SamLR.com

WR Unforeseen

Posted: 27th August 2019

Well there's sort of a theme anyway. Apart from the first entry.

This isn't so much a specific article but the whole series -- Things I won't work with: Sand Won't Save You This Time, by Derek Lowe. If you've not encountered this series I can't recommend it enough, notes from a chemist on horrifying chemicals and why he won't go near them. This one is on chlorine trifluoride and was prompted by this Twitter thread from @NireBryce on the datasheet for it.

Teacup Pigs, where are they now? Still here but much bigger. They bought trendy ‘teacup pigs.’ now they’ve got enormous hogs, by Quinn Myers, covers the sad story of pets piglets that grew to full size (i.e. 90Kg) pigs. It's not a surprising story but definitely worth a read. Also I learnt that pigs keep growing for up to 5 years, so there's that.

Disney and Fox is an old article (published 2017 apparently) but a nice in-depth look at why Disney might want to buy Fox (it subsequently has). A bit inside baseball but I always enjoy this sort of deep analysis and it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out over the coming years.

Last, but not least, is The Costs of Camouflaging Autism, by Francine Russo. This article delves into the different ways that gender impacts growing up autistic. It appears that, for those brought up as girls, autism manifests in a series of exhausting camouflaging tactics that hide the symptoms (which have been traditionally modelled on boys' behaviour). This will often push back diagnosis of all but the most severe cases into adulthood (if it's ever formally diagnosed). This can, obviously, cause huge amounts of stress for the individual. This is a sympathetic and interesting look at this problem and how it the women it effects deal with it.

...and quickly before I go (this literally crossed my time-line as I wrote this): this press-release from locus is welcome news following Jeannette Ng's excellent acceptance speech. This is a good change.