Sibylla Bostoniensis

Many years ago, I was sitting on the steps of the MIT Student Center, eating my Tosci's ice cream after SCA dance practice, when a young philosophy major I was mentoring ran up to me and exclaimed, "I just realized!

A long-time reader asked if I have any wisdom to share about getting one's first set of hearing aids, and I don't.

In case you missed it: I have a poll up about experiences with medical care.

The algorithm brought this to my attention, and I thought it was very good and learned things.

2026 Aug 6: npj Vaccines [peer-reviewed scientific journal]: "A single-dose amber codon carrying live attenuated vaccine elicits pan-sarbecovirus immunity and blocks SARS-CoV-2 transmission" by Nigeer Te, Jiangchuan Li, Alex Wing Hong Chin, et al.

This is a poll about experiences with health care and receiving medical treatment.

Here at Casa Sibyllea, we're using a few online tools to navigate The Smog.

This is a rumor, but a pretty good one run in the Washington Post: 2026 Jul 16 5:06 pm EDT: WaPo: "Lettuce supplier identified as potential source of cyclosporiasis outbreak": The CDC has linked the Taylor Farms produce supplied to Taco Bell to the outbre…

Meteorology Youtuber Ryan Hall Yall has just issued a severe weather warning alert that is not at all reflected in the weather forecasts from either NOAA or the textual forecast from the Canadian government, but which does match what is in Weather.com's f…

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1901776.html [Previously: ALERT: Cyclosporiasis Outbreak Nationwide] There's a subtle fault I've noticed about how a lot of people are thinking about Cyclospora, the organism causing the outbreak of cyclospor…

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1901288.html Heads up, Americans!

The CT scan found my body has "small accessory spleens", which, speaking as a medievalist: oh of course my body turns out to have little ADUs for melancholia.

So, unfortunately, it dawned on me only about ten hours after getting home from the ED (i.e. after I had slept) that the condition my symptoms most match is a thoracic aortic aneurysm, and in the ED I had been asked none of the relevant diagnostic or risk…

Early Monday morning I went to the emergency department with mild but inexplicable and persistent chest pain and shortness of breath to find out if I was having a heart attack.

(h/t conuly) This longform article is framed as being a "ha ha isn't it wacky NASA hired a lingerie company for the Apollo missions".

This is legitimately one of the most alarming things I've heard about AI.

Polka-dotted extraterrestrials with prehensile toes and monster groove have come to save humankind with virtuoso looped microtonal rock in compound time signatures.

Boston locals!

The YouTube algorithm pseudorandomly served me this, thereby answering the question I'd had on a distant back burner forever, "Hey, didn't I hear something about colored cotton cultivars once upon a time?

[requires both audio and video] Jonasquin on YT (previously) has written a wholly original motet in the 16th century style after Desprez upon the cantus firmus "Seven Nations Army", for the words of Psalm 10, verses 2, 3, 7-11.

I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why: 2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat.

The previously expected ICE enforcement surge never materialized.

Just hit play.

Debate is raging on BSky if this is deliberate wit or accidental idiocy.

I have been kicking around a post idea for something like a year or a year and a half, but I've been torn between wanting to write it as a post (and tell you things) and wanting to ask for solutions.