Well this is interesting

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731610-600-the-amazonian-arrow-poison-that-made-modern-anaesthesia/

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ether isn’t modern?

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279945/
Raghavendra, Thandla. “Neuromuscular Blocking Drugs: Discovery and Development.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.7 (2002): 363–367. Print.

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cool.
pretty funny how they went for imitation Sigur Ros music for the Icelandic video

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Somehow I doubt the ergonomics. If they used standard-height furniture, it won’t fit any but standard-height and standard-shape people with standard abilities.

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So this is like a Murphy bed but more like a Murphy everything? I had an apartment with a Murphy bed way back in the day. The bed was smaller than I am, inconvenient, and not that comfortable. Hard pass.

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… But Moore’s Law is about transistor density, not system performance.

ETA: and system performance hasn’t had the same rate of exponential improvement since processor speed peaked at about 4GHz back in the Pentium 4 days.

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and now for something completely different.

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https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/24/580228837/a-dozen-camels-disqualified-from-saudi-beauty-pageant-over-botox-injections

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That was excellent! Thanks for posting it.

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I get the feeling that the core of West’s identification of neoliberalism is how devoid of traditional Christian love something is. If it doesn’t mention it, if it is insufficiently sentimental about it, if it doesn’t attack the non-Christian idolotry of what calls itself Christianity these days, it’s a callous, unspiritual, and further destroys what he believes is the essence of Christianity.

Being more the mindset more of Coates, this isn’t the kind of thing I normally credit as a real motivation. I can imagine being aggrieved by it.

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https://twitter.com/GlytchTech/status/957840193431666689?ref_src=twcamp^copy|twsrc^android|twgr^copy|twcon^7090|twterm^1

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312817305541
"Identification of a Botulinum Neurotoxin-like Toxin in a Commensal Strain of Enterococcus faecium"

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Here we report that an Enterococcus faecium strain isolated from cow feces carries a BoNT-like toxin, designated BoNT/En.

Wait, wait, wait.

Does that mean that Botox is bullshit?

[Edited to make horrible pun more apparent]

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:laugh:

No, it means that a different type of bacterium has acquired the genes necessary to produce botulinum toxin.

http://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/research/cell-host-microbe/online-now/S1931-3128(17)30554-1.pdf

BoNT-like gene clusters have not previously been identified in any bacterial species outside of Clostridium and no toxins of E. faecium have been reported before now. It is disconcerting to find a member of potent neurotoxins in this widely distributed gut microbe, which is a leading cause of hospital-acquired in- fections (Lebreton et al., 2017; Gilmore et al., 2013). The rarity of BoNT/En producing E. faecium in strains sequenced so far may reflect its recent acquisition, or may be due to the relatively limited sampling of clade B strains from wild ecologies. To know the scope of the natural diversity of genes harbored by entero- cocci and to monitor the emergence of new strains, it will be crit- ical to survey the enterococci beyond lineages that commonly cause infection now. Many important questions remain un- known including the evolutionary origin of BoNT/En and the host species/cell types targeted by BoNT/En. Nevertheless, the capability of E. faecium to acquire a BoNT gene cluster could create emerging strains with severe consequences. Furthermore, the possibility of introducing a BoNT cluster into MDR E. faecium strains could pose a significant biosecurity threat.

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… Okay, pun was apparently too stealthy.

Editing to fix.

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