FWIW, I have a similar athletic history & am about 9 years into chronic fatigue syndrome. Mine’s likely post viral, but I can also remember a 24 hour race where I finished not feeling like myself anymore. I’ve had extreme exercise intolerance and all of the typical CFS symptoms. I’ve been to dozens of doctors and several top institutions with no answers yet.
3 years into it, I was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea — even though I’m not overweight.
I’m finally feeling somewhat better after eliminating all caffeine (I only had 1 8oz cup every morning), plus 4 months off of any exercise, work, and as much stress as possible. Some of my mysterious and long-lasting symptoms, such as various food intolerances & dizziness, suddenly resolved.
I stopped drinking alcohol a long while ago too, thinking even my occasional drinking could impact my sleep and recovery.
I still experience post-exertional malaise if I go above zone 2, but I can now tolerate zone 2 workouts without the typical crashes that would occur 24-48 hours after exercise and would last for days.
I’ll likely be on a nice e-bike soon, so that I can keep my heart rate more stable and low over hilly terrain.
Are you treating the apnea? How did you start to identify the other triggers and level of exercise you can tolerate?
I also have mild sleep apnea and am not overweight. Although weight gain can directly cause apnea, it isn't the only cause.
Treating the apnea improved my quality of life an immeasurable amount. I started actually being able to have a life rather than a series of responsibilities to get through between naps. I still struggle with energy levels though.
I had symptoms for 10-15 years before getting diagnosed. I've heard doctors have become a lot more diligent about identifying it over the past 5 years or so.
I think something like 80% of people with it were undiagnosed as of 2016ish (as per a study done by surgeons).
I'm a neuroscientist who published on central sensitization and chronic pain. Unfortunately, I was forced into retirement by chronic fatigue syndrome.
The linked article and others have convinced me that CFS can be caused by viruses.
There's one important and tricky question: is a viral infection necessary to trigger CFS in humans (such as long COVID or in this linked article), or is an extremely stressful series of events (which could include the physical stress of a severe viral infection) sufficient?
Giving a certain interpretation of their comment, I think the physician could be stating that they've seen patients with CFS that has been triggered by stressful events alone. I think this can coexist with the linked research if CFS can be triggered by stress OR a virus.
When chronic stress is mentioned as a factor, that should not be interpreted as being a psychological predisposition ("it is all in their head"). Instead, it is a predisposition on a cellular level.
The brain regions involved in central sensitization are tightly linked with those involved in chronic stress. Animal models of chronic stress lead to central sensitization of pain, as do animal models of chronic illness. Chronic stress causes an immense amount of remodeling in the brain and the rest of the body.
Proving or disproving that CFS can be triggered by chronic stress alone is difficult because CFS is a diagnosis of exclusion. Diagnosis can take a long time. We humans are always getting viruses and occasionally enduring stressful life events, so it is difficult to untangle the two.
If we look at my personal history, my diagnosis took several years (above average for CFS patients). I can point to 3 stressful life events and 2 viral illnesses that might have preceded CFS onset. The cause for my CFS remains a mystery.
Without a mechanism and diagnostic test for CFS, I think this question will remain unanswered.
I think it is contentious to say that CFS is an endpoint of central sensitization. It might be, but it also might be related to mitochondrial dysfunction or another mechanism-- too soon to tell, in my opinion. Central sensitization is certainly a component, but I do not think it is proven to be the only component. I should say that I'm extremely biased towards believing in central sensitization as the cause of many things because that was the primary focus of my research.
Again, without a mechanism and a diagnostic test for CFS, much is murky. Viral infection can at least be a cause. I think we're far away from having a tidy answer like the story of H. pylori and ulcers though.
My family in Texas has told me that some electricity cooperatives have been disincentivizing solar by charging different rates to customers with solar or charging fees when customers with solar produce excess power.
They need to protect the fossil fuel powered central grid.
People with solar panels can definitely produce in a year all the energy need they want and basically pay zero after they install solar panels (bills went from 1k+ to less than 100 per year), so they're just using the central grid as a free battery that never deteriorates, never need to be bought and exchanged for a new one every once and then.
The central grid makes very little money out of solar user and they can't justify their existence or improve themselves and go solar.
Now there are rules that say you can't buy more solar panel than what your expected consumption is and they want to install a remotely controlled system so that the central grid won't purchase your electricity unless it's favourable for them.
People are fighting the first rule by buying a lot of cheap resistive heaters which consume a lot of energy which they can use to get enough solar panels to cover their needs.
There is not much hope for the remote control but I guess in that case we'll have to go with batteries. Hopefully by then Form Energy would deliver their iron-air batteries.
I think it depends on what you do in music. I also just play for fun and do not care about trying to gain absolute pitch (not that this is an option from what I've read).
My friend's brother has absolute pitch. I've played 10 note chords for him & he can pick out every note and also tell me if each note is in tune, sharp, or flat.
He is a high school band director. I can imagine that this is a very useful skill for his job.
Wow this is so interesting! So you are saying that the person with absolute pitch often has lost the ability to intuitively follow relative pitch, such that they are having to transpose in their heads?
I had always assumed they could still intuitively match pitch and just had an extra information overlay.
Do these people you know who dislike transposed covers also dislike genres of music with dissonant elements, such as certain types of jazz or microtonal music?
It's not losing relative pitch at all[0], it's actually kind of the opposite. Relative pitch and absolute pitch are at odds with each other in some contexts. There are many reasons as to why, and if you search tuning theory [1] you can find some amount of technical information. In this post I'll only cover a tiny portion of the reason, there are many other reasons, but this is one fundamental reason why.
To give a basic gist, two of the most fundamental intervals in music are octave (2:1 frequency ratio) which is 1200 cents, and perfect fifth (3:2 frequency ratio) which is about 702 cents. You'll find that if you stack 12 of these perfect fifths you come back to the same note (seven octaves up) but 23.46 cents off. 23.46 cents off is very much audible by every human being who is not speech impaired, so it'll sound extremely jarring (dissonant). This makes musical composition within the tradition of Western art/church music challenging. So, to fix this, we use 700 cents as the interval of approximate perfect fifth and each semitones apart by 100 cents (so that perfect fifth is 7th note and octave the 12th). We call this system "12 tone equal temperement" which is standard in all genres of Western music (from classical to jazz to pop to rock... but other cultures have many other systems). Now your piano will be tuned to these notes (0, 100, 200, 300... cents) such that it's impossible to play other notes. When people learn absolute pitch, they learn these notes are C, C#, D, D# etc. But when an instrument with continuous pitch plays (such as violin, cello, human voice etc) you do not need to be bound by this tempering. So you can actually play a perfect fifth as 702 cents. As long as the piece is not so chromatic/atonal such that you need 12 perfect fifths to add up to seven octaves, it'll work out. But when someone with perfect pitch listens to this effect, it can feel jarring, particularly because music is "out of tune". This can make piano music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to just intonation (e.g. violinists) and violin music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to 12TET (e.g. pianists with perfect pitch).
[0] Note that relative pitch is required to understand spoken human language, so as long as you don't have a speech impediment, you can likely understand relative pitch just fine. Of course, ear training can help you label the intervals you hear and associate them with names, not something all laymen can do.
Most professional violinists play in perfect equal temperament. I never got that deep into string playing, but I assume that a lot of study of "intonation" is actually about unlearning the natural frequency ratios (3/2 for 5ths, 5/4 for 3rds, etc) and learning to use the equal tempered counterparts (2^(7/12) and 2^(1/3) respectively).
However, there are a lot of times when you can make music more interesting and exciting by adding some pure thirds (equal temperament is off by the most on thirds, and thirds are very harmonically important) at strategic places. You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument.
I think this very much depends on the context, and being a good virtuoso violinist (or cellist, or singer etc) picking the right temperament for the right effect. If you're playing in an orchestra with many other instruments, you likely have to stick with 12TET. If you're playing a violin concerto cadenza, if you're playing a piece for solo violin, you likely want to play in just intonation as much as possible. If you're playing a piece for accompanied solo violin (violin + accompanying piano or orchestra i.e. sonata or concerto) then it very much depends on the moment and what sounds good for the music. Especially for an instrument like violin, which is extremely sensitive to every tiny expression performer can add, it's hard to make blanket generalizations. Ultimately, it's all about the artistic style of the performer, and composer's vision.
Excepting split sharp/flat keys (as seen in some non-equal-tempered harpsichords and organs), or some electronic instruments/plugins which can dynamically vary the pitch of each note.
AC power is becoming more common on flights, and I speculate that you will be able to use Bluetooth headphones.
Otherwise, yeah probably a multiple battery solution.
I don't really see myself caring about the movies during a flight use case.
For working during a flight, I'd greatly prefer the Vision Pro, as I am easily distracted by my surroundings and would value the improved ergonomics over being hunched over a laptop (I'm flying in coach). And for reading PDFs and web browsing, ergonomics again seem superior to a smartphone or tablet.
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