I've been there, and in my case computer games were both the solution and the problem. In the short term they give you the endorphin boost you need to feel that you're living an interesting life, and hence stop you topping yourself, but over the medium to long term your original problem - that your life feels like a thankless, meaningless struggle - is still there and getting worse as you're avoiding your problems with all this displacement activity, not taking steps to solve them.
Self-medicating with the internet is no different than staying in bed all day, reading hundreds of books, drinking yourself to death or watching TV til your brains run out of your ears. It's what makes depression so destructive and prolonged - you get stuck in a loop of behaviour which just drags you further into loneliness and misery. And even if you know how this works you can't seem to stop yourself doing it...
Except Elvis's hips, D&D and video games aren't generally used to distract you while driving, and therefore don't represent a real risk to life and limb.
I'd be equally enraged at my friend being killed by someone eating a burger/ playing with the radio/ reading a map or texting while driving because a driver should know that these things are likely to distract them enough to make their driving dangerous, and if they are likely to be distracted they shouldn't be doing these things in a built-up area!
Maybe texting shouldn't be singled out any more than your other examples - people should try not to drive dangerously however that manifests itself - but don't try and pretend that this justifies trying to text while driving in busy areas. Actually, I think texting should be singled out. The main difference between texting and most of the things you mentioned is that texting (unless you're texting for directions, in which case it'd be safer to phone) isn't going to help you get to where you're going any quicker or more comfortably, and is therefore a completely unnecessary indulgence on your part, whereas "cd/radio/8 track/being lost/reading a old fashioned paper map/reading a GPS map" distractions at least serve a purpose on the trip. The point of the propaganda is to produce social stigma so it changes people's behaviour and they don't take unnecessary risks with the lives of other road users. In this case I'm all for it!
I'm looking forward to the day when driverless cars are designed to lock together to form "road trains" on the motorway - it would save a butt-load in petrol, be great for congestion and probably much safer than lots of single driverless cars once merging in and out of a train is made safe.
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't mean that everyone in the US has that attitude to drink driving; just that it's much more common than it is in the UK... In certain states of the federation.
I come from the UK and have relatives in America. The UK is much more like Norway than it is like the US. There is a huge social stigma associated with drink driving here - generally people don't do it. Okay, so we're allowed one drink before we drive, and many people have their one drink before moving on to soda; but in the US it seems like people are happy to get totally blasted and crawl behind the wheel of a car... And then even talk about it with their friends afterwards instead of being suitably ashamed, which is bizarre to me. There are reasons for this - one of the more compelling ones being that despite them all driving around pissed as newts, not that many people end up dead; but I'd never do it, and neither would most British people. The UK and US are world's apart on this one nowadays. Please don't tar us with the same brush.
Mod parent up. I just signed up for an account to say exactly the same thing.
To add to this, the major thing about Warburg metabolism is that not only does it allow cancer cells to survive in low-oxygen conditions; it actually produces the raw materials for making the protein needed to grow new cancer cells, so it allows cancer cells to grow faster than if they were using normal aerobic respiration. Here's James Watson talking about it in the NYT. So the low-oxygen conditions in a tumour are an evolutionary selection pressure for tumours to evolve towards dealing with low-oxygen conditions, but probably also for them to evolve towards growing faster and being more malignant too.
In the study in the OP they already knew the normal gubbins that engages the services of the protein-making machinery doesn't work in low-oxygen conditions, so they went looking for something that does work under these conditions and found it. It normally exists in cells so that they can make proteins when starved of oxygen. What's not clear from the Nature abstract, and what will probably need more work to study, is whether this pathway is massively boosted in cancer cells. My guess is that it will be. The Warburg effect is interesting and unique to cancer cells, but it's difficult to turn into a treatment as it's a perversion of a pathway that's essential in all cells - if you drug the pathway itself you'll likely kill the patient. This study is different as it's a pathway that's specific to oxygen-starved cells, so it may well (in about 20 years) provide some exciting new 'universal' drug targets for solid tumours, that may not kill them dead but might at least slow them down. Don't take up smoking yet though...
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I've been there, and in my case computer games were both the solution and the problem. In the short term they give you the endorphin boost you need to feel that you're living an interesting life, and hence stop you topping yourself, but over the medium to long term your original problem - that your life feels like a thankless, meaningless struggle - is still there and getting worse as you're avoiding your problems with all this displacement activity, not taking steps to solve them.
Self-medicating with the internet is no different than staying in bed all day, reading hundreds of books, drinking yourself to death or watching TV til your brains run out of your ears. It's what makes depression so destructive and prolonged - you get stuck in a loop of behaviour which just drags you further into loneliness and misery. And even if you know how this works you can't seem to stop yourself doing it...
Have a nice day everybody!
Except Elvis's hips, D&D and video games aren't generally used to distract you while driving, and therefore don't represent a real risk to life and limb.
I'd be equally enraged at my friend being killed by someone eating a burger/ playing with the radio/ reading a map or texting while driving because a driver should know that these things are likely to distract them enough to make their driving dangerous, and if they are likely to be distracted they shouldn't be doing these things in a built-up area!
Maybe texting shouldn't be singled out any more than your other examples - people should try not to drive dangerously however that manifests itself - but don't try and pretend that this justifies trying to text while driving in busy areas. Actually, I think texting should be singled out. The main difference between texting and most of the things you mentioned is that texting (unless you're texting for directions, in which case it'd be safer to phone) isn't going to help you get to where you're going any quicker or more comfortably, and is therefore a completely unnecessary indulgence on your part, whereas "cd/radio/8 track/being lost/reading a old fashioned paper map/reading a GPS map" distractions at least serve a purpose on the trip. The point of the propaganda is to produce social stigma so it changes people's behaviour and they don't take unnecessary risks with the lives of other road users. In this case I'm all for it!
I'm looking forward to the day when driverless cars are designed to lock together to form "road trains" on the motorway - it would save a butt-load in petrol, be great for congestion and probably much safer than lots of single driverless cars once merging in and out of a train is made safe.
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't mean that everyone in the US has that attitude to drink driving; just that it's much more common than it is in the UK... In certain states of the federation.
I come from the UK and have relatives in America. The UK is much more like Norway than it is like the US. There is a huge social stigma associated with drink driving here - generally people don't do it. Okay, so we're allowed one drink before we drive, and many people have their one drink before moving on to soda; but in the US it seems like people are happy to get totally blasted and crawl behind the wheel of a car... And then even talk about it with their friends afterwards instead of being suitably ashamed, which is bizarre to me. There are reasons for this - one of the more compelling ones being that despite them all driving around pissed as newts, not that many people end up dead; but I'd never do it, and neither would most British people. The UK and US are world's apart on this one nowadays. Please don't tar us with the same brush.
Mod parent up. I just signed up for an account to say exactly the same thing.
To add to this, the major thing about Warburg metabolism is that not only does it allow cancer cells to survive in low-oxygen conditions; it actually produces the raw materials for making the protein needed to grow new cancer cells, so it allows cancer cells to grow faster than if they were using normal aerobic respiration. Here's James Watson talking about it in the NYT. So the low-oxygen conditions in a tumour are an evolutionary selection pressure for tumours to evolve towards dealing with low-oxygen conditions, but probably also for them to evolve towards growing faster and being more malignant too.
In the study in the OP they already knew the normal gubbins that engages the services of the protein-making machinery doesn't work in low-oxygen conditions, so they went looking for something that does work under these conditions and found it. It normally exists in cells so that they can make proteins when starved of oxygen. What's not clear from the Nature abstract, and what will probably need more work to study, is whether this pathway is massively boosted in cancer cells. My guess is that it will be. The Warburg effect is interesting and unique to cancer cells, but it's difficult to turn into a treatment as it's a perversion of a pathway that's essential in all cells - if you drug the pathway itself you'll likely kill the patient. This study is different as it's a pathway that's specific to oxygen-starved cells, so it may well (in about 20 years) provide some exciting new 'universal' drug targets for solid tumours, that may not kill them dead but might at least slow them down. Don't take up smoking yet though...