for remaining in cryptobiosis for prolonged periods. The longest records of cryptobiosis in nematodes are reported for the Antarctic species Plectus murrayi (25.5 years in moss frozen at -20°C), and Tylenchus polyhypnus (39 years desiccated in an herbarium specimen).

And the fact that the creature is parthenogenic raises other interesting aspects:

In summary, our findings indicate that by adapting to survive cryptobiotic state for short time frames in environments like permafrost, some nematode species gained the potential for individual worms to remain in the state for geological timeframes. This raises the question of whether there is an upper limit to the length of time an individual can remain in the cryptobiotic state. Long timespans may be limited only by drastic changes to the environment such as strong fluctuations in ambient temperature, natural radioactivity, or other abiotic factors. These findings have implications for our understanding of evolutionary processes, as generation times may be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages. This is particularly interesting in the case of parthenogenetic species, as each individual can find a new population without the need for mate finding, i.e. evading the cost of sex. Finally, understanding the precise mechanisms of long-term cryptobiosis and cues that lead to successful revivals can inform new methods for long term storage of cells and tissues.

Detailed information and discussion in the PLOS Genetics article (not behind a paywall).

The movies of 2024

The YouTube source has a transcript of the audio, but I haven't yet found a time-stamped listing of the source movies.  I'd appreciate if someone can locate that.  Done by a couple readers; see their notes in Comments.

It's a long list, obviously, so I won't copy/paste the content here.  But it's easy to open this post in one window and open the comments in a second window [not tab] to view them side-by-side.

Addendum: My thanks to the readers for those lists.  I know it's crazy to choose movies based on 2-second-long clips, but after cross-checking the Rotten Tomatoes scores to weed out the under-80s, I found seven movies to watch.  

Phrazle is a variant of Wordle

I just discovered Phrazle a couple weeks ago.  It is essentially a variant of Wordle that asks you to identify a phrase rather than a six-letter word.  For Wordle I developed a personal strategy that simplified the game to the point of rendering it not very challenging.   I decided to see if the same would apply to this one.

New Phrazles are offered every twelve hours, and each gives you six chances to guess the phrase.  Previously used phrases are compiled here; readers of The Guardian have complained that too many of the phrases are "Americanisms."  Solving a short phrase does require a bit of luck when you enter the first guess (I try to test the vowels first):

- and short phrases with repeating letters can also be difficult:

It is not necessary that your entry be an actual phrase, so in a long mystery phrase one has the opportunity to test a good proportion of the commonly-used letters -

Note that if you solve one of the words on the first try but don't know the whole phrase, you can use that space to test out other letters (see above).  Sometimes solving one word will reveal the answer, as in this case where the second word had to be "thick" -

The hardest one I have encountered was "Butterflies in my stomach" because only 11-letter words could be entered in the first spaces and I don't have a lot of those in my head.

The first time I played I failed because I was confused about the color rules, but after that it has been pretty easy...

I'm going to move on to other online games, but decided to post this for other wordsmith readers who might enjoy giving it a try.  Feel free to offer your own suggestions and data in the comments.

Carl Sagan's foreboding (29 years ago)

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” 

-- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, 1996

Reposted from last year because it's so damn accurate and needs to be read more widely. 

Surprisingly valuable collectible coin

This 1967 Kennedy half dollar sold for $192.

It was graded "Poor" (grade 1) by PCGS - the lowest possible grade.  Normally coins are priced higher for higher grades from poor up to brilliant uncirculated and proof.  The odd valuation on this one is discussed in some Reddit comments: "Because it’s rad! Full of character - wholesome, as they say - it took years of honest wear for this coin to get this way, and for it to return so near to its original unstruck planchet, while still being recognizable as this exact year’s issue - is kind of special, rich in history."  "It doesn’t have the dings of being in commerce to me though. People will carry a coin special to them in their pocket every day and I’ve only seen a coin look that smooth from them doing that. And it takes a long time." "Think how rare it is for a coin to get just that amount of worn without also getting damaged...scratched, cleaned, environmental issues, rim dings."

I have numerous similar-quality Indian Head pennies, buffalo nickels, and Barber dimes, but sadly the same valuation criteria don't tend to apply.

Impressive dismount

Food for bears

Biologists estimate about 200 [grizzly] bears each year feast on moths in the eastern portion of the carnivores’ range. Each gram of moth offers bears about eight calories, which means some bears will eat up to 40,000 a day.

“A bear could, in about a month’s time, get one-third of the calories they need to build up fat for hibernation at these moth sites,” says Frank van Manen, leader of the interagency grizzly bear study team with the US Geological Survey...

At a time when other food sources, such as whitebark pine nuts and cutthroat trout, have been hit by global heating, disease and invasive species, the army cutworm moth population has remained remarkably stable, making it a critical ingredient in the grizzly bears’ continued recovery in the US...

Researchers believe the army cutworm moth population remains healthy, and because they arrive from many locations as far east as the Missouri River and as far north as the Northwest Territories, no localized issue, such as pesticide use or flooding, can crash their populations..."

The story continues at The Guardian.  I was surprised at the long distances these small moths migrate.

Reposted from 2023 to accompany an adjacent new post.

"Grizzly bears are mostly vegan"

The title on The Atlantic article startled me, although I've actually blogged this fact before.

Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week. (The typical modern American, meanwhile, derives about a third of their daily calories from animal-based foods.) In the decades after colonizers began to introduce new settlements and animals to the West Coast, the bears probably did start eating more meat. And humans were likely the ones to blame.

California grizzlies, like most other brown bears, were never averse to eating meat. Chemical signatures in the skulls, teeth, and pelts of museum specimens, analyzed by Alagona and his colleagues, reveal that land animals made up just under 10 percent of the bears’ diet, even in the precolonial era—on par with the tastes of grizzlies elsewhere. (Marine meat made up less than 2 percent of the menus of the bears sampled.) And if modern brown-bear habits are any indication, what land animals the grizzlies were eating were probably mostly small, sluggish, newborn, or already dead. Grizzlies, for all their heft and roar, are kind of crummy hunters. “By and large, they’re just too slow,” Garth Mowat, a bear biologist at the University of British Columbia, told me.

Then, European colonists made meat-eating much, much easier—and perhaps more necessary. Livestock proliferated around California, many of them untended and unfenced. Indigenous populations dipped, which likely led to a bump in some wild-animal populations, Alagona told me. Swelling settlements thinned woodlands and pared back grasslands, potentially chipping away at the bears’ vegetarian menus. By the early 17th century, California grizzlies were probably eating quite a bit more meat—as Alagona’s team found, maybe nearly triple what they were consuming before.

The story continues at the link.  Check the other link for a report on bears eating 40,000 moths in a day.

Prehensile opossum tail useful for nest-making

A tip of my blogging hat to Marcie O'Connor at Prairie Haven for posting a video of an opossum gathering leaves for its nest using its prehensile tail (scroll down in the December journal entry).  Her video was captured using a motion-sensing night-vision camera, so I've embedded above a daylight version from the North Carolina Museum of Natural History.  Another video, from Manhattan (NYC) shows an opossum carrying its leaves up a tree to its nesting site.  I knew the tails were prehensile, but didn't know they were used for this purpose.

Pancake ice

It's truly amazing all the different forms ice can take.  Having spent much of my life in northern climates, I've seen many of them, but this photo (cropped for size) from The Guardian is my introduction to pancake ice (in eastern France).  You learn something every day.