That's exactly wrong and terrible advice if any diabetic believes it. Diabetic retinopathy is best treated (and often urgently *needs* treatment to prevent permanent damage) *before* the patient notices symptoms.( I am an ophthalmologist who specialises in exactly this field.)

Nonsense. Diabetic retinopathy is very treatable. (It's actually probably the most valuable thing I myself do during my working week.)
Certainly it doesn't always work in every case. But that's true of any treatment you care to mention.
Panretinal photocoagulation (with lasers) has saved the sight of hundreds of thousands of people. Over the past few years, on top of this, there have been major advances using antiVEGF treatments like Lucentis/ranibizumab.
It is *eminently* worthwhile for diabetics to be screened for eye disease. The problem is not that we can't treat it - it's that treatment is best done *before* the patient notices any problem. Hence, screening.

Priapism? Well, I suppose it makes you go blind ...
The cornea does not have a "reticulum." Either.

Incidentally nobody sent *me* this famous email. What's the deal? Why aren't I on this mailing list? Was it something I said?
Perhaps I only imagine I work for the NHS ...

What is this "cataract medication" of which you speak?
Last I heard, the only thing for cataracts was surgery. I'm an eye surgeon. That's what I'm going to be doing tomorrow morning. I hope. The organisation failed to replace our microsurgical instruments to cut costs (you need several sets to run an operating list) and last week I had to cancel half the operations.

The thing about not doing cataract operations if the other eye could still see well has never been NHS policy. It *has* been implemented by individual health boards because they had no bloody money to pay for it because our wonderful government thinks that we should have a system like you enlightened Americans where the insurance companies in the middel can rip off both the sick and the health workers and make big donations to the ruling party from their pickings. It is deliberately starving the NHS of funding in order to drive people into private healthcare.

This has nothing, absolutely nothing, with whether government knows better than ordinary people. In fact, it's driven by government ideologues who want to destroy health care provision for everyone too poor to support them with big fat donations. I believe you have such creatures in the USA too?

That doubtless explains why most Muslims are not Arabs, and many Arabs are not Muslims.

Exactly.
If you read the words "the gene for ..." relating to human beings in anything other than a medical context, you can be 95% certain that reading further is a waste of your time.
This reveals a basically magical, not scientific, idea of what "genes" are. Or a scammer.

Even in medical contexts, there is a vast gap between identifying a genetic variation associated with a disease and figuring out what the gene actually does and how the disease actually arises. It's the *beginning* of the real research.

A lot of this crap works along the lines of "Ooh, people with abnormalities in this gene can't speak" from which is deduced "Eureka! we've found the gene for language!"

The dead giveaway on Theranos is the splurging of publicity in mass mainstream media without anything at all published in relevant peer-reviewed specialist journals.

As soon as anyone asks why they would do that, the answer is obvious. You'd think.

I'm perfectly happy with the old version of Linux, with the sex robots. You can always uninstall them if you need the disc space.

There is, as a matter of fact, a right answer to this question, if you do interpret it in the usual way with "or" as XOR, at least when the bullet is high-velocity.

The answer is "chest."

The key is "high velocity." This means that if the bullet is stopped by your body, the kinetic energy will cause massive tissue necrosis. Head or guts, you're just dead. Limb, you'll lose it if you live.

Chest, if it goes through heart or aorta, you're dead. But most of the space is lung, and the bullet will go straight through you, and with luck and prompt care you may survive pretty much intact.

I was told this by a South African trauma surgeon with great experience in this very area, in the context of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.

Oh, for modpoints ...

Yes and no

Kenji Miyazawa, a very well known Japanese author of mainly children's stories, was very interested in Esperanto. The anime version of his "Midnight on the Galactic Railroad" has Esperanto in all the written materials you see in honour of this.

This was in the early part of the twentieth century, when there was a lot more interest in Esperanto worldwide. It probably is the case that there was at any rate more interest in it in Japan than you might have expected.

A study on anonymous hiring practices in France showed that anonymization resulted in fewer minority candidates getting hired. Their explanation is essentially that the companies who care enough about diversity to participate in this sort of study are already subtly biased in favor of minority candidates, and anonymization put a stop to it. Considering the amount of focus big tech companies are putting on diversity, there's a fair chance the same thing is happening here too.

(They spoke Aramaic long before they became Christian, of course.)

The people in question call themselves Assyrians at the present day; there are some Akkadian words preserved in their Aramaic language even now, although Akkadian itself probably died out in the earlier part of the first millennium BC.

The name "Syriac" is itself from a worn-down version of the same name; it was once used pretty much as the equivalent of "Aramaic" but is now generallly used to describe only one particular version of Aramaic which was a major literary language of Western Asia in early Christian times, and is still used as a liturgical language by Nestorian Christians as far afield as India. The script is used to write several modern Aramaic languages spoken by Christians.

These ancient communities have suffered greatly in the Middle East wars of recent times, and a huge proportion have left as refugees.