Honest question: Do many people read these entire New Yorker articles? This is what happens to me as I'm looking at HN:<p>From the main page, I open a bunch of tabs that look interesting. On some types of issues, I also open a tab on the HN discussion.<p>From there, I just wander through the tabs, reading stories and mostly just glancing at some of the top comments. My goal when I browse is to learn something new, and I try to remember that as I'm reading.<p>When I hit a New Yorker article's tab, I've often half-forgotten the subject line from HN... maybe it matches the article's title, but I just start reading regardless. Four or five paragraphs in, I start to think, "What the hell does all this setup have to do with the article title I clicked on?" Sure, on some level I know that it probably has something esoteric to do with the main article. These people must be paid by the word.<p>A couple paragraphs further and I start turning the mouse wheel to skim ahead. "Where do they start actually talking about the topic that looked interesting?" At that point, the New Yorker column has maybe mentioned the topic in an ancillary way, but oftentimes it's just warming up by bringing in some personality that they're going to focus on later in relation to the topic.<p>I get impatient.<p>I start scrolling faster, looking for some actual text to sink my mind into. At this point, I'm very conscious that I have a bunch of other potentially interesting tabs open in my browser and I've only allocated fifteen minutes or so before I need to get back to work. I scroll way down, hoping that I'll hit a paragraph that looks like it's full of information. Maybe I'll find one that looks interesting, but at that point I also don't have a whole lot of context to go on. It's like that endlessly long joke that you zone out on and then when they get to the punchline, maybe it sounds kind of funny, but you weren't paying attention to all the setup.<p>I close the tab and wonder how anyone has the time and patience to read these things. Maybe I'm just a slow reader.
>'“But, over all, would you say the temperature of the water was the key?” I asked.
“The water temperature’s a factor. The water chemistry would also have contributed.”
“So a combination of the temperature and the salinity?”
“But also the calcium content. That’s absolutely important.”
I added that to my list of drivers: “Temperature, salinity, calcium . . .”'<p>Of course... what is more important to determining the volume of a box? Is the height a key variable? Sure, but you also need to know the width. Not only that but also the height.<p>Surely irrelevant things like the color of the box, or material it is made of, will also have non-zero correlations with the volume. This is one reason why the NHST strategy of finding isolated "effects" will never lead to an "equation for cancer", but is very good at generating large numbers of red herrings.<p>You need a model of the process of carcinogenesis, and then to collect data allowing you to estimate (at least get some decent upper/lower bounds on) the parameters of the model (mutation rates, division rates, number of cells of each type, % aberrant cells that get cleared by the immune system, % that commit apoptosis, etc).<p>Armitage and Doll started this way back in the 1950s and had quite an effect on the current cancer paradigm (slow accumulation of genetic errors in a single cell lineage -> cancer), but since then it has been only a tiny minority of cancer researchers working on the actual problem.
>Malignancy wasn’t simply about cells spreading; it was also about staying—and flourishing—once they had done so.<p>>In the field of oncology, “holistic” has become a patchouli-scented catchall for untested folk remedies: raspberry-leaf tea and juice cleanses.<p>why some "juices", or more specifically just plain baking soda in a glass of drinking water, may actually help - at least for mice it doubled survival chances here <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/F1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/...</a><p>(it is pretty logical - metastatic invasion is based on acidic dissolution of ECM (which is collagen mostly) and cancer tumor local environment is acidic as a result of increased glycolysis and the resulting increased lactate production, so increasing the pH of the tumor environment naturally impedes metastatic invasion)
This article reminds me of all the things people talk about when they try and approach cell signaling from a systems approach. Modeling biological systems as an actual system probably does make sense in the long run. The problem is that it's far, far harder to study and generate that model.