403: forbidden

I currently purchase health insurance through a state exchange. Updating my name with the exchange was a prerequisite for updating it with the insurer, so I did that back in January. It was supposed to propagate through, since both entities have my assigned-at-birth government ID number and presumably index off of that. Instead, my contract seems to have experienced a critical failure to exist. Since I was using auto-pay, I didn't immediately notice that they hadn't billed me for February. It was only yesterday, when I tried to refill my primary narcolepsy medication, that I found out I was uninsured.

By this morning, I'd pulled together enough information to get them to open a ticket for reinstatement. Clock is ticking on my remaining medication.

One of my discoveries in 2023 is that podcasts and low-visual-impact videos do have a niche in my life after all. So I've started listening to a bunch of "professor's side gig/hobby project" things when I'm doing other boring tasks. I'd still much rather read, but for stuff I don't need to remember in great detail, audio is good enough.

One of those academic's side projects is "What's Going On With Shipping", and right now, that's A Lot. Back in November, a group called the Houthi (the Iran-backed faction in the Yemeni civil war) declared they would blockade the narrows between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea against any commercial vessel "connected to Israel", and backed it up by seizing the Ray Shipping vessel Galaxy Leader, of which one of the beneficial owners is an Israeli. (Galaxy Leader's crew are still being held hostage.) So far, the targets have gone out to at least three degrees of separation in terms of who does business with / is owned by whom. Or the Houthi's intelligence gathering could just be shit. Not mutually exclusive.

The above has made not just the shipping companies themselves but also the providers of war risk insurance very skittish. So the big container ships, with their massive cargo value and associated cost to insure, have been diverting away from the Red Sea <-> Suez Canal <-> Mediterranean Sea section of route. Combine that with a drought throttling the Panama Canal (which is currently allowing 24 of the normal 38 ships per day to pass through) and moving cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is becoming a right pain in the ass. Slower, more expensive, and since part of the change is sudden, also disruptive to supply chains.

Those costs in shipping, insurance, and manufacturing delays are all passed on to us, the consumers. Prices go up, available product goes down, everything goes 'round and 'round.

( Current events: The ADL as a reactionary organization... at best. )

Irony is truly dead, and we have killed it.

For the longest time, I've disliked the way that I was given a wallet name that makes two distinct references to Christianity. Both of them appear to have been for reasons of inheritance rather than parental convictions, but I've never belonged to that religion and being named in connection with it sends entirely the wrong signal. Even if today one of those references is only apparent when you examine the name's Gaelic roots, I knew and it bothered me. For that and a variety of other reasons, a name change has been on my extended to-do list for well over a decade.

So after being told on my latest visit to the UK, this past February, that I need a fresh passport photo for any subsequent visits, I decided that this year was The Time. After an extended anxiety stall, this morning a dear friend accompanied me to the nearest county courthouse. I spent much longer standing in line than in the actual courtroom, which is typical. (N.B.: Civil matters are apparently never shown on digital schedules here in King County, be they online or on the building's own public screens. It's done to safeguard the identities of people seeking protection orders, by both not directly identifying them and not specifically failing to identify them.) And then I emerged with a brand shiny new wallet-name, went home, and fell over to get the sleep I'd been too wired for last night.

Next step, make an appointment with the licensing dpt. to get my new name into my actual wallet. Once that's done, I'll have adequate ID to send my passport off for replacement. Also need to contact my bank, health insurance, renter's insurance, landlord, etc. It's all going to be a short-term pain in the neck, but also a long-term relief.

TIL: The international moratorium on commercial whaling is only about as old as I am. The linked article is an interesting description of that slice of history, with application to transitioning away from petroleum as the world previously transitioned away from whale blubber.

If you want to get rid of something and have it stay gone, it helps to have some idea of how it came about in the first place. In that spirit, here’s some thoughts about male privilege and why it used to be socially stable. (Rambly, not necessarily the best organized. Light on citations, but I can add ‘em later if people want.)



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The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us. Archived from the original.

Aside from doing what it says on the tin, archive.today is currently a handy way to circumvent paywalls on several news sites. Their operational (rather than front-page) URL jumps around periodically as a result. So if the archival link stops working, searching for the source address from the archive.today main page should still bring it up.

We just might know how antidepressants work, now. As it turns out, both SSRIs and ketamine bind to a receptor for Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, TrkB (free article). If you just want the high points, there's a graphical abstract on the front page of the PDF version.

Now, this right here? This made my day. :D



It also offers some new leads to understanding why entire categories of antidepressants don't work for some people. Subtle differences among TrkB alleles and expression frequencies might have big effects on what fits into that molecular pocket and how strong an effect it has. After all, we already know that one particular allele seems to confer a 2.2x risk of suicide attempts in depressed people.

On a more basic research level, we might also be able to develop model animals with cued brain-only overexpression of TrkB (where a gene promoter is added, and operates IFF some exogenous chemical cue is present) to determine what effects it has, and whether it's worthwhile to consider tinkering with the expression rate as a treatment method.

This is far too important a subject to languish behind a paywall. Original article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/health/coronavirus-smell-taste.html

tl;dr: Scent is intimately tied to physical and emotional well-being. If you can't smell sulfur dioxide, you can't tell that the kitchen is filling with gas from the oven or stove. If you can't smell food, you're at a real loss for determining whether it's gone off, and even when nothing's wrong with it, most people say that the pleasure of eating is gone. And people with damage to their sense of smell tend to become socially isolated--because face-to-face interactions are no longer enjoyable.


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Addendum:
My immediate thought after reading this was, 'What if the Western plague of anomie is down to our cultures' insistence that smelling like oneself is unacceptable?' It's such a simple, pervasive thing. If scent is up there with touch in its ability to create feelings of interpersonal connection and warmth, then what effect does its absence have on political polarization? On a societies' degree of individualism vs. collectivism? On America's basic civil society, which has been crumbling for generations?

2017 was a trash fire. It had its moments--even the worst years do--but on the whole, I have more fresh burns from it than anything else.

Good riddance.