The Register: BOFH

The Register is a Brit technology news publication. One of its features is the BOFH (Bastard Operator from Hell) and his young helper the PFY (Pimply-Faced Youth).

HR has asked the BOFH for all emails (including sent, deleted, and archived emails) for some kind of investigation. BOFH asks for more information on what they need:

“Okay, no problems. Now, do you want his personal email as well?”
“People shouldn’t be using company email for personal business.”
“Yeah sure, and they shouldn’t be using the company photocopiers to check on the progress of suspicious moles on their arses either – but we all do it.”
“What?”
“Not our OWN photocopiers obviously. No, I use the one up in Human Resources.”

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/bofh_2022_episode_11/

Checklist of cognitive distortions

And how to counteract them! This is a seven-page PDF, taken from the book The Feeling Good Handbook (David, Burns D., 1999).

The first list is of ten cognitive distortions and their descriptions: All or nothing thinking; Overgeneralization; Mental filter; Discounting the positives; Jumping to conclusions; Magnification or minimalization; Emotional reasoning; “Should” statements; Labeling; Personalization and blame.

More lists: Ten ways to untwist your thinking; Ways to challenge automatic thoughts; Your thoughts and feelings.

https://arfamiliesfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Cognitive-Distortions.pdf. David’s website is https://feelinggood.com/.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

…Harry hesitated. He couldn’t help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn’t be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. “What else can you do?”
Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.
Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedalling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.
At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. “I’m sorry, Mr. Potter,” said the witch, sounding sincere, though the corners of her lips were twitching upwards. “I should have warned you.”
Harry was breathing in short gasps. His voice came out choked. “You can’t DO that!“
“It’s only a Transfiguration,” said Professor McGonagall. “An Animagus transformation, to be exact.”
“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can’t just visualise a whole cat’s anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”
Professor McGonagall’s lips were twitching harder now. “Magic.”

I’m only up to chapter 8 of 122, but this is so funny… in every chapter so far. Check it out. https://www.hpmor.com/.

First gene therapy for Tay-Sachs disease

Tay-Sachs is a severe neurological disease caused by a deficiency in an enzyme called HexA. This enzyme breaks down a fatlike substance that normally exists in very small, harmless amounts in the brain. Without HexA, however, this fatlike substance can accumulate to toxic levels that damage and kill neurons…
Our treatment uses two harmless viral vectors to deliver DNA instructions to brain cells that teach them how to produce the missing enzyme… The first child who received our gene therapy treatment was age 2 ½, with late-stage disease symptoms. Three months after treatment, they had better muscle control and could focus their eyes. Now at age 5, the child is in stable health and is seizure-free, which usually isn’t possible for patients at this age.

https://theconversation.com/first-gene-therapy-for-tay-sachs-disease-successfully-given-to-two-children-17687 0

HTTP Cats

This is a little techie, but funny. The point is that when your browser asks for a web page, the computer that sends the web page back to you includes a three-digit status code. The first digit says whether the request is in progress, was successful, had a client or server error etc. From Wikipedia:

1xx informational response – the request was received, continuing process
2xx successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
3xx redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
5xx server error – the server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request

Anyway, this site will supply a cat picture (yes!) for each return code: https://http.cat/. Click on the picture for an expanded picture. Example: 400 = Bad Request: