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Really annoying that lithium orotate became the standard way to deliver lithium, given that orotic acid is toxic and mutagenic :P

TL/DR, it affects the enzymes that regulate these processes.

Lithium is naturally present in the diet, but it varies by orders of magnitude depending on where you get your water and where your food was grown / grazed, with most people today on the lower end of the intake. Mineral spring waters in particular tend to be much richer in lithium than river / lake water, and also the fact that municipal water supplies' range limitations on the quantities of common minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc) will also tend to reduce lithium, could be argued that, on average, the average person in the past might have consumed more. But it still would be quite varied on a regional basis.

Note that drinking lithiated water used to be a popular health trend. Indeed, 7-Up was originally called 7up Lithiated Lemon Soda (though the claim of being lithiated was actually a lie in their case, and they ultimately had to remove it!).

It always strikes me as weird that people would be shocked that a substance commonly prescribed to affect the brain... affects the brain.

Beyond increasing BDNF activity (which promotes neuron survival and new growth), one of the main therapeutic targets is Glycogen synthase kinase-3 beta, which controls a wide range of developmental parameters for neuronal development, including discouraging regeneration and promoting apoptosis, and is pro-inflammatory (CNS inflammation is itself associated with Alzheimers). Lithium reduces its activity, both with direct and indirect inhibition. While GSK-3B is essential to a degree, overactivity of GSK-3B is associated with a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Lithium also helps promote cleanup (misfolded proteins, degradation products, etc) via autophagy by reducing the activity of IMPase... at least at low doses. At high doses, it can cause the inverse effect, due to its GSK-3B and mTOR impacts. In general, though, it seems to typically be pro-autophagy.

There have been quite a few studies that do just that. Well, not "taking lithium", as in the medication, because typical psychiatric doses of lithium (hundreds of milligrams per day) are like 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than typical dietary doses. But dietary doses themselves vary by orders of magnitude (some European studies put consumption in some places in Europe as low as a couple micrograms per day, while in places in northern Chile some people consume ~10mg per day), because lithium is so widely varied from place to place. One study found for example that one Slovakian bottled water product had 10 milligrams per litre, while the mean European bottled water had less than a microgram per litre. In most places, peoples' dietary consumption is closer to the lower end than the upper end. And the studies strongly suggest that people who naturally consume the higher amounts of lithium have lower rates dementia (there's also positive, though weaker, evidence for lower rates of violent crime and suicide). In general, it seems to be neuroprotective.

It's been argued that we should probably be lithiating water, e.g. that there should be minimum and maximum standards for lithium in drinking water the same way that there are minimums and maximums for numerous other minerals, with a provisional recommended daily intake of 1mg per day based on the evidence. But given the huge backlash to fluoride in water, I can't even imagine how harsh the backlash to lithium would be, given that people associate it with being a psychiatric medication (even though that's at doses orders of magnitude higher). It's just not going to happen.

I personally take 1mg of lithium a day. Which is well within the normal dietary range (in some places in northern Chile people naturally consume ~10mg per day!). A common supplement form is lithium orotate, but it's a weird choice - it's chosen because it's covalently bonded into a molecule which is delivered into cells whole, to "make it more effective", but A) that's not how normal dietary lithium is delivered, and B) orotic acid isn't exactly healthy. Instead, I make my own (both concentrate and diluted solution). I start with lithium carbonate, and while it's not available in food grade (anywhere I've found), it's a very common compound available at high purity (>99,5%), with easy composition tests - crimson flame test, density tests (offset by a typically poor packing density), low solubility in water but high bubbling solubility in weak acids (with no precipitate), etc). Because it's poorly soluble & tastes like baking soda / mineral water, I also add citric acid to the solution, forming lithium citrate. Even if the impurities were pure lead, the amount would still be small when you're only taking 1mg a day. But actual impurities are mostly (A) water, (B) other lithium compounds (hydroxide, chloride, sulfate, etc etc), and (C) other similar mono- and divalent cations to lithium, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, plus some iron, alumium and silicon due to their ubiquity in nature and presence in processing.

Record player actions. Use randomly-selected other players' systems (from a pool of those who are playing on the same map) to verify those actions which you flag as suspicious during times when they are waiting for other players to join a match or similar.

We had several of them in Santa Cruz county, including a really huge one in Capitola, and a super tiny one in the inland side of the Beach Flats just off Ocean Street. I think there are still two there.

Large #9, two scoops of avo, on wheat. Just absolutely my favorite sandwich anywhere.

"which makes this disgusting to fiscal conservatives with a working brain."

No such though because austerity doesn't work.

The luddites wanted all workers to benefit from increases in productivity, the Republican party wants the opposite of that. So no.

"Physically handicapped players who need custom controllers to be able to play at all can get locked out simply because the manufacturers refuse to make the needed hardware."

It's generally pretty easy to connect your own controls to the official controller's PCB, Don't the people who make such controllers know how to do that?

There is no issue with latency in detection of cheating on the server side, unless you insist on stopping it before it happens. That would be nice as it would prevent cheating, but it is not necessary. As long as you are requiring accounts, then it's good enough to detect it after it happens and ban those accounts. If cheaters had to buy another copy after every time they cheated, it would drive them out of the game.

Check out the moderation and you can lose it again :)

I think you have to include Office in the list of things they used to do "right" or at least in a way that supported their business. Notably Excel, which used to be the absolutely most usable spreadsheet that there was. IMO Word peaked with Mac version 5.1, but it used to be pretty good too. Both are now more difficult to use than LibreOffice, and also have more stupid bugs. The one that keeps irritating me with Word lately is saving a document which ends in a list. If and only if you leave the cursor on the last character of a document like that, it will add another (blank) list item AND another paragraph after it when you save. Not sure if this only happens on a quit save or not, I haven't bothered to find out, but either way it's fucking trash.

Anyway, ahem, the point is that Windows and Office had synergy. TBF though, some of that was skullduggery. Specifically, Microsoft was caught using internal functions for Office apps, where the public (published, documented) functions were literally the same functions but with a delay loop. If they had been the same function but with a semaphore they might have had a valid argument about being more familiar with their internals, but that was just obvious anticompetitive fuckery.

It's clearly not due to the content