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Ask HN: Teach me something new

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Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#571

Post by dagmx »

mikelevins wrote: post #28

I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…

As someone with epilepsy, the divorce between what my body is doing/experiencing and what my brain perceives or is asking for are precisely how you describe it.

It leads to a lot of out of body experiences and dissociation. As a weird side effect I also mostly only have lucid dreams now.

One thing I found odd is that there's entire groups of people who chase this kind of mental state. Usually through a state of psychedelic drugs to induce a state of altered mind. It's really odd to me because I hate the feeling myself, being forced into it. Though I suppose it's like anything, where if it's in small doses it's a fun novelty for some.

Anyway, my epilepsy has greatly affected my perception of my own perception abilities.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#572

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

mikelevins wrote: post #492
sjg007 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the caffeine or the sugar when you drink the can of coke or both? I've found sugar to be way worse for my insomnia than anything else. Caffeine does play a role but excess sugar really revs me up ironically.

It was definitely the caffeine. For example, a can of Diet Coke was just as bad. I also know from experience with other stimulants that I was just extremely sensitive to stimulants in general (and so is my mother, and so is my daughter). Not anymore, though; not since I developed CFS.

Are you actively seeking replacement ideas for underlying causes of the CFS, or are you good with what's established?

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#573

Post by scruple »

randlet wrote: post #540
elric wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, scintillating scotomas don't fill the entire field of vision. They can do, and when they're caused by migraine auras they tend to grow and then shrink again within a 20-60 minute window. I can certainly read when I'm experiencing one. I can continue to work if I really want to, but I find that having a coffee and taking a break is much more comfortable. Migraine auras suck, but are pretty fascinat…

Mine grow to fill a good chunk of my entire vision and never shrink. Instead the arc continues to grow until it is outside my field of vision and therefore no longer obstructive.

This is also what I experience.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#574

Post by yshklarov »

ajb wrote: post #229

In statistics, the mean and median are both averages, but are technically quite different. The mean is the sum of all items divided by the number of them, while the median is the middle item in the sorted list. When they are different, this can have strange effects. For example, when estimating engineering tasks, the mean error is often positive while the median is often negative. This is why your manager believes th…

> In statistics, the mean and median are both averages, but are technically quite different.

But numerically, they are not too wildly different! The difference between the mean and the median is at most one standard deviation. If the distribution is unimodal, then the difference is at most sqrt(3/5) standard deviations.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#575

Post by SemanticStrengh »

weberer wrote: post #441
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found it strange how UFOs concentrate in the U.S,is it because of the climate? /s I wanted to believe and there is a serious subreddit for UFOs but most are debunked. There exist ~2 truly mysterious UFOs and most of their mystery has been explained.

Can you share the explanation for the Nimitz incident?

I forgot the names, don't remember wether nimitz is gimbal but anyway that explanation is a great example of what kind of analysis we should do https://youtu.be/qsEjV8DdSbs

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#576

Post by mikelevins »

scruple wrote: post #564
mikelevins wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The image you linked is what I'm calling "flickering". My full-blown scintillating scotoma is much more vivid and fully-formed. In the incident I'm reporting, it was a 3D physical-looking structure of triangular prisms made of white light, with zebra stripes of utter blackness sweeping rapidly along them, surrounded by an aura that looked like a cross between the sun's corona and the aurora borealis. These links are…

Fascinating. The first image is exactly what mine look like but I was told (by a doc) that they are ocular migraines.

I'm no expert; perhaps when I see those, I'm having an ocular migraine.

If it's actually an ocular migraine (which takes place in the eye) rather than a scintillating scotoma (which takes place in the brain), that's a possible explanation for why I could continue reading. The UK's NHS says they tend to happen in just one eye, so if I was having an ocular migraine, it might have left my vision unobstructed in the other eye.

On the other hand, if that's the explanation, then I would sort of expect to have consciously experienced seeing the book while I was reading it, and I didn't--or if I did, that's not the way I remember it.

Of course, memory is untrustworthy, and it's also possible that the vividness of the ocular migraine might have persuaded my brain to tell me I couldn't see the book even though I could.

So ocular migraine is a solid alternative candidate to explain my experience. If I have another scotoma, I'll see if I can figure out a way to determine which thing is going on. Maybe closing one eye and then the other.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#577

Post by mikelevins »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #572
mikelevins wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was definitely the caffeine. For example, a can of Diet Coke was just as bad. I also know from experience with other stimulants that I was just extremely sensitive to stimulants in general (and so is my mother, and so is my daughter). Not anymore, though; not since I developed CFS.

Are you actively seeking replacement ideas for underlying causes of the CFS, or are you good with what's established?

I guess I would say that I'm interested in a desultory way, but without urgency.

I've achieved a good adaptation to it, and my life proceeds mostly as if I didn't have it now, as long as I observe some rules: regular schedule, good nutrition, regular low-impact exercise. (If my exercise gets too high-impact then I cross into the kind of fatigue I cannot easily recover from.)

I do follow science and medical news related to it. The present state of affairs as I currently understand it is that it's still a syndrome rather than a disease, which basically means it's a big bag of symptoms without an agreed-upon underlying cause or mechanism. There's some evidence that ties it somehow to the Epstein-Barr virus (and, perhaps coincidentally, one of my kids had mononucleosis in the months before I developed the syndrome). There's also some evidence that suggests that susceptibility to it is heritable. Some researchers have hypothesized that it's an epigenetic disorder--that is, a genetic disease that is activated by an environmental trigger (such as a viral infection--a large fraction of CFS cases start with a viral infection).

Someone published some work that claims that folks with CFS have distinctively abnormal calcium metabolism, which might account for the difficulty recovering from fatigue.

There are still some people who think it's psychosomatic, or mostly psychosomatic, too.

That's about as much as I remember off the top of my head. As I say, I'm interested, but not urgently so. I seem to have found my accommodation.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#578

Post by mellosouls »

FrenchAmerican wrote: post #491
mellosouls wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True - and a good point - but also a troubling one as the clear implication is that male suffering is really not considered a concern - at least to the news platforms.

Or maybe we don't care much about what happens in our jails. As if being raped in jail was part of the sentence. Note that rape is only the extreme form of the violence that inmates, mostly males, endure. I can't see where the suffering of men would be silenced because of their gender. On the contrary, at last, more and more often men express their suffering, which is great because the "silent strong" man used to be…

Much of what you say is true but my point was about the coverage of these issues in mainstream news. I don't think this is particularly a male silence problem.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#579

Post by HKH2 »

wonderbore wrote: post #350
Adrig wrote: post #260

You probably heard about the quirks in the French numerical system. For example, 99 is translated "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf" which is literally "four twenty ten nine". This is a legacy of the base 20 numerical system used by the Celtics thousands of years ago before the modern Romance language drove it out. The hybridization with our current base 10 system came with the Roman conquest of the Gaul. Another example of the…

Surely they the French could figure out that "neuf-dix-neuf" could work as well. I'm learning some South East Asian languages and the simplicity is astounding. Who needs "dix" when "dua dua" works just as well? (Indonesia)

In Mandarin, you can count to 99 using combinations of just 10 short sounds (without any variation). Ordinal numbers are made using one sound that goes in front of the number.

The names of days are the equivalent of Day 1, Day 2 etc. (except Sunday which is Sunday/Skyday), and months are Month 1, Month 2 etc.

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