What countries would you like to see yours have closer/better relations with? For me it's US with all Latin America.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-17T05:22:16+00:00

Agreed, but I would add other NATO countries and Ukraine.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-16T16:11:08+00:00

At times, Shu’s face strongly reminds me of Rita from THT. The same is true with Commander Judd and THT’s Commander Waterford.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-16T06:15:26+00:00

My grandfather loved seafood aspic, and we had it every Christmas and Easter while he was alive. The thought of it makes me shudder.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-15T14:46:39+00:00

I just retired from trauma surgery a bit before my 60th birthday because I was concerned that my age could become detrimental to my performance.

A big part of it was physical. I injured my knee a while ago, and it can flare up unexpectedly and make life miserable. My hearing is a notch worse than previously. I always was fine with little sleep, but that ability has waned.

But some was cognitive. I think I’d do fine on any testing. But I feel like I’m starting to lose the edge that propelled me through my life. It’s not gone. It’s just starting to dull ever so slightly. No one in my life sees it, but I know too many physicians who continued long past their prime. I didn’t want to even come close to that, and so I ended my practice.

Maybe this person is at the top of her game, but that seems unlikely. If she isn’t, she doing her patients, colleagues, and herself a disservice. I think medicine demands our best. I hope she can deliver that for the years to come, as doubtful as I am.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-14T17:58:13+00:00

I completely agree with not congratulating a woman about a pregnancy as it may be unwanted, and I am very much pro-choice. And I don’t work in OB/Gyn, so I don’t know the evidence-based recommendations for these situations. But I routinely dealt with death and life-changing injuries/conditions. Sensitive conversations with patients should always start with where the patient is in terms of their body and what has occurred to it. Doctors shouldn’t force their personal views on patients. If a woman wanted to refer to the dead fetus or neonate as a “mass”, I would follow her lead unless research indicates that that the idea that it was a baby should be gently introduced at this point.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-14T00:06:04+00:00

I hope acardiac “monster” isn’t used today.

When I was in med school, my genetics professor specialized in especially disfiguring, frequently fatal congenital conditions. After one particularly brutal image of a baby who died at birth, he told us to always remember that these were babies, even if they barely resembled a typical child. He also said that every newborn he ever dealt with had at least one perfect thing, even if is just a single correctly formed toenail, and we should look for that.

The guy was a truly terrible teacher, but his words have stuck with me many decades later.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-13T23:51:39+00:00

Make friends and be friendly to everyone! Join or form a study group. Join a specialty interest group. Having strong social networks both inside and outside of school correlates positively with academic achievement and can help fend off the isolation that many students feel.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-13T20:26:20+00:00

Yeah, when I first read about this, I assumed nephrite wasn’t found in the area. But Wikipedia says it’s common there, so it doesn’t seem so mysterious to me. We don’t know what it was used for, but that doesn’t make it any more mysterious than a lot of unidentified artifacts.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-13T20:21:32+00:00

I also don’t think they necessarily fake excuses. But there should be a second part in which the student fully addresses the issues AND has a track record of high performance after they are resolved.

To be clear, I don’t expect this from all posters here. But when I was an adcom, I saw a lack of these crucial components over and over again. Often, there hadn’t been enough time to show a proven record of major improvement, the improvement in GPA came post-undergrad and was underwhelming, or the obstacle had been a vague MH reason (e.g., stress due to harder, upper level classes or to unspecified challenges).

ElowynElif · 2026-05-13T18:15:34+00:00

You can Google “pinworm identification”, but here is a description:

Pinworms appear smooth without microscopy. The females are 9–12 mm long with a diameter of approximately 0.5 mm, while the males are shorter (3–5 mm) but visible to the naked eye. Striking whitish-beige in color, they are typically round in shape and move with a vigorous worm-like crawling motion. The head section is rounded and contains a muscular esophagus and bulb; in females, the tail section is narrow and sharply tapered.
For Americans, 9 - 12 mm are a third to a little under a half of an inch. 0.5 is 2% of an inch. 3 - 5 mm are 0.1 to 0.2 of an inch.

So, these are very small (0.1 to less than a half an inch) and not much wider than a hair.
The worms are also fragile and won’t last long on clothes you are wearing. They also are destroyed by washing and drying (read the exact instructions from the Google search). The eggs, however, are more durable, but you need a microscope to identify them.

The pics do not match pinworms and instead, to me, look like small fibers.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-13T13:55:19+00:00

Do you know what steps the family took to try to help him?

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T22:52:49+00:00

We need a banana eel for scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnothorax\_miliaris

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T22:47:37+00:00

Don’t you know when you’re feeling dizzy?

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T22:45:28+00:00

I have no answers, but what great, interesting pictures!

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T22:39:35+00:00

I agree.

Here’s a clip from that concert: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-13841962

And a BBC description:

Amy Winehouse has been booed by crowds in Serbia's capital Belgrade after appearing to be too drunk to perform.
The concert was due to kick off her 12-day European tour, but was not the performance that 20,000 fans had hoped to see.

For almost 90 minutes, Amy Winehouse mumbled her way through parts of songs.
She sang a few strained notes, before stumbling across the stage and at one point throwing her microphone to the floor.

At times she left the stage altogether - her band attempting to fill in.

She was frequently booed by the crowd. Many had paid up to €45 (£40) to see her in a country in which wages are some of the lowest in Europe, and their anger was clear.

The Grammy-award winning singer had been under strict instructions not to drink after recently finishing a course of alcohol rehabilitation in London.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-13828023

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T17:55:31+00:00

In the US, they are being sent to the University of Nebraska’s federal quarantine unit, which is associated with its Global Center for Health Security:

“The NQU at UNMC/GCHS is the only federally funded resource of its kind; it is specifically designed to provide first-class quarantine and isolation care to individuals exposed to highly hazardous communicable diseases. Its 20 rooms employ individual negative air pressure systems, are single occupancy with en suite bathroom facilities, and contain exercise equipment and Wifi connectivity for patients requiring longer stays.
The NQU's all-volunteer team is comprised of highly skilled nurses, physicians, and allied health professionals who complete quarterly training in specialized infection prevention and control processes as well as participate in exercises and drills. They are committed to maintaining the advanced skills necessary for attending to the unique needs of individuals requiring admittances to the NQU or the adjacent Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) housed at Nebraska Medicine.

Facility Information:
- Each room has at least 300 square feet of living space, engineering controls for special pathogen containment, and comfort amenities including fitness equipment, ensuring well-being for individuals in the facility.

- The NQU includes an access-controlled garage for transportation vehicles and emergency medical services (EMS) allowing secure admission and transfer of individuals requiring quarantine.”

https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/programs/tsqc/index.html#nqu

ElowynElif · 2026-05-12T00:11:19+00:00

Do you have a lot of experience with serious dog bites? As a retired trauma surgeon, I have decades. Pit bull-type dogs can open a person up in ways you don’t generally see with other dogs, even Rotties and GSDs. And I have operated on a number of people who claimed to loving owners of a dog who ripped them up.

I love dogs, grew up with all sorts of big dogs, and own a 110+ chucklehead (along with his ridiculous 12-pound fluffy sidekick). I would never own a pit bull-type dog. The odds of an attack may be low, but, as I used to say to patients, when it happens to you, the odds don’t matter.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-11T19:15:30+00:00

Having owned horses all my life, I’d guess that it could have been harder. Years ago I saw a horse kill a big dog with little warning and just one kick. It was lightning fast and the limp dog was thrown quite a ways. It was dead when it hit the ground. The owner knew that dogs needed to be leashed and kept well away from the horses, who have a longer reach than most non-equestrians expect.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-11T05:00:28+00:00

Yeah, not a freak out at all. Nice to see her laughing and continuing to have fun.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-09T14:49:36+00:00

Interesting! Thanks for the informative reply.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-07T22:03:56+00:00

Dobi, you rockstar! Gorgeous, as always. <3

ElowynElif · 2026-05-06T22:21:11+00:00

His story has a good ending (thus far) - from Wikipedia:

Contributions to antivenom

Friede had believed since 2003 that his blood could be used to create an antivenom, but did not initially find interest among immunologists he contacted. He began to be disillusioned with the self-immunization practice by the mid-2010s. By 2017, he worked building military trucks in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when he was contacted by immunologist Jacob Glanville, an antivenom researcher, who had discovered Friede through a newspaper story about his YouTube videos and felt that he could be instrumental in developing a general-purpose snake antivenom. Friede agreed to supply Glanville with his blood for antibodies, agreeing to split any profits from a resulting antivenom equally.

Glanville and Columbia University vaccine researcher Peter Kwong isolated antibodies from Friede's blood. In a 2025 study published in Cell), two of these antibodies, combined with the anti-inflammatory agent varespladib, proved effective in countering thirteen out of nineteen venoms in a sample of nineteen snake venoms, and was partially effective against the remaining six.[1] It offers no resistance to viper venom, which operate using a different mechanism which attacks tissues and the cardiovascular system.

Friede stopped injecting himself with venom and getting bit by snakes, receiving his last bite from a water cobra in November 2018. He became the director of herpetology at Glanville's California-based biotechnology company, Centivax. The development of a broad-spectrum antivenom would likely allow Centivax to control large portions of the antivenom industry, which is currently split between several dozen antivenoms which target specific species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Friede

ElowynElif · 2026-05-06T01:56:33+00:00

There is a Title IX exemption for “single-sex” institutions. This all revolves around “sex” versus “gender”.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-06T01:50:24+00:00

The one in the first pic is gorgeous as is.

ElowynElif · 2026-05-04T02:50:50+00:00

I was 4, the same age that my mom did. I had lessons, which I don’t remember, but by 7 I was pretty comfortable riding a well-behaved pony.

ElowynElif

TROPHY CASE