Antihistamines

This was originally a really long toot.

I’ve been looking at papers on antihistamines and what makes them work better like, molecularly, not just doing clinical trials and seeing what happens. As a primer, allergens trigger the release of histamines in the body, which then bind to various histamine receptors, and the H₁ receptors are the important ones that trigger rhitinis (runny nose, etc.) and uticaria (itchiness). The antihistamines you can get for allergies are H₁-receptor antagonists, meaning they bind to the H₁ receptors and prevent histamine from triggering them, as well as producing some sort of antagonist effect (?). Simons and Simons 2011 is a pretty good overview of how it works.

Zhuyin table with examples

This is a table similar to Wikipedia’s zhuyin table, but with slightly different sorting and an example for each possible combination of initials and finals.

Respooled Film Stocks

This was originally posted on cohost.

While looking up the various colour films my local photo shops carry, I found that a lot of them are actually respools and repackagings of other film (most Kodak), so I’ve tried to compile that information here to keep track of them all.

Bopomofo is inconsistent sometimes

This was originally a two-part post on cohost.

One thing that bothers me about bopomofo is that words ending in ㄛ get an extra vowel ㄨ (essentially just /w/) in the middle sometimes when spoken but it’s never written down.

Investigations into French Diacritics

This was originally two posts on cohost.

Interesting Problems at Small Values

This post is based on the observation that, in a variety of fields (e.g. logic, computics, mathematics, physics), while certain classes of problems can be parameterized by some natural number $n$, it appears that the interesting problems―not so simple as to be trivial, but not so complex as to be unsolvable, undecidable, intractable, or nonexistent―always occur at small $n$. Below is a collection of such problems, describing at which $n$ they are interesting, and how so.