Precision cancer treatments

We (with the help of artificial intelligence) are more and more able to find exactly the right chemical to attack an individual’s cancer. This article looks like an excellent overview of the state of the art, the possible future of precision treatments, and the obstacles.

Doctors are taking a far more nuanced view of what drugs and treatments will work on which patients and on what different kinds of cancers. The idea of this so-called precision medicine, or personalized medicine, is that ultimately doctors will use genetic tests—of both the patient and the cancer tumor—to determine the exact drugs or treatments that have the best chance of working.

(…)

To wring useful insights out of the data from 170,000 cancer patients that Caris has access to, the company enlists hundreds of different deep-learning algorithms. The programs essentially compete with one another to find patterns in the data that indicate which drugs will work best with which patients. “Different algorithms will miss different patients, but together they can do a better job,” says Spetzler.

3,500 words. https://www.newsweek.com/2019/07/26/targeting-each-patients-unique-tumor-precision-medicine-crushing-once-untreatable-cancers-1449287.html

“The shape of you”

Putting together a smash hit song involves a lot of pieces. Ed Sheeran didn’t even write this one for himself. You probably remember these lyrics:

Girl you know I want your love
Your love was handmade for somebody like me
Come on now follow my lead
I may be crazy don’t mind me
Say boy let’s not talk too much
Grab on my waist and put that body on me
Come on now follow my lead
Come come on now follow my lead

Remember to watch the video in the article, 8 min 44 sec.

Good news on child mortality

Some things are getting better:

Two decades ago, nearly 10 million children did not live to see a 5th birthday.

By 2017, that number — about 1 in every 16 children — was nearly cut in half, even as the world’s population increased by more than a billion people.

…

The overwhelming majority of child deaths are preventable. Adequate nutrition, water, sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics can save many lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/17/upshot/child-mortality.html

Non-paywalled: https://archive.is/PWY6R

The next decade could be even worse

Normally I lean towards optimistic visions of the future, but this is thought-provoking:

In 2010, Peter Turchin predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.

This article (approx 5,100 words) also includes a philosophical discussion of why historians tend to refuse a trend-based approach to history, and some ideas for preventing disasters, and many other interesting ideas…

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

Saving democracy in America

This story deserves to be much more widely known:

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

And on January 6th 2021, why were the fascists alone in their attack on the Capitol, Congress, and democracy? Because supporters of democracy knew that a confrontation would certainly become violent, and the President would then declare martial law, arrest his opponents, and refuse to step down…

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/. 6,800 words but worth the read.

Marriage 101

Article from 2016:

Nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that.

While popular culture often depicts love as a matter of luck and meeting the right person, after which everything effortlessly falls into place, learning how to love another person well, Solomon explains, is anything but intuitive. Among the larger lessons students learn in this class are:

Self-understanding is the first step to having a good relationship. “The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person,” Solomon declares.

You can’t avoid marital conflict, but you can learn how to handle it better. Once you have a sound, objective sense of why you behave the way you do, you are better equipped to deal with conflicts—inevitable in any long-term relationship.

A good marriage takes skill. The reality is that most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage.

You and your partner need a similar worldview. Even the best communication skills won’t help a couple that sees the world completely differently.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-first-lesson-of-marriage-101-there-are-no-soul-mates/283712/

[emoji words]

Emoji have their place… to express emotions, not facts or verbs. I dislike using them in place of words because they tend to be seriously ambiguous, and we have these things called “words” that we have been developing for millenia and which are much less ambiguous. We’ve had ideographic written languages and we’ve gotten rid of most of them.

I had this late-night text discussion…

Girlfriend:

       Why are there no hug emoji

Me:

   🫂 🤗

       But they could be ambiguous. I prefer words.

Girlfriend:

   🛌

       #notambiguous

Me:

       “F*** me now.”

Girlfriend:

   🤦🏻‍♀️

Me:

       “Wasp on my forehead!!!”

Girlfriend:

   🏃‍♀️

Me:

       “Time for a jog!”

Girlfriend:

   💩

Me:

       “Pooping makes me happy!”

Girlfriend:

   👽👾🤖

Me:

       “I’m going to eat your soul.”

Eighteen things that are not worth the mental cost

There are many daily activities, people, requests and categories associated with mental drain. Here are the things that are definitely not worth the mental cost.

• An invitation you instantly search for an excuse to decline
• A person who throws you under the bus at work
• Items that create clutter in your home
• Clothes that don’t fit — and never did
• Being late to meetings

Example:

Clothes that don’t fit — and never did

Marie Kondo that shit out of your closet.

Choosing clothes takes mental energy. Every decision you make — no matter how small — takes away precious mental energy.

I used to hold on to clothes that didn’t fit me. I had buff man shirts from back in my twenties, when I went from 60 KG to 100 KG in a year. Those shirts don’t fit anymore and the buff legs have gone back to chicken legs.

If you have to think for more than five seconds about an item of clothing then it probably should be donated to the local homeless shelter.

The article includes explanations of how these situations happen and why they are a waste of your finite mental energy. https://medium.com/the-ascent/18-things-that-are-not-worth-the-mental-cost-84871d61e4db.