My partner had a concussion many years ago, it was an eye-opening experience.
After months of mostly-useless conversations with doctors, neurologists, etc, we visited a sports medicine specialist who worked with snowboarders, skiers, etc, people who get concussions frequently.
The way the specialist described common concussion symptoms was really interesting: Effectively, your brain finds balance by using a combination of sight, touch (feet), and your inner ear. A concussion can impact the inner ear part of that equation, so your brain is overly reliant on sight and touch to compensate. This can cause all kinds of common concussion symptoms: Dizziness, sensitivity to screen time, etc.
Anyways, after giving us the rundown my partner was prompted to do a few simple exercises to test concussion symptoms. One of them was to stand on one leg and track a moving pen with her eyes. She'd done OK on some of the previous exercises but this one took her out, she lasted maybe 5 seconds and was completely exhausted and dizzy for the rest of the day because of it.
We ended up with a physical-therapy-like balance exercise plan that she stuck to regularly for a few months, and it ended up getting her to complete recovery.
Scotty, from Strange Parts, aka the youtube guy who showed the world that Apple could have included a headphone jack this whole time, went through a similar set of circumstances.
Like you said, extremely eye opening, and very good information to have. There is help available, and it likely won't come from a normal neurologist until their training catches up to the research.
People often seem to have a casual attitude to concussion; you read sports star X is out with a concussion and think little of it. Another word for concussion is "traumatic brain injury" and that tends to get it across better. I had a bad concussion a while ago and I still get occasional headaches, I had a tinnitus for months (if you are unlucky, it stays with you forever) and my sense of smell is permanently altered. I was ultimately lucky on that one too, enough force and you can permanently sever the connection to your olfactory receptors.
The neck is also surprisingly fairly involved in the balance system, I unfortunately have a lifelong inner ear deficit (deafness and vestibular) on one side and there have been times where neck tightness caused significant issues with my eye tracking (nystagmus). It’s really all connected, also salt intake, caffeine etc. can impact your balance / dizziness due to the pressure in your inner ear canals where the otoliths are swimming.
I once had a bad dream and violently shifted in bed hard enough to headbutt the connected nightstand next to my pillow (weird design). Hard enough to bleed.
I was dizzy for days whenever I laid down. It was as if I was spinning in an amusement park ride slowly.
I called an ex GF neuro radiologist, who after realizing I wasn't going to go in for any scans (no health insurance at the time), told me of a series of "brain/balance reset exercises" you can do. I did the exercises, moving my head in several positions in a particular order, and all symptoms went away.
More or less benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. The bang on your head dislodged crystals that form in the fluid in your ear’s semicircular canals. These crystals form with age and normally collect in some nook in the inner ear. When they are floating around in the fluid, they can strike the tiny hairs in your inner ear that indicate to your brain how your body is moving and how it is positioned. When fluid flows by the Haus and makes them sway, your brain interprets that as motion.
But when a crystal hits a hair, your brain interprets it as “I am suddenly moving about one axis at high angular velocity.” You become insanely dizzy. The nature of this phenomenon is that when you turn your head one way, you feel like you are falling forever in that direction.
Solution: the Epley maneuver. Turn your head quickly in the direction of the falling while you are sitting in a bed. As your head turns, fall backwards quickly on to the bed. This motion more or less tucks the crystals back into their niche so you can regain your sense of balance.
The brain is crazy. The inner ear is crazy. See an ENT specialist before you follow my dumbass version of doctor’s orders, but if you suffer from Bppv maybe this will be interesting information.
I studied neuroscience in undergrad and never learned about this. Thank you for sharing, I feel like I’ve experienced this phenomenon over the years and it might explain the changes in my behavior and erratic moods thereafter.
It wasn't exactly what you've described, but Im sure with enough googling someone could find all the various brain balance reset protocols and just try them all.
Downside: the Epley maneuver makes you feel so, so dizzy while it is resetting the crystals. Trying every one of these weird motion sequences one after another would probably give you some peculiar syndrome all on its own.
Like I said above consult a vestibular therapist, neurologist, or someone other than this dummy if you want real medical advice.
But it is real fascinating that this kind of physical manipulation is so effective.
Do you or anybody else have any resources to share regarding such training? I suffered a concussion 5 years ago and two more shortly after, and I still suffer from regular dizziness due to sunlight / busy environments and after too much screen time. It has taken away much of the joy of my twenties. Thank you.
Unfortunately I don't know anything online, but I would suggest seeking out sports medicine/physiotherapy folks who work with your local concussion-heavy athletes (snow sports, mountain biking, etc). Good luck!
The person we saw was a master of science in physical therapy, and specialized in/had personal experience with concussion rehab. They were based near a ski mountain, and thus a stream of athletes getting concussed regularly.
If you aren't near any skiing, I'd seek out sports medicine/physical therapy folks who work with your local concussion-heavy athletes. Mountain bikers, cyclists, maybe football/rugby, etc.
There is "vestibular therapist" specialty which is physical therapist that specializes in vestibular issues. I had one who helped with vertigo from BPPV and some of the recovery exercises sound similar.
Ie. Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH) in London has both a neurologist (Richard) and a physio (Theo) specialised in concussion recovery, and working together. Been very useful for me (guessing you could do some assessments remotely).
Glad to hear your partner is better. My wife dealt with a serious brain injury in her early 20s (she has since fully recovered) and it’s always a concern of mine if she were to be hit in the head again.
> He told me to go to the FTC home page and look up the main phone number. “Now hang up the phone, and I will call you from that number right now.” I did as he said. The FTC number flashed on my screen, and I picked up. “How do I know you’re not just spoofing this?” I asked.
> “It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.”
Completely insane that we continue to allow caller ID and number spoofing, it's so effective for these fraud scenarios.
I consider myself technically inclined, yet up until today I didn't realize numbers COULD be spoofed
One day a few months ago I woke up to a missed call from a verified number. I had been in a car crash the night before, and I was worried I missed a call from the driver's insurance company.
I called them back, and I was told that I was talking to a civil engineering firm; the receptionist was polite, but she sounded even more confused than I was. I had googled the number while I was on the phone, and yup, it belonged to a civie firm.
At the time I just assumed some engineer fat fingered my number by mistake, but I guess I missed a call from "Amazon" or "your insurance company" or some other nonsense. Funnily enough an insurance scam might have gotten me in the state I was in.
And, in fact, there are good reasons to spoof numbers. For example, a company may want all/many numbers to look like they come from a company's central exchange as opposed to an individual person's desk.
Don’t forget the kicker, that IAP at the time was unable to support more than a few thousand SKUs! And (iirc) that pricing, naming, etc for everything would’ve needed to be done through their atrocious web app.
This is not be the market success you’re thinking it is. The fast fashion industry relies on extremely dubious labor practices, massive amounts of pollution, and a culture of constant consumption and mostly disposable goods. 70lb of clothing are landfilled per person per year in the US alone (2018 numbers, today’s would certainly be higher).
The article’s comparison to gambling, and now outright use of gambling game mechanics by fast fashion co’s, is the most troubling part of the industry. It relies on getting people addicted to consumption, on ‘whale’ customers who buy constantly, on a lifestyle of single-use, disposable clothing (with massive negative externalities). Society, unfortunately, pays the cost.
I've had the pleasure of visiting a few cities/countries without much (if any) physical advertising/billboards, it's a change that's both incredibly jarring and incredibly pleasant!
At first there's a bit of an uncanny valley effect, particularly when driving around a city. Eventually that settles down, and the reduction in low-level visual stimulus is really appreciated. Coming back home, you might see the insane levels of visual pollution we deal with in a new light.
Not qualified to comment on the broader economic ramifications of this, but as a normal person navigating the world, it's pretty great!
The most annoying thing about them, that's seemed to increase over time, is that for 'premium' names the renewals are the same cost as 'buying' the domain.
At least if you manage to snag a .com/.net/etc, you'll have low yearly renewal fees.
* As the numbers here show, the high end of Manhattan rentals is very, very high. ~10%[0] of listed rentals at the moment are >$10k/mo. >$100k rentals are not unheard of. Looks like the highest market rental right now is asking $175k/mo.
* ~50%[1] of Manhattan's rental stock is rent stabilized, meaning the rent adjustment rates are set by the city. These units rent for considerably less than market-rate rentals.
* For a variety of reasons, rent-stabilized units often stay in the informal housing market (i.e. not on real estate listing services), which AFAIK these reports do not measure.
* There are a variety of cultural factors here that are a bit unusual for the US, including:
- It's fairly normal here for people with 'good' jobs to have roommates into their 30s+
- The informal housing market here is massive (e.g. I've lived here for 10+ years and have very few friends who've ended up in market-rate rentals)
- Manhattan builds very little new housing (e.g. zero units approved last month)
- It's Manhattan, so there's a LOT of money floating around here.
So yes, Manhattan is getting more expensive, but these market-rate rental reports are not the entire story.
[0] From Streeteasy, a local real estate listing service
these are not 'normal' rentals and imo should be excluded from stats, since they don't apply to typical families living year-to-year in nyc
a majority of those are short-term entire floor/home rentals, often rented out for less than a month at a time, to be used for production companies putting up A-listers for the length of a project, or even used as the set itself: sometimes the listing will say 'used for the filming of y reality show in 20xx!' like a selling point
Topical, someone just landed a Carbon Cub plane on a ~90ft helipad for a stunt with Red Bull a few days ago. The video[0] is insane, I've flown in STOL aircraft before but had no idea some were capable of landings like this.
Is the takeoff here less impressive than the Super Cub in the OP? It looks like the Red Bull plane falls off the side, but can trade altitude for airspeed until its back in normal non-stalled flight. The Super Cub starts on flat land and only ever goes up.
(And likewise, the landing is less dangerous than it looks because even if the pilot overshoots, he has plenty of time to get the plane back to powered flight after it falls off).
An anecdote: My NYC neighborhood has seen a building boom over the past decade. As far as I can tell, every new building puts its trash out on the street.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
Go look at the absolutely massive piles of trash bags outside 20 Exchange Place in the financial district (huge office tower retrofitted to rental apartments) for an example of this. There's nowhere to put dumpsters and obviously no alleyway...
Not trying to underplay how impressive the tech here is, but could you expand on what you see as the ($) value of something like this? From my perspective, these look like not-so-interesting stock-photography-level photos, nearly all of which have clear tells that they're AI-generated.
Well even the free models aren't free at scale. And if you're paying for the inference anyways you might as well pay for one in a model which was specifically truncated to your needs.
To provide some perspective here, SD can be retrained on comparably small samples to generate images for very specific needs (example see [1]). So there is certainly a bunch of $ to be harvested by generating very good training sets for industry needs, say for instance mockups in architecture, creating logos and brand styles or just nice looking designs for consumer products.
sure, stock photography may just disappear as a business model.
while SD is freely downloadable, it isn't energetically free to run inference,
so for example (and as an off the cuff speculation), opportunities could arise to provide execution of these models from places where the cost of energy is lower
we can never confidently predict what the business models will be when such an impressive new technology arises.
I think this is not necessarily the case. At least one of the generative models (DALL-E?) has a license that you own the images it generates from your prompt and can copyright and license those images.
After months of mostly-useless conversations with doctors, neurologists, etc, we visited a sports medicine specialist who worked with snowboarders, skiers, etc, people who get concussions frequently.
The way the specialist described common concussion symptoms was really interesting: Effectively, your brain finds balance by using a combination of sight, touch (feet), and your inner ear. A concussion can impact the inner ear part of that equation, so your brain is overly reliant on sight and touch to compensate. This can cause all kinds of common concussion symptoms: Dizziness, sensitivity to screen time, etc.
Anyways, after giving us the rundown my partner was prompted to do a few simple exercises to test concussion symptoms. One of them was to stand on one leg and track a moving pen with her eyes. She'd done OK on some of the previous exercises but this one took her out, she lasted maybe 5 seconds and was completely exhausted and dizzy for the rest of the day because of it.
We ended up with a physical-therapy-like balance exercise plan that she stuck to regularly for a few months, and it ended up getting her to complete recovery.