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Wrote my first programs for this too, at 7. Copied from the manual with no understanding but eventually writing my own. The only coder in the house! Didn't write anything decent until the C64 when I made a few small games.

Great memories of Parsec too.


Sadly I'm in the same boat, for years now. Fatigue is such an inadequate term. Can't even sit up for long without getting exhausted. Still trying treatments but to no avail so far. The impact of Long Covid seems to be drawing a lot of eyeballs to this though so I'm hopeful something will be found.

It's taught me patience and empathy. I used to teach others how to program and when people couldn't get something I presumed they weren't trying hard enough. I get it now. Now I read the requirements or exercise or puzzle or whatever and there's just nothing where once there was a bubbling and filtering of ideas or whatever we call thinking.

There was a recent survey paper in Nature covering this syndrome that can triggered by various infections https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01810-6

Be well, and get your own Illness Benefit Insurance policy


A lesson learned from hard experience and unfortunately too late: get your own illness benefit insurance. If you have it through your employer you can't sue the insurance company since you're not a party to the contract. They don't even need to talk to you, only your employer.


I was preparing to possibly have to do this, but it looks like I've narrowly avoided it. My family has a procedure scheduled Dec 4, and my work insurance is changing plans Dec 1. Got pre-approved with previous plan, previous insurance company is exiting health insurance totally. New plan needs 15 business days to approve it, and can't start that until we get group numbers, and there's a holiday in here.

But, the doctor has been able to get us in due to a cancellation, before the insurance expires.


I love that song and found out recently it was actually written by Peter Hames.



You're right. Tom Clancy used it in The Sum of All Fears


On a related note, in college ca. 1999, when I took a history and philosophy of science course on nuclear weapons, the instructor, a retired Los Alamos physicist, assigned an excerpt from The Sum of All Fears as required reading.

He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find in the open literature.

Amazing class, which also included a field trip to Oak Ridge, TN, where we got a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility[1] while it was in the process of being decommissioned, and a far less interesting "tour" of the basically nonexistent public areas of the Y-12 weapons plant[2], where the only interesting things on display were the extensive security precautions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_National_Security_Complex


The book is well worth a read too. There are some great bits with John Von Neumann.

On a similar note, Adventures of a Physicist by Luis Alvarez is also a great read. Among many other things, he and his son proposed the theory that the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by a meteor.


Of all mathematicians who would qualify as unsung, von Neumann is the last...


There's a nice webcomic called Drawing History that gives a gentle overview of many ancient civilisations, including the Kush https://m.tapas.io/series/Drawing-History/info


Zoom traffic is encrypted, just not end-to-end. So your ISP and flatmates can't sniff it but people with access to Zoom servers could


Where are those servers?


The 5.0 client includes an icon that has this information; after starting a meeting, this currently says "You are connected to the Zoom global network via a datacenter in the United States."

Make what you will of that.


I'm interested in your opinion of the citations too. They purport to show persistence beyond standard treatment in mice, dogs, macaques and humans, the latter via xenodiagnosis and PCR. PCR is pretty direct.


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