Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. I have no concrete plans to visit Vegas, but if I do, I plan to refresh my memory of Krista Diamond's list of "15 Unwritten Rules of Visiting Las Vegas." The below snippet from her intro should serve to establish her credentials in terms of knowledge and writing ability:

In 2015, I moved from the woods of Montana into an apartment directly behind a Las Vegas casino, as one does. I had been working in the national parks and wanted to live in the real world -- in retrospect, Las Vegas was an odd choice for that. Since then, I've learned a lot about how to navigate this strange and beautiful city. I know its secrets and myriad hustles. My decade-long Vegas staycation has taught me the rules for a good Vegas vacation. With the right mix of planning and spontaneity and a little insider information, you can not only have a good time in Las Vegas, but the best time.

It's a fun and thorough piece: The points run the gamut from the mandatory (stay hydrated), through the expected (respect the tipping culture), to the optional (consider enjoying natural wonders). I'm not the type to be concerned with knowing a good marijuana dispensary from a bad one, but that's in there, too.

2. My planner alerted me to a small, but potentially important preparation for hurricane season: Verify thaw detector in freezer.

But there was a problem: We lost power for hours last season when Francine passed us closely to the west. The coin in the thaw detector went nowhere, because the ice it was sitting on floated, meaning the thaw detector was worthless. I removed it from the freezer ahead of the ice crystal check I obviously had to do en route to throwing out about half of the food.

Luckily, we were home, rather than returning from an evacuation after the power came back on and everything refroze.

Image by the author.

Also luckily, I found a way to make a better thaw detector. This one is smaller and has a lid, both obvious advantages, but testing it revealed that it addresses the issue I noted above: Because it's small, the weight of the coin will be enough to cause it to at least drop to the side as the ice rolls beneath it if there is a thaw.

Now, if we're away during a similar event, we really will know if the freezer thawed.

3. Fellow geography nerds take note: There may soon be an even smaller sovereign state than Vatican City:

If the prime minister's plan is approved by Albania's parliament and the country's constitution is duly amended, the Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order will comprise no more than 27 acres (0.11 km2, 0.04 sq mi, or 20 football fields). That's just one-quarter the size of the Vatican, meaning the Bektashi state will be not only the world's newest country but also its smallest.

As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened (or been nixed) yet, but the latest news I can find is from very late last year.

4. Derek Lowe provides an update on some groundbreaking work on autoimmune diseases:

... The patients, who had disease so severe that it was destroying their lives, for which no other therapies were available, and whose lupus was of a type that no clinician had ever seen improve on its own ... appear to have been cured. They are in drug-free remission, and no one until now has ever seen anything like it.

That result, which was the culmination of years of attempts by researchers around the world to accomplish such a B-cell reset, attracted a tremendous amount of attention in the immunology field, as well it should have. Now this overview at Nature reports that there are at least 85 therapies involved in about 380 clinical trials following up on this idea (!) ...

Among the diseases being targeted is multiple sclerosis, which is fantastic news.

Lowe had reported some time ago that the cause of that disease may have been found, making its eventual eradication a possibility. I am glad in the meantime that stopping MS in its tracks might also be on the table.

-- CAV