Miss Philomena

Just link parking this here, but it might be interesting to others too.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/podcast-ancient-greek-dinner-parties

Andrew: The whole book is written in Greek. So Deipnosophistae in Greek can be translated as “the philosophers at dinner” or like, “the wise people at dinner.” One scholar that I spoke with had a kind of funny translation. He translated it as “banquet wits,” and he said he likes this because it sounds a little bit like “twits.” And there is like a bit of irreverence or humor in the text itself. So, he thought that that was a funny way of translating it.

Dylan: Yeah, I mean it shows you something about the culture, that there was so much kind of fine dining and social maneuvering happening in this space that someone would go to the trouble of producing a text, which was actually quite a lot of trouble back then, to be like, here’s kind of what you need to know.

Andrew: It’s a very rambling book. The format is hard to pin down. The framing device is that it’s a bunch of people talking at a dinner party. So it’s kind of structured that as the courses of the dinner are coming out, they see a dish and it inspires them to talk about that ingredient. Like the food itself is inspiring what they’re talking about. And they’re telling stories and they’re quoting a lot from other authors. That’s what makes it such an interesting and important text is because it preserves the words of all of these earlier writers. And in some cases, you have writers whose work doesn’t survive in its entirety, but the little piece of it that’s quoted in Deipnosophistae is what we have that survives.

Dylan: It’s like super meta because it’s like in the format of a dinner party conversation, but is also like a great quotes book so that you can reference it for your future dinner. So, Deipnosophistae contains these quotes, it contains these kind of philosophical tidbits, but it also seems like it also has real recipes in here.

Andrew: Well, one of the most significant things is it contains the oldest recorded known recipe in Greek. During this time, especially the Greek cities in what is now Sicily, were known for kind of fancy haute cuisine. And so the recipe that we have in Deipnosophistae is for a grilled fish. It’s a type of fish called ribbon fish, and it’s topped with grated cheese and olive oil.

*****

Dylan: That’s amazing, because there isn’t actually patent law for recipes now. I like the idea of it being a one-year patent on a recipe because it’s kind of like, okay, you get a year to be a really hot star chef, and then everybody gets to take a crack at doing the thing. I kind of feel like that would be a good thing to bring back. So, this book’s fascinating because it’s so many things. In a way, it just reminds me of what I sometimes call a tidbits book, which collects a lot of little stories or a lot of quotes or just this and that. It reminds me of the books that people sometimes put on the back of a toilet, like the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader kind of thing. The thing that you pick up and you sort of browse through it, it’s not really meant to be necessarily read in a go. You kind of open to some pages and go like, ah, interesting, very enlightening, and then you close it and you put it back on the back of the toilet.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/eat-like-a-greek-philosopher-oldest-fish-recipe

Whelp, Congress went and passed the First Felon’s Big Bastard of a Bill. So now what?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what-next-no-kings-movement-protest-boycott-organize-1235367077/

Those next steps include a new national protest, dubbed “Good Trouble Lives On.” That protest is scheduled for July 17, and honors the anniversary of the 2020 passing of Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis, who called on Americans fighting for justice to create “good trouble” in the name of redeeming the soul of America. The rallying cry for the march is “March in Peace. Act in Power.” The protest already has dozens of planned demonstrations.

The other action announced on the call is called “1 Million Rising.” Organized by Indivisible, the progressive grassroots juggernaut, the initiative seeks to harness the energy of protesters to build long-term political power. One Million Rising describes itself as “a national effort to train one million people” to become pro-democracy movement leaders, with “the skills to lead others.” The initiative aims to “build people power that can’t be ignored” and has as its mission statement: “1 Million Trained, Millions More Empowered.”

Mark your calendars!

Indivisible - https://indivisible.org/

Good Trouble Lives On - https://goodtroubleliveson.org/

1 Million rising - https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/803953/

I read this a while back, but I forgot to post it here. The NY Times wrote about how DOGE cuts will affect not just South Africa, but how those funding cuts will affect much much more than people might expect.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/health/south-africa-medical-research-trump.html

South Africa has for decades been a medical research powerhouse, yet its stature has been little known to people outside the field. South Africa’s scientists have been responsible for key breakthroughs against major global killers, including heart disease, H.I.V. and respiratory viruses such as Covid-19. They have worked closely with American researchers and have been awarded more research funding from the United States than any other country has received.

But a swift series of executive orders and budget cuts from the Trump administration have, in a matter of months, demolished this research ecosystem.

There are grim ramifications for human health worldwide, and also for pharmaceutical companies, including American giants such as Pfizer, Merck, Abbott and Gilead Sciences, which rely heavily on South Africa’s research complex when they develop and test new drugs, vaccines and treatments.

Pharmaceutical companies have relied on the country for clinical trials for decades. Some are now rethinking their relationship with South Africa, according to people familiar with the discussions.

And as just another layer of WTF racism, the US found a way to still keep experimenting on Black people, just not in our own country but overseas. *head desk*

“The implications of this are huge,” said Dr. Ntobeko Ntusi, chief executive of the South African Medical Research Council. “One of the biggest success stories to come out of South Africa in the last three decades, largely aided through the generosity of American people, has been the development of this high-caliber cadre of scientists who’ve led scholarship that has been seminal not just for South Africa but for the whole world.”

The first-ever heart transplant was performed in Cape Town in 1967. The CT scanner was invented in South Africa. So were many now-common surgical techniques. Vaccines and drugs that are widely used in the United States — including treatments for high blood pressure and the immunization for R.S.V. — came out of South African research.

And also, goddamn us for throwing all these highly trained doctors and scientists out of work.

South Africa’s research might is a legacy of its harsh history. Apartheid-era governments neglected the health of millions of Black people but invested in educational institutions and medical innovation for the white population. In the decades since the country transitioned to a multiracial democracy, those educational institutions have been open to everyone. But efforts to extend basic health care have been slow, which means the country still has a high rate of disease. That, in turn, makes for a grimly efficient place to conduct research.

Because the South African rand is a weaker currency — running about 20 to a U.S. dollar — running studies in South Africa costs a fraction of what it does in the United States.

First a little backstory, for the non-technical people in my reading audience. I’ll try to keep it brief.

You may have heard of virtual machines? They are software that mimics a laptop or server. So for example, you can have a Windows laptop, but run a Linux virtual machine on top of it if you want to. And the VM behaves exactly like a Linux laptop would. Well, the next software evolution from VMs is a container. When you create a VM, the virtual machine contains all sorts of things that you might not need. The same way a new laptop has all sorts of programs you might never use (in my case it’s browsers that I don’t use, and all those games). When you create a container, you only install the exact software that you need, and nothing more. So they’re much leaner/smaller, and you can run more containers than you can VMs on the same hardware. The most popular software to manage containers is called Kubernetes, and the most popular way to install containers on a Kubernets platform is using Helm Charts. OK, that’s the background.

At my current job we support Helm Charts for customers to install our software. BUT, we don’t use Helm Charts when we install our own software internally, we use something else. As a result, since we don’t use Helm Charts, the engineering team doesn’t really know diddly squat about them. And even our most experienced Engineer is intimidated by Helm, and complains that he doesn’t understand it. BUT our customers use Helm Charts, and they have to install our product using Helm charts. I’m sure you can see where this is going, can’t you?

When we have a release and update the Helm charts, we often do it badly so that there are bugs, or even worse the software can’t install. So our open source customers then have to log bugs. And they submit fixes because sometimes the problem is obvious. Or they write new features, because they need to be able to configure something we hadn't thought of. But the Engineering team pretty much ignores the issues, and somehow never get around to reviewing their code submissions until either I beg them to or someone from the community finds someone’s name or email address and pesters them personally. People tweet at us. One guy tracked people down on LinkedIn and sent them messages that way. It’s a mess. And it’s embarrassing and makes us look bad.

My Developer Advocate buddy Jay had an idea a while back to form a group of volunteers from the Community to tackle the problem. And then the idea went nowhere for a couple of months. When we met up at the offsite in Madrid, we decided to resurrect the idea and see if we could get the team to let us try it for a three month pilot program for a Helm Maintainers Group. This time we got the approval. Whee! We have two developer advocates, myself, and three Community Champions, people who we’ve already recognized for helping out in the Community, answering questions on the Community forum and Community Slack and submitting bug fixes. I don’t know much about Helm (yet). But it’s a skill I’d like to add to my toolbox, so I have a couple of books and I’ve signed up for a couple of online courses. For the time being, I’m around because I have permission to push buttons on the repo that only employees can push.

We had our kick off meeting last week (Tuesday the 24th) and then I spent the rest of the week going through and getting all the Helm Charts pull requests into a Google Spreadsheet so that we could triage them. Starting out we had something like 135 - 140 Pull Requests waiting to be reviewed. Between Jay and I, we’ve already closed about 45 as either too stale or no longer needed (because the fix was already in the code). One of our Community champions has started working his way through the spreadsheet, and I’ve already merged one PR for him. I saw him commenting on a lot of other PRs, asking for changes or asking people to update to the latest version of the code. So he’ll probably get through all the extra small ones this week.

I’m so excited that we’ve gotten so much done in only a week. Yeah, we do still have about 90 PRs to deal with. I’m hoping that we can get through all of the biggest ones in the next month or two, and then maybe we can work on some of the backlog of issues and bug reports.

Particularly relevant right now after I only got about two hours sleep Sunday night...

https://www.inverse.com/health/all-nighter-rewires-brain-mental-health-treatments

Everyone remembers their first all-nighter. What’s probably more memorable, though, is the slap-happy, zombie-like mode the next day brings. That “sleep-drunk” feeling isn’t imaginary.

The researchers found that one all-nighter roughly had the same effects on the brain as taking the anesthetic ketamine.

Which also might explain Elon Musk's behavior. He is famous for 1) staying up all night working and getting very little sleep and 2) taking lots of ketamine, which probably magnifies the effects of not sleeping.

This isn’t an endorsement of acute sleep deprivation. “I definitely don't want the takeaway from the story to be, ‘Let's not sleep tonight,’” Kozorovitskiy says.

Insufficient sleep brings risk for myriad conditions and events, such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke, way up. What’s more, sleep deprivation can push the antidepressant effect too far in the other direction, triggering manic episodes in people with mental health conditions like bipolar disorder. Going a night without shut-eye isn’t the latest craze that will cure your depression, but rather, this insight could shake up our approach to targeting different areas in the brain when developing antidepressant medications.

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a38146699/can-you-cure-motherhood-burnout-the-germans-seem-to-think-so/

By giving exhausted moms a paid time-out, the Germans may have found the remedy for what ails you—if what ails you is the stress of raising a child.

I had been parenting alone for the better part of two years when my doctor, after repeatedly treating me for fatigue, decided to write a unique prescription. A cure, as they say in German. Taking in the air, as we once said in English.

Whatever you call it, the treatment felt luxurious to this American: a three-week time-out with my kid on a quiet, car-free island, paid for by my insurance company. We would stay in a dormitory and I, along with 24 other exhausted mothers, would be taking classes on things like budgeting and stretching as a means of self-care. There would be day care and housekeeping and meal service, so we could concentrate on our lives beyond work and domesticity.

***

The cure, which got its start in the rubble of World War II, had been approved for more than 47,000 people the year before the pandemic; another two million people are estimated to be in need of one. Raising a child is clearly exhausting, especially under these circumstances.

Elly Heuss-Knapp, the wife of Germany's first postwar president, knew this firsthand; raised by a single father after her mother had been committed to an asylum, Heuss-Knapp introduced the concept of sending stressed out mothers to rural places for retreats in the early 1950s. In doing so, she enshrined the needs of women, hundreds of thousands of whom were widowed or dealing with traumatized husbands, into law in a newly formed country whose Constitution did not prioritize the rights of women. After such profound social disruption, the women (who were themselves often traumatized after surviving the war) needed a quiet time-out to grieve in peace and regain a sense of normalcy. Whole towns grew up around these dedicated "cure houses," and these retreats were enshrined in law.

I love this idea, that a culture can recognize that mothers are stressed out. And then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.