the deep oesophagus of night
Clearly, the trick to a good workshop is to go in with unreasonably low expectations. As soon as I found out the story was salvageable, things were all right. Consensus was that I have the right stuff in the wrong order, which I can deal with.
According to this climatology plot, the weather around here should start improving soon. It might even be tolerable by the end of March. Ethan claims it's going to stay arctic until the beginning of May, but then Ethan has also warned us away from Altoids because of mad cow disease, so I don't really know what to say.
Here's an effusive Guardian piece rhapsodizing about the fusion experiments in New Mexico's Sandia Labs, where coincidentally most of my father's family works. (The labs, not the actual fusion reactor.) They use the phrase "oesophageal dark" and refer to Waiting for Godot without shame. (The article, not my family.)
Tell me history isn't a circle. I'd never heard of the Dayaks or the Madurese until a couple days ago, but these pictures are so familiar they're practically burned into my retinae. Since the Enlightenment we've had the idea that eventually we'd reach some sort of collective escape velocity, jolting us out of the cycle so this would never happen again. Right? We've been waiting for a while now.
Though they have just discovered a key pathway in tumor metastasis; it's regulated by chemokines, which help direct the traffic of blood cells. This is one of the first inroads anyone's made into how metastasis works, and theoretically if you could block the action of certain chemokines you might be able to halt metastasis, which is the part that kills most cancer patients. This is all theoretical and they're still in the working-with-cancerous-mice stage, but hey, hope.
