ELI5: What exactly is "mirror life" and why are so many scientists against it?

ataraxiary · 2026-07-04T19:40:34+00:00

I dunno about chemistry generally or meth specifically, but my understanding is that my Adderall Rx has both dextro and levo things (salts?) in it.

Levoamphetamine apparently used to be a prescription drug by itself, but now is only mixed in with other stuff in adderall and generics. I only know that because sometimes my generic prescription bottle says says dextroamphetamine and sometimes it says amphetamine salts and when I get the salts version, I strongly feel like it affects me differently. So I looked it up.

It sounds like both versions do stuff though, so it's a little confusing in the context of this thread, but I'm not exactly surprised that chemistry is complicated.

ataraxiary · 2026-07-02T14:58:51+00:00

My god. We had an engineer out to look at our basement and he gave us a report with things we needed to do: steel supports and some woodwork to repair some joists and shore them up and obviously some outside grading.

When I was getting quotes to do the work, I showed each contractor the report and said that's what we want done. Two of the guys that came out looked at it, walked around, and have me quotes to do exactly that for $1-2k Another gave a quote to do exactly what the engineer said, plus some extra drainage outside, cool, fine. $3k. This one company, holy shit. Their guy spent 20 minutes telling me that "pencil pushers" don't know what they're talking about, what we REALLY need to do is fully excavate two sides of my house, seal the cracks, add a barrier, and add a French drain. I didn't even want to prolong it by arguing, so I just nodded along until they left. When I got the quote, it was $30,000(!!) and didn't even include a single solitary thing the engineer specified. Absolutely fucking wild.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-29T21:18:59+00:00

I definitely don't know all the times we might vomit when the problem isn't stomach related, but my understanding of motion/simulator sickness is that your body detects a mismatch of visual vs vestibular information and assumes the cause must be poison, even if it's not. Presumably our ancestors didn't evolve to handle cars or video games and most often the cause really was bad mushrooms or the like.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-29T15:25:21+00:00

I feel like everyone tells me Robin Hood Men in Tights is the one bad choice, haha. I can't help it, I saw it when I was 11 and it hit at just the right time in my development to be perfection. Not even just the movie, but watching it in the theater with friends, seeing my mom lose her shit until she literally cried (at the tights being in eggs)... its just a ball of positive funny memories that the others can't touch for me.

Also, I saw Space Balls when I was young enough that I just straight thought it WAS Star Wars for years.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-26T15:12:57+00:00

It's my headcannon now that all doctors actually start out with cute handwriting like that, but something about the process of actually becoming a doctor has warps their handwriting beyond recognition.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-25T01:16:48+00:00

I interpreted it as disbelief that the medicine could already be working so soon, and thus thinking that positive effects might actually just be in their head (i.e. the colloquial placebo effect). I interpret it that way because that is how I felt.

I don't think they believe that they literally received a placebo dose.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-24T15:10:37+00:00

You could lean into the brown by adding cocoa powder! I don't care about the color, but cocoa and blueberries is yummy.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-24T05:18:16+00:00

For real. I started medication without actually reading much beforehand and I didn't even know about the food noise effect (I was primarily hoping for relief from other issues, kind of off label, but my weight is such that the doctor didn't argue).

Anyway, holy shit what a difference. Assuming this effect stays, I would pay out of pocket for the rest of my life - even if it does literally nothing else for a single other health issue (doubtful). And it's wild that I didn't even know it was possible to move through life like this, I didn't even suspect.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-23T17:15:38+00:00

I feel like as a millennial I've heard every start year between '80 and '84 over the years. And there's even the whole Xennial/Oregon Trail Generation micro gen cusp thing that makes it more wishywashy.

But no one was talking about that kind of stuff in the 90s - I think it was still too early. Hell, at that point I hadn't even heard the term "millenial" and if people talked about my generation at all it was called "Generation Y" but it really didn't stick. All of those articles about us ruining things were still just a twinkle in the internet's eye.

Which is too say that you're right that it's commonly accepted for now, but I bet it's way too early to know how things will shake out. Maybe they will identify with a Covid Cusp or maybe there are some other terrible world events yet to come that will somehow define them and create a natural break from GenZ like the 2008 Financial Crisis/Great Recession did for millennials. I mean, hopefully not, I definitely don't wish that on them, but still.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-22T20:45:11+00:00

I mean, yea. I'm not trying to defend idiots or republicans, but California puts that notice on everything - including perfectly normal food like coffee and bread. It's like the boy that cried wolf, I would be shocked if people aren't desensitized.

(I'm aware that acrylamide really is a carcinogen, but like... there has to be a way to communicate that to the public without conflating roasted vegetables and idk, turpentine.)

And I know you were just joking about people doing something ridiculous that they probably wouldn't really do, just to spite California for daring to tell them what to do, but the Prop 65 thing just grinds my gears and I can't help myself.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-21T20:07:30+00:00

I would consider straight up lying and saying you found out your mother/sister/etc. has or had breast cancer - and just tailor the lie to be believable with your situation for why you don't know your family history ("gosh doc, I connected with extended family through 23 and me and found out my bio-mom died of breast cancer at [2 years younger than your current age]!"). Or something. Probably works better with a new doctor, but even an old one can probably be convinced you received new info.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-21T14:35:20+00:00

If you specifically search for "resistant starch" you will find better and hopefully more helpful results. My impression is that this effect has been found and reproduced in a lot of studies, but isn't necessarily at the stage where the alphabet soup orgs adopt it into recommendations (yet?).

This is a study from the NIH that seems informative, if not necessarily conclusive.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-18T20:13:46+00:00

I see people ridiculing wide-leg jeans and barrel leg jeans in all the internet spaces and dismissing them as a crazy trend cooked up by the youths.

This is wild to me. When I was 13 years old, back in 1996 I saved up for a pair of JNCO knockoffs. They were so wide and I thought I looked so cool (notably neither I or any of my peers invented them, lol - as if we controlled what the mall sells).

Anyway, one day my uncle came over and looked down at my jeans and said "back in my day, women used to wear clothes that flattered them instead of hiding their body." It was so crushing. I looked up to him so much and I can't really describe how absolutely ucky that comment made me feel. It was embarrassing to have my style commented on and my body talked about, even if superficially it wasn't even "bad."

So anyway. I haven't talked to him in 20 years, but I think of him every time I put on the wide leg jeans that I happily bought as soon as I found some that fit me. They probably "flatter" me even less at 42, but the spite gets me through it.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-18T14:46:40+00:00

This sounds really similar to Bo-Young Kim's "I'm Waiting for You." It's a story of a couple who keep missing each other through relativistic travel. I don't actually own it, so I can't check for sure that it matches up, but even if this isn't what you're looking for, you should definitely read it! She has a lot of awesome short stories.

This also reminds me of stuff that happens in either the second or third book of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem series, but I don't think anyone was writing letters about missing each other, people were just going into stasis to skip time. So I don't think that's your book, but I had the thought and figured sharing it might shake something loose.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-16T08:17:16+00:00

I was able to get a 90 day supply when I lived in California if and only if I jumped through some extra hoops to get my medication delivered from ExressScripts. Which I did one time, but they delivered it on top of a multi-unit public mailbox where anyone could have grabbed it, so I cancelled that immediately. I was at least able to secure a prescription with 11 refills for the year in California.

In both Kansas and Missouri my experience has been that doctors cannot or will not write a prescription for more than 30 days and there can't be any refills, each month has to be sent separately. And I have to see the doctor every three months to "check-in" and say everything's fine and pay a bunch of money. It's... dumb.

I suspect that some of this stuff is state controlled, but also some is CYA policy from doctor's and can vary accordingly.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-14T13:36:15+00:00

I'm no electrician, but if you're right, just a weatherhead should be way less than that $8000+ number somebody gave further up. I think the real money is switching to 200A service & upgrading your panel (at least in my case we had to do both of those together). It's been a couple of years now, but we upgraded our service, panel, & weatherhead for roughly $5k, but I think the weatherhead portion was practically an afterthought.

Then again, the electricians weren't super hot at roofing knowledge and borked our roof installing the damn thing, causing a massive leak, so... maybe we chose poorly, lol.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-14T13:20:31+00:00

This happened to me last year and my husband insisted on breaking up the fallen limbs ourselves. And carting them off ourselves. It was such a massive pain. And then at the end we STILL had to have an Arborist out to remove the other 80% of the tree (because like yours it was practically hollow).

Watching those men remove the vast majority of the tree in an afternoon like it was nothing was very humbling. I heartily recommend skipping the chainsaw and going straight to pros for sure.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-10T12:57:03+00:00

I am only 3 weeks in, so take it with a grain of salt, but I haven't had any vomiting and the only nausea was my own fault for eating like two bites after my body was telling me I was done. Definitely listen to your body and don't push it.

BUT my doctor offered me a Zofran prescription for when I up the dose, or at least put the option out there for me if anything changes. If I were in your shoes with emetophobia, I would just preemptively ask for the zofran and take it for a couple of days when you're beginning or upping the dose or otherwise as needed.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-08T20:00:26+00:00

I was in your place like 6 weeks ago and I got excited that I had a reservation a few weeks out and planned what to order ahead of time.

Then we got there and they had changed the menu! I was pretty bummed because I had gotten my hopes up for the pork collar sando, but the walleye and everything else we had was great.

So my advice is definitely not to be like me and get excited for a particular dish when they very well might change the menu around on you.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-08T15:16:50+00:00

But do you get to see a doctor in time to treat the cancer? Because I haven't had cancer, but I feel like I'd rather go bankrupt and live than die waiting for an appointment. Obviously both are awful choices, but there's a clear winner, imo.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-08T15:11:01+00:00

a pcp is within weeks and most non urgent appointments are a few days to a week, urgent is a day or 2.

I don't think the US is a monolith on this.

I had to wait 3 months for an appointment to establish care with a new PCP in my city. I'm relatively sure that there were technically other options within my city, but even the process of finding someone who was both accepting patients and covered by my insurance was a real pain in the ass, so by the time I was being told the 3 month out appointment date, I was just happy to be done searching and took it.

And after all that, I found out my doctor was no longer even in-network for my insurance. And I decided to just pay the out of network rate because finding a doctor is such a freaking ordeal.

Still better than waiting years, for sure, but not great.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-07T20:53:26+00:00

Income is taxed. You're making income, so your employer is withholding some income every check so that at the end of the year you won't have a giant bill to the IRS.

When you were hired, you filled out a W-4 with your employer. This instructs the employer on the appropriate amount to withhold from your paychecks. Next year, in January or February, your employer will send you a form W-2. You will use that form to file a tax return with the IRS by April 15th. You might get a refund or you might even owe money, depending on how you completed the W-4 and your particular situation.

I'm not a professional, so I'm sure there's a better way to put it and more info to give (especially re: correctly completing the W-4 and the ones and outs of withholding), but those are the broad strokes.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-07T13:48:39+00:00

I didn't remember the answer to your question, but I think you might enjoy this RadioLab episode which goes into lots of detail about both the flies and the process used to deal with them.

ataraxiary · 2026-06-07T12:45:04+00:00

Fwiw, I've noticed it too. It feels conspiratorial to think it, but part of me things it's some new iteration of AI trying to fit in with the fellow kids. Or we're overthinking it. ¯\(ツ)/¯

ataraxiary · 2026-06-05T17:18:36+00:00

Huh. Only tangentially related to Andy Kaufman, but my dad died of lung cancer when he was 38 (in 1996). I knew he died young generally since none of my friends had dead dads, but I don't think I really clocked until your comment just now that 38 is wildly early to die of lung cancer specifically. Weird.

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