Apropos of nothing.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/01.res.50.3.325

My point was exactly the hope to indicate how much knowledge there exists. That's the truly wild thing. Or yeah, how unread most of it lays.

Lightly edited from Wikipedia:

"Menthol's [agonism of] the cold-sensitive Transient Receptor Potential cation channel subfamily M (melastatin) member 8 or TRPM8 receptors is responsible for the well-known cooling sensation it provokes.

Menthol's analgesic properties are mediated through a selective activation of κ-opioid receptors. Menthol blocks calcium channels and voltage-sensitive sodium channels, reducing neural activity that may stimulate muscles.

Some studies show that menthol acts as a GABAᴀ receptor positive allosteric modulator and increases GABAergic transmission in PAG neurons."

…and! Check this out:

"Menthol has anesthetic properties similar to though less potent than propofol, interacting with the same sites on the GABAᴀ receptor."

Propofol. PROPOFOL. The -ol in propofol is the -ol in menthol, haha.

"Menthol may also enhance the activity of glycine receptors and negatively modulate 5-HT3 receptors and nAChRs."

Aaaaand:

"Menthol also lowers blood pressure and antagonizes vasoconstriction through TRPM8 activation."

And wont accept clear straightforward plain language explanation of what others want, because in their heads they should not.

I find it extremely interesting that GLP-1 agonists and GLP-1 receptors are highly pulmonary.

(There seems to be a persistent correlation between detailed pulmonary mechanisms, biology, responses… and neuroinflammation. Which does make sense when we consider the metabolic demands of the brain, which can be highly localized and sensitive to fine variances in supporting system capacity.)

My from-the hip take – from the hip!, no judging pls; It's a hunch, working to falsify it – is that… everything that makes humans aggressive to someone. Every feature someone can present that increases the odds of aggression… is a heuristic for neuroinflammation.

It's a lot of things, but neuroinflammation is a pretty consistent good match as core heuristic.

As in: GLP-1 agonists do reduce neuroinflammation. And then the hunch: This generally and ubiquitously reduces the aggression-induced features thereof.

(This take is somewhere between riffing on concepts and a surprisingly earnest and mechanistic theoretical perspective. Started as jokey banter but it's kinda hard to unsee it. not sure where else to place it, haha.)

(I'm kidding when I say this, and it's also concretely true.)

Been working on realtime DSP and ad-hoc A/V integration and sync.

Audio DACs are a solved problem. Pristine D/A conversion is a ubiquitous low-cost commodity. It's fun to buy a bunch of cheap "chi-fi" DACs – quality is excellent – and ad-hoc merge them into one big audio interface and do per-channel DSP. Toss in some TPA3255 amplifiers. Bodge together a crossover and room correction monstrosity in Reaper or Logic. Run system audio through that. It's easy to get super arcane. My home stereo is frightening. The interesting part is thinking about how to get a human interface on top of it. How to get it to assemble and stay assembled and present human-comprehensible knobs – or not.

Also had an extended family health crisis. About 9 years non-stop of extremely unlikely convergences of life-threatening conditions. (My close family has dissolved due to trauma and stress. (It's okay.)) And I haven't been working a programming or computer-science job since 2020… but I have very serious and significant work experience in things that are… how to even put it. It's not immediately clear how to add the past few years to my resumé?

Did an invisible PhD in mitochondrial neuroimmunobiology at the School of Hard Knocks? Stint of off-piste biomedical engineering? Amateur placental biotechnologist? Independent researcher?, or just… faceplanted into some PDFs on Google Scholar and accidentally read some out-of-my-lane stuff and it turns out it's actionable. Results from molecular biology are actionable.

It is said that there's a 15 year gap before something reaches clinical practice. Between having in one hand some concrete scientific results. On how to treat something in the body. And on the other hand… to clinical practice. A 15 year gap.

What's that 15 year gap made out of?, and can we cross it earlier?

We can.

Trying to figure out how to get this into words, and what to do with it.

And then when I've got the realtime-DSP-ed-to-the-hilt home-computer workstation going, I'm going to work on Idris 2 because we need dependent types.

(The frequency is 42.3338481 nanohertz.)

(Law of headlines: No.)

For instance, Ginger and its pungent constituents non-competitively inhibit activation of human recombinant and native 5-HT3 receptors of enteric neurons, as they say. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nmo.12107

Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.

And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"

and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha

PC fan boxes are a quieter option too: https://itsairborne.com/pc-fan-corsi-rosenthal-guide-a611dab...

(Incidentally, PC fans can also be used to pull/push air through N95/FFP2 masks.)

Kenyan benga music from the early '80s or so. It's got every type of tape artifact. It's horrible, haha. There are even tracks where the tape head seems to be picking up the other side of the cassette in reverse.

It's not supposed to sound like that. Just a result of stewardship and rightsholders and incentives. Someone somewhere has a cassette tape and digitizes it. And uploads it to Spotify. Then it's forever.

(Frankly, I think it's gorgeous. The combination of the music and the recording is accidentally something really special. Laid-back but gently enthusiastic and warm 4/4 music, bright bur melancholy. Sounds like the Mega-Man 1 soundtrack played by a live band? And a really, really good band. And then it's all tragically messed up by the gears of history. Fluttering, swaying underwater. And… it's all so pretentious when I type it out… but it just… there's something about it. It's pretty great music for programming, haha.)

From the 2017, uh, molecular neuroimmunosociobiology survey paper Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models by Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo – https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056

(These are serious, credentialed people. The tl;dr is that "losing" is proinflammatory and subjugating others is antiinflammatory. In the brain. Which is behavior-modifying.)