The Curious About Everything Newsletter #32

The many interesting things I read in October 2023.

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 31, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Lola Christina Alao on how we’re not meant to see ourselves this much (on Zoom or generally).

Personal updates:

• CAE is a few days late because all of my brain juice has gone toward finishing my talk for the spinal CSF leak conference I’m speaking at on November 11 (it’s free - you can register here). It’s rare to have a medical conference with such robust patient presentation, and I’m honoured to have been asked. This is the first time I’ll do a talk since my leak began in 2017. It used to be a big part of my pre-leak work, and it’s been an interesting challenge to see what my brain can handle with what has been called ‘an ongoing concussion’. I definitely notice the difference.

• I’m redoing my websites, splitting the health content (my lumbar puncture, chronic pain, my free meditation course, and more) to a new site, keeping the travel and gluten free guides on Legal Nomads. Feels like the end of an era, but one that probably actually ended some years ago. I’ll be redirecting those posts to their new home once migration is complete.

• Speaking of splitting, there were too many good things to read this month, so I’ll be sending a second email midmonth with spillover links.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

This section’s links here are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, since the Substack app still doesn’t allow people to add hyperlinks. SUBSTACK PLEASE, HEAR MY PLEA. Gimme some editing tools on mobile.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below:

👃🏻 Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong. Sarah Zhang’s piece about noses and congestion is fascinating and, as we move into “congestion season” here in North America, quite timely. Ultimately, noses are far weirder than you likely ever thought, including such interesting facts as you can control your nose from your armpit, there is a “nasal cycle” comprising swelling and unswelling of venous erectile tissue in your nose (yep, that’s right) that has a ”similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” and you actually have two noses, one for each nostril—not one. I really wanted this piece to keep going! Tell us more about noses, Sarah, we’re listening. The Atlantic (Archive link here)

🐀 In Defense of the Rat. Rats are less pestilent and more lovable than we think. They are not aggressive, nor a primary disease vector — despite their reputation. And research has shown it was fleas, not rats, that transmitted the plague so effectively. Rats are smart and playful; they can solve complex puzzles and understand time, space, and numbers. They laugh. They play hide and seek and will even do so just for the reward of ‘tickles’ not food. They are (at least I think so!) very cute, and make lovely pets, albeit ones that don’t live that long. Can we vilify them a little less, and maybe even learn to love them? Yes please. Hakai Magazine

🪠 You're Invited to a Colonoscopy! Excellent science writing for the masses that really takes the interplay of concepts involved and explains them ways that are engaging. Written like Matt Levine writes about finance, which I've loved for years, i.e. by synthesizing complex data or information and explains what the average person may miss in reading about it. The piece reviews a recent study trial that found colonoscopies have little effect on mortality, a conclusion that was disputed by American GI doctors. Asterisk Magazine 

🌾 The Lurker. Engagingly written, this horrifying piece about stalking of a professor, her husband, and other faculty affiliated with her work— all Asian or South Asian—will keep you reading. In the digital age, many threats to faculty and staff do not just come from those affiliated with campuses. They can come from individuals anywhere around the world, making harassers harder to track down or punish. Very scary for those involved. The Verge

👻 The Future Of Ghosts. Interesting short essay about ghosts now and then, with a point I never thought of prior: that ghost stories in the 19th century were probably really common because everyone was getting poisoned by carbon monoxide from gaslamps. In modern times, the essay wonders, will our ghosts be the avatars of the future? Does anyone really die if we all live in fragments online forever? Thoughtful read. Paris Review

😶‍🌫️ My Brain Doesn't Picture Things. 1 in 25 people have aphantasia, inability to picture things in their head. “As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind,” Marco Giancotti writes. He also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside his head. This is the complete opposite of my brain, which instead is an overabundance of voluntary imagination of the senses. I am a 1, below, for all things; Giancotti is a 5. Such an interesting piece, and another great reminder that our brains are often all so different. Nautilus Mag

🍳 Orange Is the New Yolk. Marian Bull on how the farm egg and its revered orangey yolk became an unlikely fetish object, telling us more about ourselves than it does about the hens that laid it. This is an August piece, but I ran out of room and wanted to save it for when I could feature the whimsical illustrator who drew the accompanying art for the piece. It’s a fun read on the cult of eggs, and all the history (and marketing buzzwords and building up) that goes into the current eggy zeitgeist. “We want it jammy, that sludgy midway between soft- and medium-boiled. We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate. And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.” Eater

💸 The Great Zelle Pool Scam. What a saga, about peer to peer payment fraud taken to the extreme. After hiring a contractor to build a pool, Devin Friedman agreed to wire them the money for the work via Zelle—again and again. Eventually, he realized those weren't legit requests from the contractor, but it was only the beginning for him in trying to get their funds back. We all benefit from this mess, because the piece is incredibly engaging and funny—but I do feel for him and his wife as this was a disaster. Don't worry, though, even he doesn't feel too sorry for himself: “[o]ut of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of." Business Insider 

👂🏻 Michael Faber on the torture of tinnitus. Tinnitus, “the metallic squeal – like the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop”, is something I deal with as well with an ongoing spinal CSF leak. It’s also a common condition, with millions suffering from it worldwide. This piece goes into the wonder of how ears work, but also how easily fragile and disrupted they are—as those of us with tinnitus can attest. Mine sounds like the ‘eeeee’ of cicadas or electricity lines in the summer. High pitched and disruptive. The Guardian

🔎 Google's Helpful Content Update: Full Review, Analysis and Recovery. Easily the most comprehensive, best overview of Google's recent Helpful Content Update, with a mention and summary of the October spam and core updates as well. It's very long, and very worth a read if you're someone who relies on search traffic online. To that end, I recently shared on Patreon that Google is truly killing blogging these days by focusing so heavily on these algorithmic changes that favour keywords and formalities. I miss the days where I could just write what I want and not think of what search results will yield about it; the beauty of Substack (and Patreon) is that I can do just that and share within communities I've built instead of relying on the whims of search. My business does, in part, depend on Google though—my celiac translation cards primarily get sold via searches for gluten free eating abroad. So that’s why I’ve made the changes I mentioned above. onpage.ai

🗿 There's a museum in Japan that honors rocks which resemble human faces. I shared a piece about face-recognition, aka pareidolia, in an earlier CAE. Not far from Tokyo, there’s a museum dedicated to rocks that look like faces. Called the Chinsekikan (“Hall of Curious Rocks”), it’s certainly up our alley. It’s got over 1,700 stones, each with history, and a bunch of them even resemble faces of actual people. Wish I could visit! ZME Science  

🖼 Empire of the senseless. Thoughtful long read that I found via The Morning News. In it, Rob Horning writes about parasocial relationships with perpetually online artists, and the widening gap between them and traditional art criticism. To do so, he spotlights a penned critique of a hugely popular social media artist, Devon Rodriguez. The purpose of art criticism isn’t to make fans or administrate fandoms, yet that’s what’s expected of ‘artfluencing’ these days. The people who love art from social media stars aren’t usually those critiquing art from museums, and though there’s nothing wrong with either, says Horning, the lacuna between the two is increasingly tense — especially with the pursuit of AI. Can AI models address the longstanding “crisis of modernity”? Unclear, but this piece gives you something to think about, that’s for sure. Internal Exile

🤕 The Standard Advice for Concussions Is Wrong. I know, another Atlantic piece in my ‘start here’ section. But both reads were very good! In this one: many patients are simply told to wait out a concussion, but there are treatments available that can make a big difference in terms of recovery—if started early. And yet, they aren’t often suggested. “Why had I—a patient with a brain injury—been the one sifting through scientific papers and online support groups rather than getting these referrals from my doctor?” asks Tove Danovich. Patients are often stuck being our own advocates, and thankfully pieces like this help us find clearer paths to help. The Atlantic (Archive link here).

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

💡 How to light the dark months. I look forward to the winter light in the dark half of the year. I find summer brightness too penetrating with a leak, spring light too dreary. This is a season of delicious contrasts, of cold blue skies, of glowing light against black mornings. Enjoyable list of tips from Katherine May on how to embrace the winter cocoon as “an art and a daily practice”, to help us all transition through the dark. For anyone dreading the coming darker, colder Northern hemisphere months: this may be for you. I do use a SAD lamp for 15 minutes every morning, and I find it makes a big difference to sleep cycles. (Mine is a LumiPlus Happy Light from Verilux).

🧠 For The First Time, Scientists Show Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation. The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don’t just affect reproductive anatomy: they also reshape the brain. A new study shows how that happens, and CSF is also affected. Anecdotally, leak patients do feel a lot worse in the week before menstruation, as do mast cell patients. Interesting to start understanding why. Science Alert

🛠️ The best inventions of 2023. Many great inventions highlighted, including ones mentioned in CAEs of yore, like braille LEGO and vests for the hearing impaired to wear at concerts. TIME

🦠 Long COVID brain fog may originate in a surprising place, say scientists. A study this month linked low serotonin levels with some of the neurocognitive manifestations of Long Covid. It's an interesting study, and while you'd think by headlines like this that it's Super New, it's not; ME/CFS researchers have been looking at tryptophan (part of the serotonin pathway) for some time, and low serotonin has already been associated with ME/CFS. Tryptophan degradation also has been found in chronic EBV infections. Still, more research is good, especially research that shows biological changes with long covid. (No, it's not in people's heads.) I wish they had looked into other supports for low serotonin beyond SSRIs (like 5HTP). For a more in-depth review, see Cort Johnson's writeup of the study here. NPR; Healthrising

🗳️ Pennsylvanians Are About To Decide Who Will Oversee The 2024 Elections. Pennsylvania’s elections are managed by county officials, and all 67 counties are voting in just a few days, with results that will impact how 2024 elections play out. This article is a dive into some of what’s important from these local races, and a reminder that regional politics, and coverage, matters. Bolts Magazine

🍄 The Great Psychedelic Experiment. A research team mined an old drug forum called Erowid, then fed the entries to an AI. The result is the largest ever study of psychedelic influence on the brain—and could augur a new class of hybrid antidepressants. For now, writes Natasha Boyd, “there’s no separating the agony from the ecstasy”, but maybe that will change one day. Pioneer Works

🪦 Why Are We So Scared Of Friday 13th? Apparently fear of the number 13 is so prevalent that it has a scientific name: triskaidekaphobia. This piece explains why the fear is there, and why Friday the 13th especially has such superstition surrounding it in North America especially. Smithsonian Magazine

💉 How To Live Forever Or Die Trying. At RAADfest, a gathering devoted to “radical life extension,” no pathway to eternal life is off the table. Another piece featuring Bryan Johnson and his quest for making his body younger while he ages. It’s an interesting article to read this piece as a disabled person, because it feels so deeply decadent to chase immortality, instead of just chasing functionality. GQ 

💍 The truth about the 'marriageability gap'. An eye-opening read on how the marriage market shames women if they don’t participate, and shortchanges them if they do. “Be smart and successful, we tell women — but not so smart and successful that your partner resents you.” A study by Pew Research found that in hetero couples where women out-earned their male partners, men had more leisure time and still did less housework. (It’s a lot more complicated than housework, too: when women earn more than their male partners, domestic violence risk goes up by 35%). Men Yell At Me; Sydney Morning Herald

🐑 The surprising benefits of switching to ‘lamb mowers’. Sheep Meadow in NYC's central park was not a metaphor; the area was commonly filled with the animals back in the 1860s. Further, in 1914, more than 100 sheep were invited to the nation’s capital to graze near the Lincoln Memorial, and later the White House. They disappeared as machine lawn mowers took over. And now, the sheep are back. Washington Post, syndicated to MSN

📸 Photos Photos Photos (A little break from the reads):

• 2023 Photomicrography Competition. My fave!

• Wildlife Photographer Of The Year award winners. (I had shared finalists in an earlier CAE).

• Weather Photographer Of The Year 2023.

• The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. Just the finalists - the winner TBD!

🦭 Seals Show Scientists an Unknown Antarctic Canyon Underwater. I find seals so joyously special, and I love that this discovery of an underwater canyon mapping hadn’t found was thanks to them. They fitted over 200 southern elephant seals with trackers, and they did what seals do and dove down into the ocean. After the sealscovery, sonar measurements confirmed the existence of a canyon plunging to depths of more than 2km. (I shared more about sonar mapping back in CAE 26.) Scientific American

🐱 How do cats purr? New finding challenges long-held assumptions. Researchers have long wondered how domestic cats purr at such low frequencies despite being small animals. A new study shows that their voice boxes contain pads of fatty tissue that slow down the vibrations of their vocal cord, AND that sustaining the sound doesn’t seem to require input from muscles or the brain. This study challenges the common explanation that purring is produced through fast, repeated muscle contraction. Really fascinating! Science

A few more long covid updates:

• The long-term health outcomes, pathophysiological mechanisms and multidisciplinary management of long COVID: this November 1 study provides an overview of how the condition occurs, including the different mechanisms hypothesized thus far, which include viral reservoir, gut microbiome dysbiosis, endothelial dysfunction, autoimmunity, and inflammation. Good illustrations that help explain it, as well. Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

• Could gut fungi be linked to severe COVID?. Severe COVID has been linked to the fungal microbiome, and specifically an imbalance of fungi in the gut. Scientists think it can contribute to excessive inflammation and push Covid into severe states, or into long covid. Could antifungals help critically ill patients? Unclear, but it’s very interesting. The Conversation

• COVID’s Damage Lingers in the Heart. Building on research that said as much back in 2020, researchers continue to find that the effects of SARS-CoV-2 (not requiring a severe infection, either) extend to the cardiovascular system, including with blood clots, heart attacks, stroke, and POTS.

🐵 Menopausal chimpanzees deepen the mystery of why women stop reproducing. TIL chimps go through menopause too, which adds to the mystery of why a handful of mammals, including humans and toothed whales, evolved so that females lived past their reproductive years. Many other animals just keep reproducing until death. Biologists disagree about whether this is a byproduct of evolution, or something specifically selected for it. More research is needed, the phrase we all know so well. Nature

⛵️ I Was Six When My Father Decided We’d Sail Around The World. I Would Be Trapped On That Boat For Nearly A Decade. Memoir from a now-adult woman whose family took her and her brother to live at sea, sailing around the world for a decade. A life plan that many these days dream about (“sell it all and sail the world!”), Heywood's recollections were more of a nightmare with a controlling father and very little social contact. She managed to get out from under his thumb, and has now written a book about that journey. This shorter piece is an excerpt from that book, and I wanted to share because I'm always curious about how the kids that are brought up traveling long term feel about it. Some are incredibly grateful for the experience, others like Heywood are brittle, but the difference seems to lie in the parenting itself. Her parents did not have her interests at heart. Huffpost

🐣 The same lab that cloned Dolly the sheep has used gene editing to create chickens resistant to avian flu. Sounds good at first: using CRISPR, chickens became resistant to flu. Except, the gene modified was a protein that the virus needs to replicate, so the virus did what viruses do and it found other proteins in the same family to replicate from. “We must be careful not to facilitate adaptations of the virus that make it more dangerous than it [already] is,” says virologist and study co-author Wendy Barclay. You think? El Pais

📖 Who is the greatest economist of all time and why does it matter? Creative new project from Tyler Cowen: a generative book. It's a 100,000 word “entertaining and erudite analysis” that he wrote about who qualifies as the greatest economist of all time — but it lets readers dive into the material and directly create more content from it. econgoat.ai

🛝 Why do we stop playing? As adults, play is often low on our list of priorities, being that we live in a world that often makes us anxious. “In the never-ending to-do list of adulthood,” Shannon Watts writes, “play can feel like a waste of time.” We drain ourselves with our to do lists, but rarely have time for our want lists. Very short post but one worth thinking about, understanding of course that not everyone has the privilege of doing more of what they want. Shannon Watts

⚽️ Soccer goalkeepers literally see and hear the world differently. In soccer, goalkeepers play a special role with unique physical demands. A new study shows that professional goalkeepers process sensory information differently from other players and non-players. As well as possessing an enhanced ability to integrate auditory and visual cues, they are also more inclined to perceive those cues separately. Big Think

🧑‍💻 We caught technicians at Best Buy, Mobile Klinik, Canada Computers and others snooping on our personal devices. More than half the time, too! Plus, technicians at 9 stores also accessed private data, including one technician who not only viewed photos but copied them onto a USB key. Disgusting. CBC News

🏹 The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. This study paper concludes that the theory of men evolving to hunt and women evolving to gather is wrong, and using paleoanthropological data, shows that women also had roles as hunters way back in the day. PLOS journal

👀 Fungal infection in the brain produces changes like those seen in Alzheimer's disease. Can a common Candida albicans infection lead to PD and Alzheimer’s? New research thinks it just might. Earlier studies implicated fungal infections in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s but we didn't understand why/how that happened. In this new study, they found that Candida albicans enters the brain via enzymes that degrade the blood brain barrier, then when in the brain, the fungus activates two separate mechanisms in brain cells that promote its clearance. Those mechanisms (via microglial activation) cause the brain to generate amyloid beta peptides, the toxic protein fragments considered to be at the centre of the development of Alzheimer's disease. Science Daily. 

🛌 Why Ideas Bloom At Bedtime. Why do people feel most creative at bedtime? In a 2019 UK survey, more than 40 percent of people said being in bed spurs creativity, admitting they have their best ideas before sleep, in the middle of the night, and just after waking up. “Scientists believe we’re pinged with great thoughts in bed because our brain is in a relaxed state conducive to neuroplasticity”, writes Nir Eyal — which believes actually means boredom. We are most creative when we are bored. Psychology Today

🪙 Flipped coins found not to be as fair as thought. Is a coin flip really a fair way to sort out a problem? Not as much as we think. Persi Diaconis suggested that impartial wasn’t the name of the game when it came to coin tosses back in 2007, and recent research just confirmed his take: namely that tossed coins are more likely to land on the same side they started on, rather than on the reverse. It’s only a slight bias (1%), but it’s there. Phys Org

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Bright yellow sea snail named 'margarita' in honor of late musician Jimmy Buffett.

• A massive solar storm shown via 14,300-year-old tree rings, suggesting that it could possibly be one of the largest solar storms ever recorded.

• Headline of the month: 'Planned to make a necklace': Airport agents seize giraffe poop from woman returning to US. (No, it's not legal to transport animal 💩 across the US border. At least without special permission.)

• NOPE. Nope nope nope. Spider and its exoskeleton removed from a patient’s ear in Taiwan. She was “hearing abnormal sounds” for four days.

• The 20 most haunted places in the world.

• The 2023 UberEats cravings report. Surprisingly entertaining!

• Highway in the UK brought to a standstill by escaped llamas and alpacas.

• Is it legal to pay a ransom in an extortion event? This is a map showing where it’s legal and where it’s not.

• Mother in Italy wins her court case to evict her two sons in their 40's.

• A new tool 'poisons' AI models to fight copyright theft. Called Nightshade, it’s designed to disrupt AI models attempting to learn from artistic imagery by subtly altering pixels in images, rendering them imperceptibly different to the human eye but confusing to AI models.

• Where in Europe do men sit down, or stand up, to pee? This has been a frequent discussion when I’ve been abroad or at home. In parts of Europe, men do sit to pee; not the case here, but some friends definitely wish it would catch on. (The friends cleaning the bathroom, I’d wager.)

• New pepper breaks records for hottest pepper in the world, with an average of 2.69 million units. By comparison, pepper spray is around 1.6 million units.

• Sam Sieracki breaks Guinness World Record for solving Rubik's Cube while skydiving, in 28.25 seconds no less. Couldn’t do that with feet firmly planted.

• What did October’s solar eclipse look like? The Ring of Fire on 14 October led to some great solar eclipse photos from North America.

This month’s featured artist is Dingding Hu, who did the whimsical eggtastic illustration for the Eater feature about our obsession with orange yolks.

© 2023 Dingding Hu

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi