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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • It’s important to know that both the FDA and the USDA are in charge of inspecting food, and which food is covered by which agency can be complicated.

    FSIS [under the USDA] conducts continuous daily inspections of foods in its domain, whereas FDA inspections have no regular schedule. The FDA is more likely to inspect only after a tip about a possible food safety violation, so random inspections can occur up to 10 years apart or, in rare cases, not at all.

    “It’s not that they don’t want to inspect more, they just don’t have the funding,” Raymond says.

    This inspection imbalance means that pepperoni pizza, because it contains meat, has ingredients that will be inspected three times before the product hits the grocery store freezer: at the slaughterhouse, the packing plant and the pizza factory. A vegetarian pizza produced at the same facility, however, will probably not undergo any inspection.

    And in regard to the FDA being not allowed to regulate:

    [The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994] placed the burden of proof concerning dietary supplement safety on FDA, requiring the agency to show that a dietary supplement ingredient is adulterated rather than requiring the manufacturer to prove a supplement is safe prior to marketing. This is in contrast to new food additives, which require submission of safety information in a food additive petition prior to marketing, or drugs, which generally require submission of safety data as part of a new drug application prior to marketing.

    At least with dietary supplements, they can’t make a new product guarantee it’s safe, the FDA needs to already know something is dangerous before it can force a recall.

    If you’d prefer to learn more through a comedian, John Oliver covered this topic a while back https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg



  • In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They’ll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

    But some children will skip the sounding out if they’re taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers — until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they’re stuck. They haven’t developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don’t like it, so they don’t do it if they don’t have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind.

    These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they’re incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

    Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there’s a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they’re taught. According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

    Maybe your kid is one of the lucky ones that can read fine regardless of how he’s taught. But not everyone will be. That’s the point of changing how reading is taught, to be more effective for the highest number of people.

    But you could also try giving him a reading test like the ones presented at the top of this website https://readingtests.info/ and see for yourself how well he reads an unfamiliar story.


  • He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word “horse” and says “pony” instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

    I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn’t the same thing as a horse. Second, don’t you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says “pony”? And different letters say “horse”?

    He dismissed my question.

    Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn’t like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

    “My science is different,” Goodman said.

    It really shouldn’t surprise me at this point that people that think like this are in charge of how kids are educated.


  • why do people have this innate ability to underestimate what we might be capable of?

    Because we can see what we’re currently capable of in terms of climate change, and the outlook is pretty bleak

    why do you think its impossible for us to become masters of our own genome?

    Because even in the best case scenario, this is dangerously close to eugenics

    not getting off this rock means our species is doomed regardless of how ‘perfect’ we keep earth.

    If we can’t keep earth livable, an entire self-regulating planet that’s been livable for hundreds of millions or billions of years, what are our chances of keeping anywhere else livable?








  • https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

    I’m looking at the Full Volume, and on page 71 you can see

    With about 2°C warming, climate-related changes in food availability and diet quality are estimated to increase nutrition-related diseases and the number of undernourished people, affecting tens (under low vulnerability and low warming) to hundreds of millions of people (under high vulnerability and high warming) … Climate change risks to cities, settlements and key infrastructure will rise sharply in the mid and long term with further global warming, especially in places already exposed to high temperatures, along coastlines, or with high vulnerabilities (high confidence).

    At global warming of 3°C, additional risks in many sectors and regions reach high or very high levels, implying widespread systemic impacts, irreversible change and many additional adaptation limits (see Section 3.2) (high confidence). For example, very high extinction risk for endemic species in biodiversity hotspots is projected to increase at least tenfold if warming rises from 1.5°C to 3°C (medium confidence). Projected increases in direct flood damages are higher by 1.4 to 2 times at 2°C and 2.5 to 3.9 times at 3°C

    Global warming of 4°C and above is projected to lead to far-reaching impacts on natural and human systems (high confidence). Beyond 4°C of warming, projected impacts on natural systems include local extinction of ~50% of tropical marine species (medium confidence) and biome shifts across 35% of global land area (medium confidence). At this level of warming, approximately 10% of the global land area is projected to face both increasing high and decreasing low extreme streamflow, affecting, without additional adaptation, over 2.1 billion people (medium confidence) and about 4 billion people are projected to experience water scarcity (medium confidence). At 4°C of warming, the global burned area is projected to increase by 50 to 70% and the fire frequency by ~30% compared to today

    However, if you really want to get into it, you can read the Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Full Report. It has a lot more details about the effects of climate change on all parts of the world, but it’s also a 3,000 page pdf.