Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

Psychotherapist-programmer musician-historian outsider-anthropologist healthcare-blogger science-explainer social critic essay-essayer and soothsayer. Professional wisewoman and amateur wiseass.

#PsychiatricNosology #HistoryOfScience #AnthropologyOfMedicine #EarlyMusic #EvenEarlierMusicThanThat #Galliards #Goliards #LoGaiSaber #Pestilence #TheSoCalledUSHealthcareSystem

Last Notes

2025-07-12 01:02:10 UTC

There's a saying that goes something like "everyone who has ever lied to you has compromised your ability to reason". Does anybody recognize this and know the original? And its source?

2025-01-26 03:02:14 UTC

Is there an Information Scientist in the house?
Help. How do I mirror PubMed?
They have their whole corpus conveniently available as XML files for download while supplies/democracy lasts. I speak Unix and disk space is cheap. Once I have all the XML, then what do I do?
#InformationScience

2024-12-19 04:08:00 UTC

Hey, #Buttondown creators and paid subscribers! I am entertaining moving from Patreon to Buttondown, and sent Buttondown a question but never got an answer back.
Who actually bills paid subscribers? Does Buttondown have their own Stripe acct or similar to bill all the paid subscribers themselves then pass the revenues on to the creators? Or do they just have an integration with Stripe where the creator has to have their own Stripe account?
Put another way: who owns the merchant account that bills paid subscribers? Whose name shows up on paid subscribers' credit card bills? Does Buttondown touch the money? Does Buttondown issue 1099-Ks to creators?
(And consequently, who has to satisfy Stripe's requirements, you or Buttondown? Do you have to trust Buttondown to handle your revenues? Is Buttondown in a position to bundle charges across creators? This is a HUGELY consequential issue.)

2024-08-13 03:29:19 UTC

What I just wrote to #Patreon:
Hi, team. Just wanted to reach out to you to add my voice to the no doubt many others raised in complaint about today's bombshell announcement.
I just wanted to point out that we are at odds. While maintaining the presence of an iOS app in the Apple Store is in Patreon's financial interest, it is not in my financial interest. It would be considerably more advantageous to me for Patreon to drop the iOS app rather than force my account to convert to a subscription model which is incompatible with my business model.
1/n

2024-08-09 09:09:53 UTC

Heads up, massholes, if you have recently registered to vote or plan to register to vote soon.
I just moved earlier this year, and I finally got around to doing my re-registration to vote. I did it a few weeks ago through the Secretary of State website.
There was apparently a glitch.
After a week or two, I got a boilerplate letter from the municipality I had left saying, "Hey we understand from the Secretary of State that you are registering to vote somewhere else, so we're taking you off the voter rolls here." But I didn't hear anything from the municipality I had moved to. Odd.
So I got around to calling them up and asking what was going on with my voter registration, and they were like, "huh, we have never heard of you, nothing here from the Sec'y of State about you, you want we mail you a voter registration form?"
So I called up the Sec'y of State to notify them of a problem.
Two days later, voila, I was registered to vote with no further effort on my part.
#Massachusetts