The issue is not cold, but whether you can get a highly competitive position at the South Pole Station. In order to see the sun set, you have to be part of the skeleton crew which maintains the station during the winter-over. There are no flights going in and out during the winter. If you see the sun set over the South Pole... you'll also be stuck seeing the sun rise as well. In the months between you'll be working in perpetual night.
> I don’t personally see a reason to treat cadavers any differently than any other object in a lab
Even from a purely consequentialist point of view: if behavior around the cadavers gets out to the public, and the public deems it disrespectful, the public stops donating cadavers, which negatively impacts medical education. Even if you don't personally believe in treating human remains with respect, a huge part of society does, and you have to at least respect that.
Speaking from first-hand, I can't remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a "gift of body" ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.
I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.
Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:
- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery
- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.
- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.
- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."
Also speaking from first hand I remember quite a bit of "disrespect". Jokes were outright common. The vast majority of interactions were respectful of course -- its hard work studying anatomy after all. But TBH many folks in medicine can be quite callous, which I find not unrelated to the task at hand (i.e. dealing with the crazy and brutal facts of us all being mushy living creatures at a much higher rate than most people). Standing in a room full of dead bodies being dissected... isn't really normal. And it takes a toll.
> Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."
Thought provoking. I'll keep this in mind while holding a hundred billion apples during lunch. ;)
From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands. And there's also something in the brain that has been lost, something beyond mere physical matter. An easy example of this is a puzzle, if you're putting a puzzle together, and I come in and mix it up, I've taken something from you, and yet I took no material object away. There's probably some organization that's part of our brain and "humanity" that is lost at death. I'm not talking about religious "spirit" here - back to the puzzle, it has no spirit, but an assembled puzzle is more than the physical material it is made of.
I don't mean to be super critical of your lab partner, just sharing some additional philosophical views.
> From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands.
I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.
A large amount of computation takes place in the gut, largely by the foreign bacteria that make up our gut flora, and the gut has direct lines of two-way communication with the brain. Hence the term "gut feeling".
The brain certainly does a lot of heavy lifting, but I think if you took a person's brain out of their human body and into a robot body instead, they'd probably have dramatic shifts in personality, behavior, thought processes, feelings, worldview, etc. It would probably be on a similar level as those experiments where people use magnetic or electric pulses on their brain or whatever and observe large personality changes.
The comment you're replying to is talking about discussion of the experience (hopefully after the fact). I don't think that they're claiming the bodies are being disrespectfully handled. I'm assuming they're talking about the black humor people use to cope with being surrounded by illness and death.
Mom's a nurse, so it never struck me as odd or mean-spirited. It finally dawned on me when she cracked a joke in response to a question grandma asked about a work story mom was telling at a family get-together. It went over grandma's head, thankfully. It was a pretty good pun, but I think that was the first time I realized that not everyone is used to that sort of talk.
Try a run that is much longer (eg, 3 hours), then see how your 1.5 hour run feels. Usually you need a larger-than-normal stimulus to elicit adaptation. In my experience, the mind adapts to these things and will essentially learn to shut off.
I had a conversation with a cyclist who grew up in one of those "high crime neighborhoods" in St. Louis. He said that he received strange looks and comments when he visited his old neighborhood with a road bike attached to his car. He belonged; the bike did not. I suspect that more-than-casual cycling is a cultural oddity in some areas. I'm not sure that walking would garner the same reaction.
Whenever I see a bike in a car I assume the person has a lot of free time and therefore is somehow what well-off. Perhaps people were subconsciously judging his wealth?
I've gained an appreciation for walking through very roundabout means.
For the longest time I found walking even short distances insufferably slow and boring. I ride my bike--a lot. The distances and durations I cover have grown each year to the point that centuries (metric or imperial) are a regular weekend event. Boredom is always an issue when you're out for 5+ hours, but you'd be surprised at how much your sense of time can change if you normalize riding long distances. Interestingly, my mind's time-condensation for cycling never translated to walking.
This year I branched out into winter ultra fat biking, which, as it turns out, can involve a significant amount of walking. In bad snow conditions one can end up pushing a heavy bike for hours at a time. The two races I did this winter had their respective all time worst course conditions. So, I did a lot of walking.
This spring I've found myself opting walk to the gym and office, leaving the bike at home. My mind doesn't count the minutes the way it used to. I actually have no sense of how long it takes me to get to these places. I suspect the exaggerated stimulus of pushing a bike for hours through snow drifts has adapted my perception of everyday walking. I would hypothesize that the author's 20-mile weekend walks makes their long daily walks more doable. If you want to enjoy short regular walks, perhaps it would help to go out for a very long and hard walk from time to time.
> If you want to enjoy short regular walks, perhaps it would help to go out for a very long and hard walk from time to time.
Bingo. Adaptation can do wonders for our perception of an activity. How do you adapt? By pushing the limits a little bit at a time; getting in the zone of discomfort for a short while, and stopping before pain/injury.
Lately, I've been trying to enjoy discomfort by thinking of it as an indication that my limits are now shifting in the right direction.
Two cents as an MD-(CS)PhD student studying what I've heard referred to as "the last mile problem."
My stack trace of investigation:
- The model is good, we just need to get the doctors to trust the model.
- The model is good, we need to figure out how to build an informed trust in the model (so as to avoid automation bias).
- The model is good, we need informed trust, but we can't tackle the trust issue without first figuring out a realistic deployment scenario.
- The model is good, we need informed trust, we need a realistic deployment scenario, but there are some infrastructural issues that make deployment incredibly difficult.
After painstaking work with real-life EHR system, sanity-check model inference against realistic deployment scenario.
- Holy crap, the model is bad and not at all suitable for deployment. 0.95 AUC, subject of a previous publication, and fails on really obvious cases.
My summary so far of "why?": assumptions going into model training are wildly out of sync with the assumptions of deployment. It's "Hidden Tech Debt in ML" [1] on steroids.
You've probably seen it, but a more recent, related paper (that I think has some of the same authors) about inherent features of modern ML that make models so fragile, even if they test OK:
Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning, D'Amour et al.,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03395
my question: why don't they just specify that this ML model has been trained with this type of medical equipment? Couldn't they make it part of the SLA to use the same type of equipment in the field as that used to obtain the training images?
HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn't fly in other online communities.
I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.
I also feel the text-only format and less visible “points”/“likes” has something to do with it. It’s harder to be attention-grabbing with just text. In many ways, HN feels to me like an online email thread.
> I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
That might be true. However, from my experience maturity is way more important than actual age. Some maturity comes with age, but a lot of it is also individual behaviour in my opinion.
The Overton window is real, but it's fairly wide open.
I could post a pro-socialism argument and get upvoted, I could post a pro-capitalism argument and get upvoted. I could criticize GMOs, or praise them. I could probably defend Trump if I'm thoughtful about it, or decry him.
Can I say "Capitalism/Socialism/GMOs/Trump is dumb" and get upvoted? No. Can I point out problems (or benefits) of them? Yes--so long as I'm not inflammatory about it.
When a post involves gender and/or race, the Overton window is quite narrow. Those appear to be the most controversial with the comments section filled with snark and polemics.
No, not really. You can't 'disagree' with pedophile politician rings any more than you can disagree with the moon landing having taken place. The one is reality, the other is not. That's what the nonsensical stands for.
It is quite interesting what people are willing to believe when individuals in power state these things with great certainty. But personally I prefer to have my fiction and real-world views separated by a healthy dose of skepticism.
> I come from Minneapolis, and before that I lived in Seattle and Boston — three of the bluest, most left-leaning cities in the United States. I was an urban woman and couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than a city. My husband concurred. Then our 28-year-old son died in late 2016.
> Suddenly the traffic and noise and confusion became too much. John and I took off on a year’s driving tour of gentler parts — both of us working from the road, a computer security consultant and a writer. We grew nearly silent in grief.
> We considered Asheville, N.C., and Santa Fe, N.M. But on a chilly, silver January day, we drove into the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. Though neither of us could put our finger on exactly why, this felt like our place. People back home were flummoxed: I heard them say a lot about white, rural Christians who reject outsiders and “cling to their guns.”
> But what city folk don’t know is how beautiful it is here, and by that I mean way more than you imagine. We’re surrounded by low mountains, bony shale bluffs, forest, shining lakes and mysterious twisting roads. The wide-open sky brings every bird formation and low-hanging planet into relief.
As a native and resident, Arkansas has a history and a reputation, but it also has amazing strength of character, and people who care about each other and their community. There are folks from all over the world who call my state home, and I’m proud to welcome them all.
Except the KKK. They are the bane of my home state, and it is my wish that I live to see each and every one of every group’s members publicly repudiate their membership and their belief in the groups. /rant
Please, visit! The Buffalo National River is one of the most amazing natural attractions in my neck of the woods. Nearby in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is the best world-class museum in the state, if not the region. I think we have some pretty famous art, if you’re into that kind of thing. Also in Bentonville is the corporate HQ of a little store which started in Arkansas, and kept growing, which you may have heard of: Walmart. A short trip from there takes you to Fayetteville, AR which is currently #4 in the nation for best places to live, according to U.S. News & World Report. Doesn’t hurt that the University of Arkansas is also in Fayetteville; my time on campus was longer ago every day, but the campus and its surrounding metro area is as vibrant as ever, and I hear good things about its Walton School of Business.
We have a legacy to bear as well, but I think we honor our mistakes and errors as well as our virtues. On that note, one of the projects I’m most proud of in NWA is our massive bike trails network that connects the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers-Bentonville-Bella Vista area. This area was on the route of the Trail of Tears; this section of paths is the Northwest Arkansas Heritage Trail, part of the NWA Razorback Regional Greenway.
Yup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergy#Pathophysiology