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Chronotherapy is the idea that time of day matters for things like taking drugs or getting vaccinations, and chronoimmunology is a related field for how your immune system varies in effectiveness over the course of the day. I've been wanting to write about this since there's definitely a best time of day to take drugs, get vaccines, and do social activities without getting sick... but unfortunately I don't really know what that time is.
Some studies say your immune system is most primed to prevent infection right as you wake up, and other say mid-day. Of course half the studies are in mice. Maybe it depends on the disease and the chronotype? See this review.
One study says that vaccines work better in the morning (for older patients). Another says there's no difference. Maybe this has something to do with the particular vaccines, or maybe the populations (different circadian rhythms, more powerful circadian rhythms). Weirdly, our priors say vaccination should work best mid-day but most people don't even try that. See this review.
I find this all really interesting, and there's probably a practical takeaway, but I don't know what it is. I guess we can be pretty confident that you shouldn't get vaccines in the middle of the night.
Maybe someone can convince Elizabeth to look into this.
It always seemed weird to me that dying is frequently described as not particularly painful[1], when I'd expect it to be the only literal 10 on the pain scale[2], since dying ensures you have no further chances to pass your genes on.
Thinking about it more though, there's no reason for evolution to optimize that. If you think you're going to die, and the pain makes you do something about it so you don't die, then evolution should optimize to keep you alive. But in the case where you actually die it doesn't matter because (tautologically), if you succeeded you wouldn't die, so there's no selective pressure.
So,
Fear of death: Big
Pain from things that could cause death: Big
Pain from actual death: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
1Probably depends on the way of dying. There are situations where doing something in the last moment might change your fate. There are situations where you fate has already pretty much been determined minutes or months ago, and it's just about how fast your body collapses.
Seems very related to this post from the sequences on fitness of people of numerical ages correlating more with imagined emotional anguish resulting from such a death (at that age) than with experienced anguish actually following such a death. Maybe this is a more common phenomenon observable in other contexts too, but this was the only example that came to my mind.
Evolution isn’t that precise. If it helps a little bit to make the seconds before death painful, it will be so.
I agree, I just think it's interesting that there's evolutionary pressure to make potentially dying extremely painful, but there's no evolutionary pressure to make actually dying painful, and all of the pain of actually dying is just collateral damage.
I'd like to learn more Spanish words but have trouble sitting down to actually do language lessons, so I recently set my Claude "personal preferences" to:
Try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation.
(This is the whole thing)
This has worked surprisingly well, and Claude usually either drops one word in Spanish with a translation midway through a response:
For your specific situation, I recommend a calibración (calibration) approach:
2. Accounting for concurrency: Ensure you're capturing all hilos (threads) involved in query execution, especially for parallel queries.
(From a conversation about benchmarking)
Or it ends the conversation with a fun fact:
¡Palabra en español! "Herramienta" - which means "tool" in Spanish, quite relevant to your search for tools to automate SSH known_hosts management.
La palabra española para hoy es "configurar" - which means "to configure" in English, fitting perfectly with our discussion about configurable thinking limits!
I don't know if this actually useful for learning, but it's fun and worked better than I expected.
My wife tried a similar prompt (although her preferences are much longer) and it made Claude sometimes respond entirely in Spanish, so this could probably be made more specific. If you run into that, maybe try "Response in English but try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation" would work better?
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