iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 4h

Me: It's not a competition Them:

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 10h

Can’t wait for your submission

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 06/10/2026

No blinding is needed because the fetus can’t see very well, you demonstrated that yourself

Vague white blob against a black background. This is a figure from “ Methodological problems in a study of fetal visual perception” by, among other people, Nick Brown

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

Researcher insisting that attributing Y to X is not meant to be a causal statement:

Elizabeth Holmes: why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

This is very good. “Over 2.2 million cancer deaths can be attributed to Costco; that’s more than 20% of all cancer deaths between 2000 and 2018.”

Ridiculous things you can “prove” caused cancer mortality

Everything causes cancer. Sounds cliché; maybe those California warning tags were right all along. But thanks to the methodology created by Alwadi et al., we can now prove that anything and everything causes cancer. Oh, sorry, that is too strong of an assertion. To use the authors’ words, since they have claimed their papers don’t prove causality, we can create an association between any physical landmark and cancer and, from that association, figure out how much cancer is attributable to that thing. Which is totally not the same as saying “that thing causes cancer.”

For instance, living near a private four-year university is associated with a 15-fold increase in cancer mortality when compared

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

It took a second to find the pictures, but this happened in March 2023.

Ice cream monsters made from purple ice cream with vanilla ice cream hair, oreo mouths and sugar eyes

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

We made cupcakes. The astute observer may be able to determine which were decorated by the kids.

12 cream covered cupcakes, 8 of which are decorated in a subtle manner if at all

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

Hope the children of the single mother were happy they received for Christmas nothing but a morally uncorrupted mother.

Around the time the British Columbia law was being debated, I had a conversation with an executive of the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, who had been talking to BC legislators. One legislator said to her that he could be convinced to vote against a ban on paying donors, if he could be sure (and here I quote her from memory) that a donor “wouldn’t be some single mom on public assistance who was donating only so that she could buy Christmas presents for her kids.” His concern seemed to be that paid donors wouldn’t be only college students needing beer money, but people with real monetary needs, and that it would be exploiting them to give them this particular opportunity to fulfill those needs.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/10/2026

TIL the American Red Cross was so serious about the “only voluntary blood donations” thing, they didn’t allow patients who had to frequently have their blood removed for medical reasons to donate it. Because those patients profited from having their blood removed.

The 2022 shortage caused the Red Cross, which only accepts voluntary blood donations, to revise one of its more stringent rules about what constitutes a “voluntary” donation and what does not. There is a genetic disease called hemochromatosis, which causes iron to accumulate in the liver. The condition is treated by frequently drawing blood from these patients, since the red blood cells are rich in iron, and so drawing blood causes their bodies to put iron into regenerating red blood cells rather than concentrating it in the liver. Prior to 2022 the Red Cross didn’t allow these patients to donate blood, because it decided they weren’t voluntary donors because they were receiving a benefit from having their blood drawn. So the blood regularly drawn from these patients was simply discarded. However, starting in August 2022 the Red Cross relaxed this policy and allowed patients with hereditary hemochromatosis to donate blood rather than discard it.23 But the

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 03/10/2026

Reposting this for the title alone, although I’m sure the rest of the paper is also good!

A beta way: A tutorial on Bayesian beta regression for psychological research

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 01/10/2026

Hey, your grad student just reached out to me — they are wondering:

Glamour.com style section:
I dress better than my boss. Is this a problem? By Morgan Sullivan

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 30/09/2026

Frag mich die ganze Zeit was für Modelle die Leute nutzen oder wieviel deranged context die haben, dass dabei sowas rauskommt.

Kurz gesagt: Es gibt keine belegten gesundheitlichen Vorteile vom Trinken des eigenen Urins. Die Praxis (Urophagie oder „Urintherapie") hält sich hartnäckig, wissenschaftlich trägt sie nicht.

Was Urin ist: Er besteht zu etwa 95 % aus Wasser, der Rest sind Abfallstoffe, die der Körper gezielt loswerden will: Harnstoff, Kreatinin, Harnsäure und überschüssige Salze (u. a. Natrium und Kalium). Nährstoffe oder Wirkstoffe in relevanter Menge sind nicht drin.

Die üblichen Behauptungen und der Stand der Evidenz:

Heilung von Krebs, Allergien, Akne, Infektionen: Es gibt keine kontrollierten Studien, die das belegen. Berichte stammen fast ausschließlich aus Einzelfällen und Anekdoten.
„Entgiftung" oder Stärkung des Immunsystems: Der Körper scheidet Urin aus, weil er die Stoffe nicht braucht. Sie wieder aufzunehmen entgiftet nichts. Niere und Leber übernehmen diese Aufgabe bereits.
Rehydrierung im Notfall (z. B. Survival): Das funktioniert nicht. Der Salz- und Harnstoffgehalt belastet den Wasserhaushalt zusätzlich, man dehydriert eher schneller. Das wird auch in der Survival-Medizin ausdrücklich abgeraten.
Wirkstoffe wie Harnstoff in Kosmetik oder Medizin: Harnstoff wird äußerlich in Hautcremes verwendet, das ist aber etwas ganz anderes als die Einnahme über den Mund.

Mögliche Risiken:

Belastung der Nieren durch erneute Aufnahme von Salzen und Abfallstoffen
Verstärkte Dehydrierung bei hohem Salzgehalt
Bakterien und Keime, besonders bei Harnwegsinfekten oder wenn der Urin nicht frisch ist
Wenn jemand Medikamente nimmt, werden deren Abbauprodukte mit dem Urin ausgeschieden und wieder aufgenommen, was Dosierung und Wirkung unvorhersehbar macht

Wenn dich ein konkretes Anliegen dazu bringt (etwa Hautprobleme, Erschöpfung oder eine bestimmte Erkrankung), kann ich gern schauen, was dafür tatsächlich belegt ist. Und bei anhaltenden Beschwerden lohnt sich der Gang zu einer Ärztin oder einem Arzt.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/09/2026

“Chocolate tree climber” surely sounds nicer than “Marañón poison frog”

Zoo sign for the Marañón poison frog (Excidobates mysteriosus), an endangered chocolate-brown frog with cream spots from Peru's Cordillera del Condor. The sign covers its diet (ants, termites), treetop bromeliad habitat, and how males carry tadpoles to water in bromeliads.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/09/2026

I have to concede that the new underwater tunnel at Zoo Leipzig is very cool.

Seal swimming over an underwater tunnel segment

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/09/2026

This is from Frank Trentmann’s Empire of things which turns out to be a lot more comprehensive than I anticipated.

Cover of Frank Trentmann’s “Empire of Things”

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/09/2026

Conceptions of leisure time sure do have changed 👀

First, in the 1920s it was still natural to include housework and needlework as ‘free time’; indeed, a quarter of the young women listed these as their favourite activity. By 2000, such tasks had been demoted to ‘unpaid work’. Second, the number of leisure activities has grown exponentially. The Westphalian working women either went swimming or did no sport at all. Their great-grand-daughters could choose football, volleyball, tennis, judo and indoor skiing. The greater level of activity, thirdly, is related to greater mobility. Other than the occasional walk, leisure in the 1920s had a fixed residence, at home or in the hostel.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/09/2026

They also do weight divided by height to quantify chonkiness. No idea what Größe für Adipositas is supposed to do; that’s not a thing for babies afaik

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/09/2026

It would be offensive *not* to call Emmy chubby. She’s significantly chubby.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/09/2026

Wake up babe, new Gettier problem just dropped en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier...

Gettier attempts to illustrate by means of two counterexamples that there are cases where individuals can have a justified true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, turn out to be false.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/09/2026

Deepfrozen Apfelküchle? Air fryer, straight away.

A pack of deepfrozen South German apple pancakes

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 23/09/2026

Me ever since I discovered our electric grill has an air fryer function:

Parcs and Recreations "right to jail" meme.
Fish sticks? Right to air fryer.
Vegetables...right to air fryer, right away.
Tofu? Air fryer.
Donuts? Believe it or not, air fryer.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 23/09/2026

I helped my vanilla ice cream flavored protein powder realize its true nature by turning it into vanilla ice cream.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 23/09/2026

Dressing the baby like a normal person

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 23/09/2026

Btw how does it feel to have your greatest hit published in psychology 🙊

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 20/09/2026

I actually have this Escher themed crafting book that contains multiple of them (plus the Platonic solids)

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 20/09/2026

Today I learned there are only two known polyhedra in which each face shares an edge with every other face. One of them being the timeless beauty of the tetrahedron and the other one being whatever the heck this is

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 20/09/2026

It’s never too early to introduce Platonic solids.

Chonky baby with tongue sticking out looking at a dodecahedron covered in an Escher pattern of shells and starfish

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 19/09/2026

Following this recommendation, we just finished @barbaratruelove.bsky.social’s “Of Monsters and Mainframes.” This was a fun read, think monsters on a spaceship, written from the perspective of the ship’s autopilot. Can recommend!