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I Had a Stroke at 33

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Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#151

Post by prawn »

bshimmin wrote: post #76
prawn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless efforts to reach people with this sort of information. Official medical sources, highbrow papers, trashy sites. What's to say that this isn't the best option to reach a certain segment and that, as a bonus, it reached beyond that? Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trash…

Do you really believe this? If Buzzfeed can achieve financial security by creating an audience who enjoy feeble drivel ("54 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'Gossip Girl'"), surely if they then start replacing that material with long-form, well-written, thought-provoking content (like this article), they run the risk of losing that audience? It seems to me that the people who want to see 27 pictures of Beyoncé w…

Yes, I really believe what I said:

That rather than just vapid trash, I'd prefer seeing something occasionally informative in there for that market.

That monetising first through listicles in order to fundraise for more serious efforts could well be a valid strategy.

If you're Buzzfeed, and you're offering a bit of both, you can't really lose. You have the daily visitors reading their listicles and occasionally stumbling across something premium, and you have other markets who don't enter via the front page, but follow viral links from aggregators like HN or Reddit. Unless a front page is saturated with "ugh boring!!1" content, I don't know that there'd be a risk with their existing market.

One side of the fence gets slightly more educational content. The other gets more quality content, propped up by tabloid junk.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#152

Post by ZeroCoin »

kirsebaer wrote: post #126
silencio wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...was scolded like I was some drug addict just looking for a fix... It's tough dealing with drugs and potential abuse. You know if you're really in need or not, but they deal with people wanting them for any reason just because, and so the skepticism starts to show. There's the default assumption at hospitals/pharmacies of just locking everything down so the healthcare providers themselves can't abuse them too. My…

This is another reason for drug legalization. The paranoia around opiates has to end. Lack of access to pain medication is a huge problem globally. Every time there is a natural disaster doctors are arrested for carrying pain meds without waiting for formal permissions. After the Haitian earthquake many people had limbs amputated without pain medication.

>The paranoia around opiates has to end. Lack of access to pain medication is a huge problem globally.

I agree 100%.

I passed kidney stones without any pain medication because the "care workers" thought I was a junkie looking for a fix... Even though I had been into their ER a few weeks earlier and was white as a sheet due to incredible pain.

You can't even fake that type of pain afaik.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#153

Post by a-priori »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #94
weddpros wrote: post #57

I was 32 when I had a stroke (March 4th, 2003). It was a different kind of stroke, affecting a different part of my brain, essentially related to vision. I was half blind, but I only realized something was "strange" when I saw myself in the mirror: I had only one eye. My brain knew I should have two: I was half blind. The first diagnosis was migraine with aura (blindness in my case). But the aura should have lasted n…

> It was a different kind of stroke, affecting a different part of my brain, essentially related to vision. I was half blind, but I only realized something was "strange" when I saw myself in the mirror: I had only one eye. My brain knew I should have two: I was half blind. There's something going on here beyond just loss of raw visual input. If you lose an eyeball, or hold your eye closed, and look in the mirror, you…

There's a similar phenomenon called contralateral neglect (or one of various other names), where after brain damage to one hemisphere of their brain, a person tends to ignore things on the opposite side. The effect is sometimes in retinal coordinates (e.g. only scan objects in one half of the field of view), sometimes in object coordinates (e.g. eat only one half of a plate of food), and sometimes in egocentric coordinates (e.g. not shave one half of their face).

This seems to be similar, but different condition. Contralateral neglect is a problem of attention: they can see the things they ignore, they just won't spontaneously pay attention to them. This is a problem of perception, where they tried to pay attention to their eye, but perceived it as not being there.

I don't have an easy explanation for how this effect occurs.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#154

Post by a-priori »

weddpros wrote: post #110
thaumasiotes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was a different kind of stroke, affecting a different part of my brain, essentially related to vision. I was half blind, but I only realized something was "strange" when I saw myself in the mirror: I had only one eye. My brain knew I should have two: I was half blind. There's something going on here beyond just loss of raw visual input. If you lose an eyeball, or hold your eye closed, and look in the mirror, you…

My eyes were just fine: it's the brain that was the cause here. When it occurs, I can close one eye then the other and still not see in half of my FoV. Part of my brain was not irrigated and did not function properly... There was nothing in /var/logs: I couldn't perceive that I was half blind. syslogd crashed :-)

Is this always one half of your field of view? Or is it one half of certain objects (e.g. your face)?

If it's the first, then it sounds like damage to one visual pathway. The visual input from each eye is divided into left and right fields, and they're processed independently. Here's a good illustration:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Constudeyepath.gif#me...

After the optic chiasma, the two pathways diverge. Damage any time after there, such as to the occipital lobe of one hemisphere, could result in blindness to one half of the field of view.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#155

Post by weddpros »

a-priori wrote: post #154
weddpros wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My eyes were just fine: it's the brain that was the cause here. When it occurs, I can close one eye then the other and still not see in half of my FoV. Part of my brain was not irrigated and did not function properly... There was nothing in /var/logs: I couldn't perceive that I was half blind. syslogd crashed :-)

Is this always one half of your field of view? Or is it one half of certain objects (e.g. your face)? If it's the first, then it sounds like damage to one visual pathway. The visual input from each eye is divided into left and right fields, and they're processed independently. Here's a good illustration: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Constudeyepath.gif#me... After the optic chiasma, the two pathways diverge.…

It's really one side of my field of view.

It've talked about the face because I did not perceive that half my field of view was missing, but when looking at myself in the mirror, I saw one eye was missing... But it really was half of my field of view.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#156

Post by diestl »

dang wrote: post #17
diestl wrote: post #13

Not sure what this has got to do with programming?

Intellectually interesting stories on all topics have been welcome here ever since PG changed the site name from "Startup News" in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html By the way, if anybody wants a hit of meta, it's astonishing how precisely the last five paragraphs there still apply.

Maybe he should change the name of the site then, you can't just say everything is now on topic, unless of course all he cares about are hits.
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