Can't be Atrios: I don't see an "I don't understand this American dysfunction, but in Europe, where I often travel on vacation and they have universal healthcare, they..." paragraph.
Yeah, I can't stand the new LGM layout. Its attempt at responsive design is pretty bad too, but that's a separate matter. Ironically, the previous LGM setup was pretty good on mobile, as blogs go. A damn sight better than TPM.
Jagged edged pseudo-grids cut my eyes.
If Unfogged goes to a magazine format and Metafilter adopts nested commenting I may finally be able to quit the internet entirely.
DeLong would also have to require passwords for commenting I suppose.
I've never been able to grasp what sort of organizing principle, if any, DeLong uses for his site.
He assumed that at some point Google would evolve to organize it for him.
Hypothetical future artificial superintelligence is also the reason my mail is stored in an ever-growing pile.
I get the same experience for most of my reads through an RSS reader.
I assumed all the readers had been dismantled by now.
I'm not sure if it's a matter of time before RSS feeds die off, or if that's in the DNA of most sites now without creators having to bother.
The mitochondria of the internet.
I solemnly swear we will never bother to change anything.
AND WHY WOULD YOU
LGM's RSS feed died a while back, though maybe it's been restored with the revamp? Also, it was truncated.
I follow LGM via their feed (the fact that there can be more than one and they can break differently is one of the terrible things about the feed universe...) and theoldreader.com and it's been fine for years, including recently.
On the plus side maybe their new site design will discourage people from commenting there.
Yeah, their feed has been working for me. An old one broke and I moved to a new one but not sure how recent that change was.
I agree that the new LGM format is terrible.
Wow, the new LGM format is ugly. Someone said, "let's do magazine format!", someone else objected "magazine format is the ugliest!" and the designer said, "I can make it worse!"
I specifically looked just for this. Yes, bad. Maybe they're trying to be TPM but without any money?
To be clear, I find TPM's design fine and readable.
TPM is pretty much unreadable on mobile, but that's as much to do with their ad policy as anything.
This is pretty much the only blog I read on mobile except when I'm trapped away from a computer.
I think 23 is probably the right answer, but hell, it's fugly. TPM thinks it looks like a newspaper site and almost pulls it off. LGM, not. The TES, where I read Mary Beard's blog, has recently done the same thing only worse.
If they were going to update it, maybe they should have picked a color scheme not built around having a puke yellow background. But I guess they didn't want to mess with the brand.
aw man, it's the actual worst. and I love their blog, even though it contains posts my husband could have helped edit for brevity.
I'm a simple man, so I didn't know that what LGM did was a thing, but I did know that I suddenly couldn't find my way around because I couldn't tell what was most recent. But then I discovered the 'recent posts' sidebar. And found five dollars. Redesign still sucks, though.
I haven't seen the new LGM on anything except my phone. If looks okay there. All posts are in one column. Actually it is a bit better. The previous mobile version only showed the post title and author. The new brain gives the first few lines of the post. That's a useful preview.
If you *were* to change anything, I would love it if the comment window in Chrome for Android did not constantly ask me if I wanted to "optimize for mobile." Not sure what would be required, but it's a minor daily irritation.
33: You can disable that by going to chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics.
Thanks Minivet!
I know it's not quite 40 comments, but this one doesn't seem to be going far, so hopefully no-one minds if I derail with a bleg.
As I said the other day, Kid D has just been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. She's now on some drugs that seem to work and is improving steadily atm, got home from hospital on Tuesday. She's lost a lot of weight - she's about 5'7" and currently weighs about 93lb - she's fairly small-framed to start with but clearly this is very thin, and her arms and legs look like twigs as she's also lost so much muscle. Which is where you exercise-obsessed lovely people might be able to help!
She's eating loads (yay steroids) and trying to build up her activity levels, but it seems optimistic to think that she'll really be ready for a full day at school in 12 days time. There must be exercises or activities she could be doing to build muscle more effectively than just doing a bit more 'normal life' stuff each day - please give me some suggestions!
There must be exercises or activities she could be doing to build muscle more effectively than just doing a bit more 'normal life' stuff each day - please give me some suggestions!
Lifting weights.
35: Just because we're dealing with something that overlaps a bit (but almost certainly isn't UC specifically) do you know if her core strength is decent? My child is doing aquatic physical therapy right now to focus on hers, which is really bad but has been compensated for by limb overuse to keep her functioning like other kids. Just a thought because I've been so impressed by the woman who gets in the pool with her and assesses what she needs and also how they're doing very hard work without the same exhaustion that came from PT on land.
I did think weights, but small/big, lots of reps/few reps, legs? I have no idea where a 14 year old stickchild should start, lol.
Also have no idea re core strength - I imagine it's dire as she's been losing weight for months and has pretty terrible posture. I don't know if the GP would refer her for physio, that side of things wasn't mentioned in hospital and it wasn't so obvious to me I guess when she was there. I do know a PT, could ask her for private recommendations.
re: 38
Maybe gentle bodyweight exercises? I'm thinking about bodyweight squats (or goblet squats with a light weight), pushups (against a wall or from the knees depending on strength), etc. There's lots of ways to make those easier depending on base level strength.
Or, on the other hand, if the strength is there, there's ways to make them harder, too.
I'm obviously a lot heavier than 93lb, but I've been doing the same to rehab chronic shoulder and knee injuries.
I have no idea at all what I'm talking about, but building strength gently for someone who's very underweight and weak makes me think water -- sort of zero impact whole body exertion. Is there any kind of public pool where she could swim a little, or maybe a water exercise class?
And good lord, I think when you mentioned it before I didn't see it until it seemed too late to be worth chiming in, but that's terrible. All my best wishes for her feeling better as fast as possible.
And looking up, Thorn just said the same thing about water.
Yoga is also a great option for gentle strengthening, and it helps with posture and balance as well.
I would also recommend core exercises. Strengthening the core will help a lot with posture, and help with everything in general. There are so many good resources online, she could put together a good routine from googling beginning core exercises. With weights, have her start with weights where she can do 8-10 reps with good form but not more than that. (So, controlled, steady movement, no hunching, no compensating with other muscles.) Have her do 2 sets of 8-10. Once that gets easy, like she feels she could keep going once she gets to 10 or 12, have her increase weights by 2-3 lbs (in the US we have 5, 8, 10, 12, 15 lb weights). This is what I learned working with a trainer when running track (which is filled with scrawny beanpoles), so it's good advice for skinny people wanting to healthily build muscle, but I don't know if there are special considerations given her health conditions.
This is not my area of expertise, but I would caution against excessive exercise if she is she is still on high dose steroids. Partially because it may not work that well and can be frustrating, and partially because her body is doing other things with her energy supplies. Not that I think she should be immobile, but I would lean towards the more gentle recommendations like yoga, water exercises, and just walking until she is on a maintenance steroid dose. Aggressive exercise (working to exhaustion) may set her back, especially if she wasn't an athlete prior to this episode. I am obviously guessing about her meds here, and this is a really good topic to talk about with people that have real-life experience with the disease, either doctors or support groups. UC is a systemic disease that presents primarily but not exclusively in the colon, and she may be using all of that energy healing.
I think yoga would help me, but I always feel that if I walked into a yoga class everybody would think I was there to look at butts in yoga pants.
My vague attempt at yoga last year was in a neighborhood studio mostly catering to the middle-aged and frumpy. If you've got anything like that around, you might feel less as if you looked like a voyeur.
(Results of that attempt: I hate yoga. I don't bend in mostly any direction successfully. OTOH, ask me to stand securely on one foot? I could do that all day.)
Why can't I stare at middle-aged butts?
I can stand on my right foot, but not my left.
I really should just get PT. All this insurance and nobody using it.
You can stare at middle aged butts all you like -- I was merely suggesting there might be a little less social opprobrium that way.
I was thinking it would be more awkward because women with middle-aged butts are very much more likely to be people who know who I am.
Showing up to class in a balaclava wouldn't make it less awkward, I guess.
It worked for knitting class, but that's different.
And now they will be grateful to you since it's been years since anyone looked, even really looked*, at their butts. Since this is an English phone it autocorrected "butts" to "bits", and that's probably true too
* Zonker style
In my neighborhood there is now yoga with a heated room which is right over my bar (and an ice cream store). Then there is not-heated yoga.
I assume not-heated yoga is still heated in the winter. I just don't think it is heated to above the usual temperatures for indoor heating.
In the Squirrel Hill yoga scene, the flexible are trained by two separate, yet equally fancy, studios: The super-heated one over the bar and the one catty-corner from the weird little clock thing. These are their stories.
My friends made me go the hot yoga place a couple of times. Worst headache of my life - thought I had ruptured an aneurysm afterwards. I'm not sure why it bothered me so much - I could row until almost blacking out and never had that problem.
44 - thanks, I'm finding it really hard to get this sort of information. (She's on 40mg pred but as it didn't really have any effect on the UC, she'll finish her 4 week treatment dose and then taper slowly, so she won't finish until nearly the end of October.) She is definitely not going to be doing any sort of aggressive/exhausting exercise! She walked about a kilometre today which is the most exercise she's done in a month. Just really trying to gain strength to make school easier when it starts - if she were at school atm she wouldn't be managing a whole day.
Swimming/doing stuff in water sounds good, and is easily doable, so thanks for that suggestion. She's probably not up to an exercise class yet, but I know there are a couple at our pool so could investigate for the future. Sending love and good luck to your daughter Thorn.
39 - I did actually suggest squats and push-ups against a wall, good to know I was thinking along sensible lines. Good luck with the knee and shoulder.
Thanks Buttercup, it's really useful to have specific advice. We do have some very small dumbbells somewhere or other, will dig them out.
I am terrible at standing on one foot. At some point in the past few years, it was floated as a factoid that one-foot-standing correlated (inversely, I guess) with comorbidity or something. Was comorbid with dying. Whatever. Anyway, even occasionally working on it, while brushing teeth or letting students work on a problem, I'm still pretty terrible.
57: Did you try to breathe the air in the bar downstairs?
Mr. Yogato in DC used to offer free frozen yogurt if you could stand on tip toe on one foot with your eyes closed for one minute.
Did they have a sign reading "Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Yogato"?
If not, why not? Defend your answer in at least 500 words and include three citations, two of which are not Wikipedia entries.
58: Thanks for the well-wishing! The good news is that her joint problem wasn't arthritis, but the unclear news is that it's some sort of hypermobility syndrome. So the stomach problems she's having could be connected to that (not great!) or just to the heavy dose of anti-inflammatories she needs to keep her joints from swelling back up eating through her stomach lining or I suppose could be something completely unrelated. We're in the process of testing and of holding off on the drugs for as long as she can manage it, and with a lot of PT at our disposal that may be longer than the last time we tested. Shrug. But she has good people working on it and eventually it should all come together into something with a name and a treatment plan.
some sort of hypermobility syndrome. So the stomach problems she's having could be connected to that (not great!)
Omg this sounds exactly like my friend's condition. She's basically like my dad's old Suburban, which drove like every lug nut had been loosened a little to much. Lots of seemingly unrelated symptoms, but a lot are digestive.
I like my women like I like my old Suburbans?
65: Is it Ehlers-Danlos? If we get a named diagnosis I'm assuming it will be some flavor of that, but there are plenty to go around.
YES! That's exactly what it is.
Hypermobility/Ehlers-Danlos seems surprisingly common, and very poorly understood. I hope the PT helps and that you can find the right balance of meds. Having a team that you trust is a really good thing though.
FWIW my sister, who has multiple autoimmune disorders, swears by something she calls the "autoimmune protocol" diet. This is solely a secondhand rec; I haven't tried it and know nothing about it, but she claims it gives her really significant relief from symptoms. (I guess I do know one thing about it: it's extremely restrictive and thus makes mealtimes no fun for her. But it made life bearable when she couldn't, for various reasons, take her usual medications.)
Are we getting into fopmaps territory?
I think it is the foodmaps sort of thing, yes -- the thing that sounds like the name of a placemat you buy at IKEA? Whatever it is, judging by anecdotes, I have a pretty good idea of how miserable I would have to be before I personally would try it. But I'm also kind of a crank about "wellness" being overrated.
She's so weird about food (no sense of smell, so it's all about texture and aesthetics) already even before this constant stomach upset that I'm hoping to avoid trying to change that until we've exhausted other avenues. She's leading a very full life at this point, unlike when symptoms began last winter, and will switch to rheumatology PT when she finishes aquatic, which may also let us know more about what's going on. Ortho PT was to relax her muscles enough that the range of joint motion was clear, which mostly happened. Aquatic is to start to strengthen her core so she can stop relying on the rest of her body to conpensate. I'm not sure specifically what the rheumatology version will do but I trust them.
Autoimmune disorders are really hard on people who have them, but spare a thought for people trying to run statistics on this stuff. All these confusing, intermittent, and overlapping symptoms just eat degrees of freedom.
Oh, my daughter is your worst nightmare, Mobes. If you have any theories about how her consistently elevated white blood cell count fits in, that would put you ahead of anyone else.
(Why does autocorrect go back and change it when I say "white people" but let "conpensate" go through unchanged? Sigh.)
I only know the people who do that line of research, I don't do it.
The autoimmune protocol and low fodmap diet seem very different.
I'm sure as time goes by that Kid D may have to think more about what she eats. At the moment it's just as much of everything as she has time for in a day, which is just amazing to watch after the tiny amounts she was eating before being admitted.
I hope the eating pays off soon, asilon. My little sickly one is seven inches shorter and a few pounds heavier and still sticklike enough to worry me (though light enough I carried her for a few blocks last night; don't tell my ankle doctor.) I'm glad you're making progress!
The autoimmune protocol and low fodmap diet seem very different.
Heh -- I know next to literally nothing, then. Autoimmune protocol is the one she's on. I had the vague idea that they both involved avoiding "nightshades" and things like that, but there are indeed probably many ways to avoid a nightshade. I wish sympathy (and no more unpleasant shocks) to all the sick kids and their caregivers.
I'd be super cautious of restrictive diets or eliminating food types for underweight young women or girls, and would strongly urge only doing so if working with a qualified dietitian you trust. The last thing they need is disordered eating.
I'm ridiculously hypermobile and relentless efforts to build and maintain strength make all the difference. It's super important to pay attention to form bc of abnormal range of motion, also pay attention to what makes things worse and don't do it no matter what the gym people say. Water supported training is ace.
Speaking of Socrates, isn't this SMBC cartoon completely wrong-headed? Isn't the "You know all analytic propositions" argument essentially Socrates' literal actual position in Meno.
He's really not trying on the art these days.
Anyone trying to restrict Kid D's diet atm would probably just get eaten!
Excellent! Wide variety of delicious and nutritious food in desired profusion FTW! I remember when the kid's appendix burst, the 2 a.m. Surgery and then the stick-like legs and arms with knobbly knees and elbows and sharp sharp collar and wing bones. Shudder.
The new LGM format sucks. The commenting system has gone from bad to worse to the worst - Disqus.