how often do you think about the ashkenazi genetic founder event because i think about it a lot

this is only about 50% understandable to me (i last studied biology at the 12th grade level during covid so if someone wants to help explain the more sciency parts i would much appreciate) but there is much to ponder much to consider

Hi! I majored in bio with a focus on genetics, so I might be of help here! Sorry for the wall of text - this study gets REALLY complicated.

This study details the close genetic link between modern ashkenazi jews and 33 ashkenazi jewish individuals from a 14th century cemetery (this may seem like a small number, but it's actually a large sample when you're working with skeletal remains. The older the remains, the smaller your sample size is likely to be). This link is primarily in the similarity of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages and the prevalence of homozygosity for specific pathogenic traits between both modern and past groups of ashkenazim. This is important, as mtDNA is only passed through what we refer to as the maternal lineage, meaning that it is only passed on by a female parent. mtDNA essentially gives us a direct link to ancient populations - as only one set of mtDNA is passed from parent to child, recombination and mutation events are rare, leaving the DNA more or less unchanged. This is used to trace population origin and migration via what we call a haplogroup, or mtDNA common in groups that descend from specific locations. The other key genetic evidence used here is runs of homozygosity, or genes for which an individual has 2 copies of the same allele, one from each parent. This most often happens when parents are either from the same ethnic background or when they are related. We know both of these things to be historically true of ashkenazi populations for a variety of environmental and social factors - this is the founder effect the study refers to, which is the term used to describe populations descended from a handful of individuals, usually after natural disaster separating groups or an extreme reduction in population size due to war, disease, etc. The study discusses pathogenic traits, in this case autosomal recessive congenital conditions. These traits generally only appear when a person inherits two of the same allele, aka is homozygous for the trait. Ultimately, they are comparing geographic place of genetic origin and prevalence of common recessive traits between ashkenazi populations living ~600 years apart. If they are unrelated, you would expect there to be a significant difference in haplogroups and in the prevalence of runs of homozygosity. If they are related, you would expect the opposite, which is what they found.

Some specific results of interest:

In short, modern ashkenazim are the descendants of a small handful of pogrom survivors who came together from little pockets of ashkenazim living throughout europe after expulsion from the levant. There is a lot more involved in the research than the handful of points I broke down, so please let me know if you want anything else discussed!

OMG thank you so so very much for unpacking this! This is so well explained, and you highlighted a lot of interesting points. Thank you thank you thank you

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s/o to this skeleton babe from 1936

This is a really poignant illustration of the seductive nature of glorifying war but that is a LOOK and she is SERVING it

I've seen Death depicted as a card dealer or other sort of gambler, a guy in a suit, a farmer, a robed apparition, and any other number of things, but this? This has to be the best Death I've seen yet. An old seductress saying "hey kid, don't you wanna die in a trench for a government that doesn't give a fuck about you, just like your dear old dad?" This goes hard as fuck.

Honestly appreciating the addition of that shiny ring, too: War's getting rich off this! That's what it does!!

Also appreciating how the cartoonist just kind of like. gave up on drawing the lower part of this kid's body.

my friends have gotten really good at recognizing when I lapse into BartBrain9000

The fun thing about having to go to the doctor to prove my blood pressure isn't too high is that going to a Kaiser facility is the most aggravating thing I do on a regular basis.

"yeah your blood pressure was a little high the last time we tested it, so you can't have any ADHD meds. Come back in and test it again"

Hey maybe my blood pressure is so high when you test it because every time I have to go to your damn hospital, I get misgendered five times BY THE PEOPLE LITERALLY GIVING ME HORMONES and nearly get killed trying to park and I'm surrounded by coughing people who aren't wearing masks? It seems that might increase my blood pressure somewhat.

They measured my blood pressure and it was still a little high so they had me relax for 2 minutes and then tested it again and it was HIGHER.

Maybe any test with the premise of "if this number doesn't go down, we won't give you any of the pills that make your brain work" is going to be inherently STRESSFUL AS HELL even if I do get to spend two minutes "relaxing"

If I get covid, I'm suing the DEA for violating my constitutional rights.

See, I can't have my ADHD meds mailed to me like all my other prescriptions, because they're scared someone will steal them out of the mail. So I have to go into the pharmacy, during a pandemic, and potentially get infected by all the coughing maskless people.

But hey, at least I only have to do it every three months!

EXCEPT NO.

There is a nationwide shortage of ADHD drugs at the moment that is entirely artificial: the DEA decided there was "too much" Adderall being used and limited the supply. Presumably to try to keep it out of the hands of people who will "abuse" it, not specifically to harm people with diagnosed medical conditions who have a valid prescription, but that may be giving them too much credit.

So now I can't get a three month supply anymore. I can only get in monthly. So every month I have to go into the hospital with the maskless coughing people and risk covid, all while I'm surrounded by big posters saying "hey there's a pandemic, why don't you have your prescriptions mailed to you?"

There's a "shortage", but calling it that seems wrong and misleading. It's a completely artificial shortage. No factories shut down. No mines had their sextroamphetamine veins run dry. No key ingredients had their prices spike unreasonably due to political unrest and capitalists capitalisting.

The DEA just woke up one day and decided there was too much Adderall and turned down the big knob on how much is allowed to be made.

Well, here's the fun part for people with ADHD: if we can't get the prescribed stimulants that make our brains work, we'll switch to other ones.

Which is just great because it's not like those alternatives don't have side-effects! Without Adderall there's gonna be a lot of energy drinks and coffees and teas, and all the side-effects of those. You wanna talk about high blood pressure?

And those are just the legal ones. Meth is still plenty easy to get ahold of. Not to mention crack and cocaine.

Which is funny, because the DEA has already fucked me over meth. They decided to wage war on pseudoephedrine, which is a great decongestant with minimal side effects. They restricted the sale of it, making it behind the counter and requiring pharmacies to keep records of who buys it and how often, so that if you buy slightly too much they can kick down your door and yell "where's the meth lab?"

Which has a couple problems. First, it makes the medicine harder to get for people who need it legitimately (I have a deviated septum, my nose barely works at the best of time, I need decongestants!), but also it means that medications that included pseudoephedrine (your Allegras, Claritins, and Sudafeds) had to reformulated to not include it anymore, so they wouldn't massively lose out on sales.

So they switched to phenylephrine. (and continued making a behind-the-counter version with the pseudoephedrine in it, usually called OLDNAME-D).

So what's wrong with that? Fucking EVERYTHING.

At the recommended doses, phenylephrine shows no decongestant effect over placebo. So it doesn't work. Great.

But that's not the biggest problem: see, it has no effect on congestion, but it does have an effect: it raises blood pressure.

So basically the DEA's war on meth caused millions of Americans to switch to a medication that

1. Does not work

2. Causes high blood pressure

IN A NATION WHERE HEART DISEASE WAS THE #1 CAUSE OF DEATH PRIOR TO COVID SHOWING UP.

And the final bow on this cluster fuck? The ultimate crowning achievement of the DEA's failure?

Do you know how much effect restricting pseudoephedrine had on the meth supply?

Fucking zip! Nada! Ziltch! Nothing at fucking all!

Pseudoephedrine only ever made sense as a meth precursor if you were making it in big batches, and in those cases it tended to be stolen/reappropriated from laboratories, not by going into the Walgreens and asking for 500 boxes of Sudafed.

Meth production was already switching to smaller and cheaper methods of production, ones that could easily be done in mobile labs or just "any car", which made it much harder for law enforcement to effectively combat it, and also meant PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MADE NO SENSE AS A PRECURSOR CHEMICAL.

This is literally a policy with a death toll associated with it. Innocent people who have never touched a meth have died because the DEA wanted to be "tough on drugs", and the companies making legal drugs switched to an alternative that caused heart problems.

That's not to say that like "all meth users should die" or anything, of course. I'm from the south: I have more relatives who have used meth than have gotten an Adderall prescription, despite ADHD clearly running in my family. Drug users are people too.

It's just that even in the grim calculus of the "war on drugs", they failed. They didn't sacrifice the lives of drug dealers and drug users to fight meth, and they certainly didn't save any of their lives by making meth harder to get (because they didn't make it any harder).

They instead sacrificed the lives of a bunch of people with allergies and heart disease, to win no actual ground against meth, other than the publicity of the George W. Bush administration being able to say they were "cracking down on meth".

I hope it was worth it. Since that law went into effect, something like 12 million people have died of heart disease in America. How many of them would still be alive today if the DEA hadn't fucked up and put a bunch of people on medication to spike their blood pressure l?

hey since i’m occasionally giving out adult advice. anyone wanna know my very adult and very boring and very sensible suggestion for grief gifts for friends and family when someone close to them dies

alright. this is shamelessly stolen from my godparents when they did this when my grandma passed about ten years ago, and since then i’ve been on both sides of this and it’s surprisingly thoughtful and useful. this is particularly important when people are like, in charge of funeral prep, but anyone who just heard someone close to them just died is gonna be in a certain headspace, so it probably works regardless. people are gonna be sending cards and flowers and other very nice, but ultimately useless gifts.

don’t do that. go to the grocery store and order one of those deli party platters. the ones with like, four different kinds each of meats and cheeses, maybe some sides, and veggies, and bread, and condiments. get the vegetarian version if you know they’re vegetarians. whatever. you know better than i how many people are gonna be eating it, but guess maybe, like, four day’s worth of food.

because, here’s the thing. cards and flowers are very nice, and remind you that you’re in people’s thoughts. but you know what you just. don’t even want to think about when someone dies? making dinner. going to the grocery store. ordering takeout. whatever. you don’t want to have to think about food. you just want to eat in between planning a funeral and working through your grief.

without getting too into it, when my grandma died, we were thrown for a loop. and we ate nothing but what was on that goddamned deli platter for days. because it was quick and easy and fresh and tasted good and we didn’t have to think about food. and ten years later, i don’t remember those cards or flowers, but i sure as hell remember the deli platter.

so next time someone’s going through something, when a family member or close friend just passed. go to your nearest grocery store, and if you can, walk a deli platter over to their place. as soon as you can after you hear. they may look at you weird when you hand it to them, but trust me, in the long run they’re gonna thank you.

^^This

Food helps. I don’t remember the cards & flowers. What I DO remember is the amazing lasagna somebody made me. It fed me for a week during a time when I was simply incapable of finding or preparing meals. The deli platter is an interesting twist on that and I’m filing that away for sure.

honeybaked ham delivers

When my dad died, everything was a black blur of grief and nobody could even really approach taking basic care of ourselves. A family friend made and brought over a HUMONGOUS batch of jambalaya, and it is basically the chief reason nobody fainted from hunger.

When my father died 18 years ago: I remember that friends and family had flowers delivered and that was nice - but I don’t even remember what kind of flowers or colors.

I remember my mom’s best friend at the time landing on our doorstep with BAGS of groceries that fed us for a couple of weeks.

When my mother died nearly a year ago: I know that a cousin ordered a bouquet of flowers and they were lovely.

What I remember is my mom’s friends landing in my doorstep with bags of groceries that kept me going for a while so I didn’t have to think about feeding myself because I was absolutely lost in a sea of grief and being suddenly Alone and just in a daze of “What the fuck just happened?  Why am I alone?  Where are you?  WHY AM I ALONE?  What do I do now?”

When my body finally DEMANDED I ingest sustenance - I didn’t have to think about it; I just went for the easy stuff and got it done with.

This is why Jews sit shiva. You have to take a week to grieve and have people bring you food and emotional support, it’s honestly something I wish more cultures had. We don’t need flowers we need people to help us hold ourselves together, and sometimes that means just bringing a plate of cheese and crackers so the grieving person doesn’t have to cook.

Yes! If you or the person who is grieving lives in a Jewish area, you can usually find a Jewish deli that offers Shiva Platters.

If it’s a good one, they’ll call the grieving folks and work out what they need and when to make sure they are helping the best way they can.

 My mom and I both work for the state, specifically in IT in different but related areas; almost everyone in our units knew both of us pretty well sometimes for years or decades, either having worked with one or both of us, worked near one or both of us, or in a couple of cases, changed my diapers.

When my dad died, my unit’s condolences were a MASSIVE MASSIVE MASSIVE variety sandwich tray from Jason’s Deli and all the things that hygo with giant sandwich platters (chips, fruit tray, cookie tray, potato salad maybe? some other things, this is like the BIG PARTY PACK or something). I mean, even with me, mom, two sisters, four kids, a BIL, and a sister’s boyfriend, that was five days of food at minimum. Mom’s unit, on the other hand, sent both cash–not loose cash, someone took the time to convert it into practical tens and twenties–and one or two extremely generous Visa cards. 

(I”m ninety-nine percent sure this was a collaborative effort between our units.)

Simple food that required no effort whatsoever even in ‘washing dishes’, just pick up and chew; cash so we’d have that on hand if we needed it without having to go to an ATM or the bank or remember where the debit card is; the Visa gift cards because we work for the state, our names and salaries are not only public knowledge but PUBLISHED IN THE NEWSPAPER EVERY YEAR, and funerals and incidentals are expensive, especially when you don’t see them coming and you’re a public servant.

It was the most intensely practical and also utterly personal help we could have possibly gotten: it was exactly what we needed in exactly the form we needed, and so incredibly kind.  It said “we’re sorry for your loss”, but it also said “we grieve with you”.

Grief is always hard and nothing can really help that, but what they did made living with grief so much easier, and I’ve never forgotten that.

Dont forget other essentials too. One shitty thing that can happen after a death when shared finances are involved is the surviving person may, for a period of time, lose all access to their finances. This happened to my mother when my daddy died, and she had 3 very VERY young children to care for, with suddenly not a penny to her name and only what was left in the cupboards. We got through that only by the generosity of our community, not just with food but with the other bits too. Keeping us kids going off to school with clean uniform, having a clean home, pets fed and looked after, bills paid.

And always make sure you keep some finances to yourself, just in case. Dont leave yourself or your loved ones starving with no money if one of you dies.

Unrealistic polymath genius: has six PhDs.

Realistic polymath genius: just has the one set of degrees, but their bachelor’s, their master’s, and their doctorate are each in a different field, and they’d be happy to explain – at great length – how the three relate to one another.

@cellarspider It’s you.

OKAY SO

My undergraduate degree was in Medieval Studies.

My professional masters degree was in Bioinformatics.

My current PhD studies are in Mammalian Genetics, emphasizing the overall physical structure of the genome.

The PhD and masters are fairly easy to relate to each other: Bioinformatics is a field that develops software and computational methods for examining and understanding biological data. Modern genetics often relies on people with these skills–while many labs can still focus intently on the workings of a single gene, if you want to understand how that gene interacts with the world, you can start generating a lot of data. A LOT. More than it would ever be feasible to process manually.

So, having a background in bioinformatics allows me to focus my work not on single genes, but on how the physical structures formed by DNA affects how genes are used. There’s 3 billion letters of DNA in the human or mouse genome, with thousands of genes, with thousands of mutations my project has cataloged, and tens of thousands of structural components to analyze along side them. If you were to randomly test each and every one of those three types of data against each other to blindly search for interactions, I calculated you’d have to run 371 trillion comparisons. My job started by trying to figure out how the fuck to pare that down to something manageable with the computing power I have, and I’m hopefully about to publish something damn cool on what I found in the process.

So, that’s genetics and bioinformatics. Sure, those fit together logically.

Medieval Studies, tho

That’s where things get interesting. The professors at my university were very careful to teach you about the idea of the “historical lens”. When you read an old text or look at a painting, you’re viewing the subject matter through the lens of your own experiences and presuppositions about the world, and about the time period you’re studying. The person who wrote that text or painted that painting had their own lens, shaped by very different circumstances. Their natural focus is not going to align with your own, and you have to be aware of that. When you start forming ideas about your object of study, you have to ask yourself, “am I seeing what the creator of this piece intended to convey, or am I making assumptions based off of what I want to see?”

In essence, the core of what was taught in that Medieval Studies program was how to think about your own thinking.

And that is so fucking important for good science. “Am I drawing logical conclusions that are supported by the data, or am I just seeing this because I want to see it? Is there some test I can do to check if I’m wrong?”

It’s not easy. Sometimes it can be really uncomfortable, in fact. But it leads to more and better results in the long run, because those moments of self-reflection help uncover possibilities that you missed before.

…And that’s without getting into the seminar paper I wrote on the medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma, as a case study in the medieval period’s contributions to the development of science and technology. Because that was also a thing.

Hello, I’d like everyone to meet one of the most interesting people I know, also Spider please tell everyone about the Medieval Head Trauma paper because it’s fascinating and hilarious.

oh my gosh coming from gallus that’s saying something, I’m flattered

OKAY SO ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL HEAD TRAUMA

This post contains Thor’s migraines, Arthurian knights spinning in circles, and the medicinal use of egg whites on your brain. CW for mentions of medical gore and aggressive head bonks, obvs. Also, this is the result of undergraduate research, and should not be considered comprehensive. If you know more, throw it at me. If you have a correction, I will happily take it! And if you can remember the title of that one book I found once in my university library called something like “Head Trauma in World Myths and Legends”, TELL ME. I can’t fucking find the thing, but I swear it exists.

Also heck my life, Tumblr ate the first attempt at this post. Always write your long drafts on a more stable platform, guys

So. Depending on where and when you lived in western medieval Europe, you might have a very different relationship with the constellation of injuries falling under the category of head trauma. These injuries were either mysterious and beyond the realm of healing, a weird side effect of people not dying so often, or a comprehensible problem that sometimes could be treated by medical and surgical intervention.

A great example of head trauma as mysterious scourge comes from Norse mythology. To cruelly TL;DR a surprisingly hilarious little myth, Thor’s giant-smacking escapades result in a piece of flint getting stuck in his skull. Neither he, nor Sif, nor a witch they call up can remove it. The witch almost manages it, but Thor distracts her at a critical moment, so her magic fails. The myth ends with a moral to the audience: don’t throw your flint tools around, or you’ll give Thor a migraine. Yes, really.

(personal side note- somebody must be throwing hella flint around today, fuck)

In this story, head trauma is just something you have to live with. Magic might be able to help you, but it failed even Thor, so don’t expect better results yourself. And we do have skulls throughout European history that show evidence of lots of people living for years with untreated skull fractures, though with a higher risk of premature death. (One source here, from Denmark, which mixes in some early modern skeletons as well.)

Now, that myth fits the time and place it originated, which is true of stories in general. But one thing you can do in comparative literary analysis is look at the variations between tellings of common stories. And one great mine for this is Arthurian legend. King Arthur and His Circle Bros were popular subjects throughout the British Isles and France for centuries, which one can use to analyze the values, morals and world views of their storytellers.

And also, what happened when you got bonked on the head. See, each storyteller might have their own first-hand experiences with battle, or they’d have patrons who they wanted to flatter or entertain by incorporating Based-On-A-Shocking-True-Story details into the stories, or they were just paying attention to other storytellers at the time and seeing which action tropes were popular.

So, the early Arthurian treatment of head trauma can be summed up in three words: bonk means death.

But after the late 12th century (which admittedly is where we get a lot of our stories from), head trauma starts to become survivable. And sometimes, it’s weird.

Men’s brains swim like water, and they might fall off their horses. If they’re not mounted, they might run around in circles and then fall down. What changed?

The bonk protectors changed! the heaume or great helm style was developed, which is more likely to stay on and protect the head from any angle, though it’s vulnerable to transferring the force of downward blows into the head, neck and shoulders. With more people surviving blows to the head, that means more concussions and traumatic brain injury, and that’s reflected in the stories.

But what about medical textbooks? Well, it probably won’t surprise many to know that western European medical manuals sucked SO MUCH ASS for centuries. The reason why is a rant for another time (and I CAN AND I WILL RANT ABOUT IT), but there was light at the end of the tunnel.

While Western Europe lost almost all Greek medical scholarship and condensed the Latin texts down to near-gibberish, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved those texts, and the Islamic world had expanded greatly upon that scholarship with their own research and experimentation. During the Islamic Golden Age, traders from Italy brought some Greek and Arabic texts back from the Muslim world, and translations were made into Latin. This gave Italian academics access to a more vibrant and systemic tradition of medical science.

Enter Rogerius, AKA Rogerius Salernitanus, AKA Roger Frugard, AKA Roger Frugardi, AKA Roggerio Frugardo, AKA Rüdiger Frutgard and AKA Roggerio dei Frugardi (jfc dude), a surgeon from Salerno (unknown-1195). While surgery would remain a low status profession for centuries, Rogerius produced a well-organized and clearly written surgical manual, the Practica Chirurgiae. This book, I want to stress, is not flawless, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Digging into the German Commission E Monographs (started in the 1970s, which systematized scientifically proven effects of traditional herbal medicines), Rogerius’ poultices for wounds do fuck-all for healing, but would probably be fantastic for an upset stomach if you ate them.

HOWEVER, the surgical contents of the manual show that either he was working with fantastic written texts at the University of Salerno, and probably had some good first-hand experience with treating head trauma.

The text provides some practical information on diagnosing the kinds of head injuries a surgeon could actually treat–while concussion was still something you’d just have to deal with, a bonk on the head can have lots of other bad effects. You can develop a build-up of fluid within the skull (cerebral edema), or skull fracture that can press pieces of bone down onto the brain. Or you could have tears in the scalp, or worse, the protective layer of tissue around the brain itself (the dura mater).

Rogerius lists ways to diagnose edema and closed skull fractures (where the scalp isn’t broken but the skull is). He describes surgical techniques that are still the basis of many in use today, for incisions and suturing of the scalp, removal of bone fragments and foreign objects, and relieving pressure on the brain from edema. Yes, that last one involves trepanning, AKA drilling a hole in the skull, and yes, it can actually be life-saving in this particular case.

And there’s one bit he talks about which I find outrageously cool. See, wound healing has always been one of the biggest problems in medicine, and it was an absolute matter of life and death before the advent of sterile medical technique. Sure, you might be able to clean a wound with some alcohol-based mixture, but that would be disastrous for wounds that pierce through the skull. This probably goes without saying, but pouring alcohol on your brain is very, very bad.

So, what the fuck do you do when you have a patient with a gnarly head wound that exposes the dura mater, or the brain itself? Water isn’t clean, alcohol is potentially deadly. How do you wash the wound clean?

Get an egg.

Fresh eggs straight from the chicken are sterile capsules that protect the developing embryo. They’re full of liquid-y stuff you can use as a wash! BUT. Rogerius specifically lists egg whites for cleaning head injuries, not yolks. I don’t have any scholarship on why, beyond some interviews with a doctor in my family, but our best guess was that the cholesterol in the yolks could be harmful to the brain and dura mater. But the egg whites by themselves? They’re almost pure protein, including some anti-microbial factors that help defend the embryo in case germs sneak in.

Overall, it’s a brilliant solution to a thorny aspect of wound care, in a time before germ theory, and centuries before Europe would collectively remember you need to sterilize your medical tools. Fucking! Fresh egg whites! It’s fantastic.

So that’s the tl;dr on medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma. A mixture of mystery, medieval pop culture, and medical science. This is the kind of practical history that I found most engaging to study–not lists of kings, not court politics, not wars, but a small, strange little corner of medical history that tells you more about the life and times of people through the ages.

And that’s what a lot of modern historical research is actually like! Find a tiny little subject that sparks joy catches your interest, and dive in. I ended up jumping over entirely to biological sciences in my post-grad research, but I don’t regret a minute of my undergrad. History in all its crumbly little details is awesome.

It’s the medieval head injury paper! Summarized beautifully for those of us that don’t have the concentration to wade through original sources!

But yeah, it really clear how the skillset of “look at the data to see what it says, not what you hope it says” is extremely applicable across art, history, science and math and that’s why every real genius I’ve met is interested in a wide variety of topics- the thing you’re actually interested in is the act of learning.

I have degrees in history and biology and will get one in chemistry if I can find time for the last class and one in criminal justice if I find time to deal with the paperwork involved in transferring the remaining half unit I needed to finish it. My undergrad thesis was about internet memes. I am hoping to go to grad school for neurophysiology.

Anyways, while I’m on a weird “intersection of evobio and trans biology” kick, there’s a group I’ve been meaning to introduce for a while now because they do amazing work.

So I’m a biological anthropologist, and that means that I study and teach about the human skeleton. The human skeleton is an amazing thing, and a lot of people don’t know just how changeable it is. No matter what your chromosomal makeup is, human skeletons look pretty much the same until puberty. Then, when the sex hormones kick in, we get a bimodal distribution of traits. These aren’t inherent to your gender or your genitals or even your chromosomes, really. What the sexual characteristics in the human skeleton really represent is what your hormones are doing.

Basically, it works like this. All humans produce both testosterone and estrogen. Humans who make more testosterone are generally more robust, and their muscle development puts pressure on bones. The bones respond and they get bigger. Estrogen does the opposite. When we talk about sexing a skeleton, what we mean is “what did their hormones do, and where does this fit in the general bimodal distribution of morphological traits?”

Except… sometimes there are problems with this. For instance, postmenopausal skeletons, particularly the skulls, will often look more masculine because as estrogen production drops, the shape of the bones begins to change. The pelvis still looks as it did, but the bones of the face are highly responsive to these changes. (For many very complicated reasons, two being that they are smaller/thinner and also have highly active osteoblasts and osteoclasts!)

Another challenge comes from trans people going through hormone replacement therapy. We know that violence against trans people is a problem. But here’s the thing: these violent incidents and homicides are just the ones we KNOW about. There are thousands of unidentified bodies in the US alone that have the very real possibility of having an assessed sex that doesn’t align with a person’s lived experience. If your skeleton looks one way, but everybody who knew you in life understood you as another… even if you’re lucky enough to have a missing person report, your remains might never be matched to your identity. Also, many of these cases are primarily investigated by… look, do I have to explain how the police see trans people and what they do to perpetuate harmful stereotypes of the kinds of lives trans people live?

So anyways, this group that I wanted to talk about, the Trans Doe Task Force, is working to fill the gaps that poor investigation, poor understandings of gender versus sex and how the two interact, and a general lack of knowledge about the complexities of skeletal development have left.

https://transdoetaskforce.org/

One of the coolest things- and most helpful things- this group does, in addition to forensic DNA testing and case reevaluation, is they go back to recreations/composite sketches of cases they identify as trans/gnc and create new images that are more reflective of peoples’ gender.

It works.

Something that’s really important about the remains of unidentified trans people is that unfortunately, due to prejudice, family members might not acknowledge how their relative has changed in both outward appearance and… uh, inward appearance, I guess. Skeletal changes. On the flip side of that coin, people who knew the trans person as they were before their disappearance might not be aware of how they looked in the past. The TDTF has also helped create forensic images of various stages of transition to show relatives/friends/loved ones.

It’s really important that we in the anthropological community talk about skeletal changes that happen throughout life. There’s a persistent myth that by looking at the skull alone, you can neatly fit it into categories of male/female or racial categories. But you can’t… really… do that. Not without knowing your references. (If you’re interested in the race thing, I’ve talked about that at length here.) The fact is, human biology is MESSY and while we do have a bimodal distribution for our morphology, not everybody fits into categories neatly… and many people fit more than one identifying category. For sex/gender, when you’re looking at ancient populations, you can only make estimations. But when you’re looking at modern populations- when you’re trying to fit a specific identity to a set of remains- it’s extremely important that you consider the role of things like HRT in your potential identification. This is extra important when you’re looking at a vulnerable population whose disappearance might not get immediately reported or whose disappearance might not be of top priority to law enforcement.

So go check out the Trans Doe Task Force. The work they do is important.

one of the most fascinating youtube subcultures imo is the MRE taste testing community…like those folks who get their hands on military ready to eat meals and do unboxings and taste tests of them? because usually theyre perfectly normal and just interested in testing what militaries around the world eat right now. but some of these folks go the extra mile. they go so hard they threaten to destroy themselves with their own hubris. some of these people are flying towards the sun at alarming rates and are going to not only melt their wings but also their 100 year old preserved foods, causing them to plummet to their deaths, their corpses reduced to stewing in the seawater mixed with the remains of the WWII soviet pea soup they brought with them. im watching a dude eat meat from a 1902 british military ration right now. my dude is deadass out here calmly trying to become the last casualty of the fucking second boer war. as an archivist and general antiques lover ive put my hands on some horrifyingly old and dirty things but the idea of ingesting legitimate american civil war hardtack makes me want to get my stomach surgically removed and i am just so FASCINATED by these people who see these military antiques and think “nice, there’s lunch right there”

“the smell is just awful” SIR you are BOILING cow meat that predates the FIRST WORLD WAR you are boiling beef from a cow that existed at the same time as ELIZABETH CADY STANTON sir this can of beef was canned during the fucking DREYFUS AFFAIR what pray tell WHAT did you EXPECT from this TURN OF THE CENTURY CAN OF MEAT

Stop taking people with dementia to the cemetery

“Oh yeah, every time that dad forgets mom is dead, we head to the cemetery so he can see her gravestone.”

WHAT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some version of this awful story. Stop taking people with dementia to the cemetery. Seriously. I cringe every single time someone tells me about their “plan” to remind a loved one that their loved one is dead.

I also hear this a lot: “I keep reminding mom that her sister is dead, and sometimes she recalls it once I’ve said it.” That’s still not a good thing. Why are we trying to force people to remember that their loved ones have passed away?

If your loved one with dementia has lost track of their timeline, and forgotten that a loved one is dead, don’t remind them. What’s the point of reintroducing that kind of pain? Here’s the thing: they will forget again, and they will ask again. You’re never, ever, ever, going to “convince” them of something permanently. 

Instead, do this:

“Dad, where do you think mom is?”

When he tells you the answer, repeat that answer to him and assert that it sounds correct. For example, if he says, “I think mom is at work,” say, “Yes, that sounds right, I think she must be at work.” If he says, “I think she passed away,” say, “Yes, she passed away.” 

People like the answer that they gave you. Also, it takes you off the hook to “come up with something” that satisfies them. Then, twenty minutes later, when they ask where mom is, repeat what they originally told you.

I support this sentiment. Repeatedly reminding someone with faulty memory that a loved one has died isn’t a kindness, it’s a cruelty. They have to relieve the loss every time, even if they don’t remember the grief 15 minutes later.

In other words, don’t try to impose your timeline on them in order to make yourself feel better. Correcting an afflicted dementia patient will not cure them. They won’t magically return to your ‘real world’. No matter how much you might want them to.

It’s a kindness of old age, forgetting. Life can be very painful. Don’t be the one ripping off the bandage every single time.

I used to work as a companion in a nursing home where one of the patients was CONVINCED I was her sister, who’d died 40 years earlier. And every time one of the nurses said “that’s not Janet, Janet is dead, Alice, remember?” Alice would start sobbing.

So finally one day Alice did the whole “JANET IS HERE” and this nurse rather nastily went “Janet is dead” and before it could go any further I said “excuse me??? How dare you say something so horrible to my sister?”

The nurse was pissed, because I was “feeding Alice’s delusions.” Alice didn’t have delusions. Alice had Alzheimer’s.

But I made sure it went into Alice’s chart that she responded positively to being allowed to believe I was Janet. And from that point forward, only my specific patient referred to me as “Nina” in front of Alice—everyone else called me Janet, and when Alice said my name wasn’t Nina I just said “oh, it’s a nickname, that’s all.” It kept her calm and happy and not sobbing every time she saw me.

It costs zero dollars (and maybe a little bit of fast thinking) to not be an asshole to someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Be kind.

I wish I had heard this stuff when Grandma was still here.

I read once that you have to treat dementia patients more like it’s improv, like you have to take what they say and say to yourself “ok, and” and give them more of a story to occupy them and not just shut it down with something super harsh.

A nurse I used to work with always told us: “If a man with dementia is trying to get out of bed to go to work, don’t tell him he’s 90 and in a nursing home. Tell him it’s Sunday and he can stay in bed. If a woman with dementia is trying to stand because she wants to get her husband’s dinner out of the oven, don’t tell her he’s been dead for 20 years. Tell her you’ll do it for her and she can sit back down.”

Always remembered that, always did it. Nothing worse than hearing someone with memory loss ask the same question over and over again only to be met with: “We already told you!”

Just tell them again.

I’ve worked with elderly dementia patients, and I agree with all the above. Treat them as you’d like to be treated in the same situation.

Same. I’ve worked with patients like these and even my grandma was convinced for a day that I was my aunt. Just roll with it.

I’m????

Oh my God this actually explains so much.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.

honestly tho that scene in the incredibles where mr. incredible sees the names of all the old super heroes that used to be his friends / that he knew from Back in the Day and how every one of them has been killed by syndrome is such a chilling scene for so many reasons 

like for one, everyone he knew is dead at this point and has been killed on the same island he’s at now and two, its heartbreaking bc that means that almost every hero wanted to try out being a hero again despite the laws against it and wanted to try and help someone out and relive their glory days, only to be straight up murdered like fuck that scene is just so fuckin intense

I think the core of that scene for me is, when you’re insane like me and you go through it frame by frame, you can work out that Gazerbeam defeated the omnidroid twice - the only super we have enough information to confirm did so. I always wondered about his body in the cave, how and why he got the password… But it makes sense. This thing goes haywire, gets an upgrade, and goes haywire again? He must have been hella suspicious! So he does what any good superhero would do - tries to get to the bottom of what’s really happening on Nomanisan Island. During the process he’s clearly caught and wounded but has just enough time to get himself somewhere he can leave a final message, just praying that the next super to come along will find it and break the cycle. Gazerbeam is my hero.

Incredibles 2 has a lot to live up to

All of this and…

I’m just realizing that the name is No Man Is An Island???? As in, everyone needs someone to depend on and connect with, no one is ever completely alone or should act all on their own.

Also Gazerbeam probably has X-ray vision–so he not only survived long enough to defeat the Omnidroid, he had the ability to see Syndrome entering the password.

Holy guacamole! I should pay more attention, I don’t think I got any of that stuff!

does anyone think about the fact that now mr. incredibles has to live w/ the fact that all his friends getting killed by syndrome could have been avoided if he had just been nicer to syndrome from the beginning

^I was thinking that from the beginning reading this and was shocked it went through so many comments before anyone pointed that out.

Syndrome waited until his machine was almost ready to go before asking Bob to come to Nomanisan. He also was surprised to find out that he was married to “Elastigirl”, which means he likely built his list and went through everyone else before finally deciding it was time to kill Bob.

Also, Syndrome literally didn’t find Bob until the start of the movie. He found Frozone and was stalking him. If Lucius hadn’t hung out with Bob, then Frozone was going to be the next one lured. There’s literally a scene of Mirage realizing that the guy in the car with her target is Mr. Incredible. He wasn’t going through the list, he was stalking and finding every former Super he could, luring them to the island, and then killing them, for the sake of improving his robot. Finding Bob was just a happy accident, and Syndromes obsession with him meant that upon finding a bot that could beat Bob, he figured he’d hit perfection and was ready.

and like, let’s be real here in the intro Buddy was crossing the line the second he showed up, Mr. Incredible mentioned he’d been very nice to Buddy, via signing a ridiculous amount of autographs and doing pictures and stuff, and that he was not going to risk a childs life as a sidekick (albeit in less words). Buddy literally showed up by breaking into his car, and then stalked him all evening until he was arrested. That’s disturbingly obsessive behavior, there’s no amount of niceness that would stop Syndrome, it was an impossible situation. No amount of nice was going to appease Syndrome, the second he faced any sort of rejection from Mr. Incredible he was going to lose it and go supervillain. After his arrest he should have gotten put into therapy, but yknow, set in like. the 50′s. so it makes sense he fell through the cracks when the cracks were a goddamn canyon. Don’t victim blame Mr. Incredible.

PLUS!!:

Toxic for rabbits: Anise, Clove, Oregano, Tea Tree, Wintergreen Safe for rabbits: Lavender, lemon, orange, fennel,  eucalyptus and peppermint, all should be diluted with water!

I’m not entirely sure about the safety of these oils (I’m no aromatherapist, and have never handled essential oils), but also:

Animals with delicate respiratory systems (i.e: mice, guinea pigs, birds), will not do well withh any sort of diffused oil. They are FAR too susceptible to changes in air quality.

You don’t need to run it 24/7. It takes almost a whole day for all of the air in the area to clear of essential oils. Run it for twenty minutes, you’ll have it all day.

Talk to a veterinarian before using any essential oils around your pets!! And NEVER give your pets essential oils unless you have spoken to multiple veterinary experts who say otherwise!!! They WILL groom themselves, they WILL ingest it, and it WILL do damage. Essential oils, even properly used (i.e: diluted in a carrier oil) are not food safe, human or not.

And I know this isn’t what the post is about, but I’ll add it anyway: essential oils, even properly used, are deadly to children under the age of ten. Children have died from them. If you have been using essential oils on a child or pet, stop immediately, and if they’ve been developing things like respiratory illness (like a chronic cough that just won’t go away) or odd allergy symptoms, take them to a medical professional immediately.

Employee: How are you doing today sir?

Elderly Man: I’m blessed. I woke up this morning, so it’s all right.

Working in an area with a sizable retirement population, I’ve heard a number of these (all in response to how are you? And mostly they bust out laughing after like they told the best joke ever):

Well, I’m on this side of the grass, so I guess I’m doing okay.

Can’t complain… Well, I could, but it’s wouldn’t help anything.

Still around, which beats the alternative.

My dad has a couple of these:

Every morning I wake up alive is a good morning. When I wake up dead, that’s when it’s a problem.

When I wake up to six feet of dirt on top of me, that’s when I know I’m in trouble.

The joke, of course, being that one can’t wake up when one is dead. And he absolutely laughs loudly when he tells them because he honestly thinks they’re hilarious.