Thomas F. Varley

What Causes All The Symptoms Of Long COVID And ME/CFS? The Brainstem Could Be The Key A new theory has been put forward, suggesting that damage to this vital part of the brain could explain why these conditions affect so many bodily systems.

It's always fun when work you've been part of makes it out of the ivory tower and into the popular press!
Coverage of our paper on brainstem deformation in ME/CFS and Long COVID w/ @renegaderesearch.bsky.social.
www.iflscience.com/what-causes-...

The influencers will never ask you to make a sacrifice with no endorphin rush. Putting on an uncomfortable mask and schlepping to CVS to get a suite of jabs may be the best option for your longevity, but it's a sucky way to spend an afternoon.
So we sauna instead. 10/10

That, I think, is the key insight. Longevity infuencers sell us the idea that the things that feel good in the short term will make us feel good in the long term. Eat lots of meat! Take psychedelics.
All of these may actually be salutary...but they also are pretty good times. 9/N

And this is where they diverge from the "protocols" of the wellness influencers - almost all of which are designed to make you feel good pretty quickly. Saunas feel good. Working out feels good. Even cold plunges give you a pretty solid endorphin boost. 8/N

The last reason is, I think, the most interesting. Frankly, most virus-avoidance "protocols" are just kind of unpleasant. I mask quite a bit still and I can say: it sucks. Similarly, getting vaccinated is pretty much always the right decision, but it's not something you'd do for fun... 7/N

I've got to shout out @erictopol.bsky.social here for being the clear exception to the rule here - he *has* been talking a lot about viruses, aging, and the public health implications. He also (as far as I know) doesn't make money off of selling supplements or ads for wellness products. 6/N

The second is that you can't really sell virus avoidance. There are no supplements, gadgets, or memberships that really solve the problem. Maybe branded masks, but I don't see those flying off the shelves because of the aforementioned political virus fatigue. 5/N

So what gives? I think a couple of things. The first is that our whole culture has "virus fatigue" after the pandemic - and the whole topic has become hopelessly politicized.
When Huberman tells people he doesn't get the flu vaccine, he's really saying: "Don't worry, I'm not woke." 4/N

Bryan Johnson - a man who has spent millions trying to reverse aging lost 19% of his lung capacity to COVID, but (as far as I can tell) takes no significant precautions against infection. Even while being eye-wateringly conscientious about other things (anyone remember the nightly erections?). 3/N

Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. on X: "I’ve had great results with NAC ever since @RogerSeheult suggested it. Sun as well of course. @RogerSeheult is a must follow here on @X for anyone wanting practical advice from a balanced MD perspective." / X I’ve had great results with NAC ever since @RogerSeheult suggested it. Sun as well of course. @RogerSeheult is a must follow here on @X for anyone wanting practical advice from a balanced MD perspective.

The unwillingness of longevity influencers to even acknowledge viruses can reach surreal extremes. On X, Andrew Huberman posted a list of things to help avoid and manage the flu - but getting vaccinated was curiously not included! 2/N
x.com/hubermanlab/...

New blog post - viruses are emerging as important drivers of unhealthy aging, implicated in everything from neurodegeneration to cardiovascular disease.
But longevity influencers are curiously quiet about this. Why? 1/N

synergies.substack.com/p/longevity-...

Very cool that the Year of the Linux Desktop might happen - but not because Linux is doing anything particularly exciting, or because our culture is finally appreciating open source software.
But because Microsoft inexplicably decided to make their flagship product unusable.

Only one of these men has almost certainly done a short of Malört and lived to tell about it.
So that answers that question.

Only one of these men has almost certainly done a short of Malört and lived to tell about it. So that answers that question.

I don't think you can extricate the psychosis that was NFTs from the fact that they emerged in the tail end of the COVID lockdown era, when everyone was traumatized and out of their minds.
Incidentally, this is why they're a bad reference for AI development.

In neuroscience, we have long made a distinction between "structure" (physical synapses/white matter tracts) and "function" (the statistical dependencies that emerge from dynamical processes on the structure.
That seems like a pretty intuitive way to describe the distinction made here.

I wish you guys had engaged with the literature on multivariate information theory here, since it provides a pretty rigorous framework for thinking about irreducible dependencies ("statistical synergy"), as well as good definitions of "pairwise" vs. "higher-order."

I think of the ML architectures as human-made attempts to "match" or "reflect" something that IS actually natural: the capacity of the Universe to reason/use language/solve problems/etc.
It's like trying to find ways to "color in" a structure that's currently invisible, but is all around us.

Are there any studies about whether humans can reliably distinguish AI-generated content (writing, codebases, whatever) under double-blind conditions?
I kind of wonder how much of the tendency for skeptics to write off AI-generated content as "slop" is because they know it's AI?

If the AI-hypers are right, the world will be plunged into a disorientingly alien and terrifying future.
If the AI-skeptics are right, it wont be - but the most smugly condescending people on the Internet will get to swan around being even more smug.
Really a lose-lose situation here.

GitHub - thosvarley/syntropy: A python package for information-theoretic analysis of discrete and continuous data. A python package for information-theoretic analysis of discrete and continuous data. - thosvarley/syntropy

Introducing a new scientific computing library: syntropy.
Syntropy is a comprehensive package for information theory, aimed at both theoreticians and data analysts working on discrete, continuous, and mixed data.
1/N
github.com/thosvarley/s...

For some reason I thought Emperor Penguins where like 6 feet tall. Learning that they're just a meter high is a bit disappointing.

I don't disagree with the career implications. I'm just annoyed by people claiming that what they really care about is highfalutin principles about "art" writ-large when they're really just worried about their own careers.
Those are legitimate worries on their own - why dress it up?

I don't get the dooming around AI and art. I'm a potter and (sometimes) glassblower, two fields that were mechanized and automated decades ago - but I still sell wares and enjoy going to galleries to see other artists' works.
The existence of factory mugs doesn't make much of a difference imo?

Has this kind of hyperfocus on "critique" always been a feature of American/progressive activism? Or is it new? It feels very academia-brained, like the best possible thing you can do is find new and creative ways to articulate "critiques" of how things are actually problematic.

Has this kind of hyperfocus on "critique" always been a feature of American/progressive activism? Or is it new? It feels very academia-brained, like the best possible thing you can do is find new and creative ways to articulate "critiques" of how things are actually problematic.

Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure The relationship between natural environments and human cognition has gathered increasing attention across disciplines, including neuroscience, enviro…

Finally published:
“Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of
nature exposure”
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A synthesis of multiple EEG, fMRI, and fNIRS studies to map the mechanisms behind the restoring effects of nature on the brain 🧠🌱

You are probably getting brain damage from all those COVID infections. A worrying look into the literature on COVID and brain health.

New Substack, and this one is definitely doozy.
I did a deep dive into the idea that repeated COVID-19 infections (even when they're "mild") might be doing bad things to our brains...and it looks like it definitely is.

open.substack.com/pub/synergie...

So far, when I've used this code for internal, day-to-day analyses at work, speed has never been an issue (although I use the Gaussian estimators the most, where are naturally very efficient - I haven't really stress-tested the KNN estimators as much).

The neural estimators can almost certainly be improved w/ GPU integration (I just don't have one, so I never spent time with that). I'm not super familiar with Numba so I don't know much much extra juice it could squeeze out.