Yes, but incidence rates are increasing. You can blame that on better diagnoses, or, more likely in my opinion, some other factors which didn't exist before.
It can be both though, there's ADHD as it is currently understood as a genetic/neurological issue where the dopaminergic system is impacted, and creates all the effects experienced by ADHD sufferers.
There might also be environmental issues, like you mention, that could be creating similar issues but not from the point of a genetic neurological divergence.
That is an important distinction since the treatment for one cause is very different to another.
The incidence rates increasing are very correlated to better diagnoses, 30 years ago most people with ADHD wouldn't be diagnosed unless they fit into the extreme cases of it. That was my experience, as a kid I was very bright but considered "lazy" since I couldn't focus as my peers did out of school, was always interested during classes, and excelled in school even though I could never do my homework or other assignments, constantly forgot important deadlines, it was always stressful but I found ways to manage it. Thirty years later and I fit in the criteria, no idea how my life would've turned out if I knew about it before, my coping/management mechanisms ended up being to lean into the stress and harness it, it made me achieve things but also created a whole other host of issues with anxiety later in life.
The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.
Thats one version of why. The other version is that it ran counter to a historical narrative about the (alleged, believed) moral superiority of antiquity and so was coined to further a somewhat political goal.
I mean, you can see pretty clear evidence of sharp declines in trade and industry in all sorts of ways following the fall of Rome, such as rates of silver production tied to concentrations of atmospheric lead in Greenland ice samples. It's not just something historians made up.
A good point, and to the specificity of early post Roman to 1000AD feels like a valid measure. But you also see innovations in trade, arts and embellishments, cathedral building. I don't think the coining of "the dark ages" label had the luxury of gas chromatography, it was an adjective of philosophical value, figuratively applied as a value judgement.
The Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).
> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress
I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.
I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.
Perhaps. But the narratives we as a society build our culture around are a serious low pass filter — time constant of centuries, not years. The pain around short-term regressions is because there’s such a strong narrative against which to contrast them — the same steps backward, against a backdrop of inevitability, would hit differently, no?
> It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles.
No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse.
Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.
Western Europe did not recover the same level of civilizational development that it had under the Roman Empire until hundreds of years later, maybe 1000. That is a fact. The Napoleonic code of laws promulgated in 1804 was based on Roman law of the sixth century because they didn’t have anything better. The Roman Empire was synonymous with civilization in Western Europe for centuries — people were publishing scientific books in Latin in 1900 (!)
“Dark ages” is an oversimplification, but it contains a quite large grain of truth.
"thats a fact" is a very odd thing to say about a matter of opinion. I think you are at best a Historian in training, I would suggest historians don't make that kind of assertion as fact, it's opinion.
When you twiddle your thumbs, your thumbnails always point the same direction relative to each other. So the bolts relative rotation will maintain that. Imagine a stripe on the face towards us of the bolts, and twiddling action will not rotate the stripe in an absolute or relative sense.
For the two bolts, this is equivalent to rotating both bolts so the stripe stays in the same relative position, as if one were rotated around the other or they were twisted in the same absolute direction. If you are concerned about symmetry violation because of the direction of the threads, you can reverse the threads on both bolts, with the same result. You can try this with a couple of bolts and a couple of rubber bands to keep them in the same relative position. The illustration is a hint that the motion is equivalent to rotating both in the same absolute direction (near side moving up.) Then view that system from the head and note the direction each would be moving, away or towards you.
If you have to undo a bolt or nut from behind, the bolt head moves in a reverse direction from your viewpoint, just as if you were to view a glass clock from behind.
I'm concerned about the same mechanism that causes permanent loss of taste with zinc lozenges, and if it applies here. I don't want to poison the nerves in my genitals. It isn't a common or widespread effect, but it is severe.
He claimed alcohol was a mystic sacrament, in an interview I read long ago. That's an awfully destructive spirituality, but it was very much his choice, whether rationalized addiction or not. Personally, I've seen that destruction too closely to find it anything but tragic, but I'm grateful for his poetry.
The button has no downside, with a possible benefit, so always push it. Also refers to discredited Bystander effect nonsense regarding Kitty Genocese murder: "there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive." https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.6...
There is one downside. Here in Australia, the walk signal does not happen unless you press the button. The unwritten convention is that if you are the first to the button, you will press it. Others arriving later will not press, for fear of looking like untrusting fools.
This works fine 99% of the time. However, sometimes my wife will be there. She never presses the button (because she’s ADHD and always forgets), but stands nice and close. A pile of pedestrians will mill around, the lights will change, and the walk signal will stay red! Someone will then annoyedly step in and press the button approximately 20 times while everyone waits for another light cycle to complete.
Her other trick is to enter an elevator and press no buttons. Eventually the lift will go somewhere, but she is often surprised at the destination!
Don't you have indicators? In Spain the buttons (which BTW are increasingly uncommon, cars lost the battle) have two large indicators, lit depending on the state:
Some pedestrian crossing buttons play different audible beats so blind people know when they can cross. Famously the beat of one in Sydney was sampled for a Billie Eilish song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zeJRjP6xA skip to around 4:00 mins).
However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.
No indicators on the unit itself, but the opposite side normally only has the red man light illuminated if you've pressed it doesn't it, and no light at all if it needs to be pressed and hasn't?
At least that's the way it is here in NZ, and when I've been in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane I haven't obviously noticed a general difference to here in NZ (there are particular crossings that are sometimes a bit different, i.e. you never need to press, but)...
That big button, incidentally, is quite a nice piece of industrial engineering. It uses a hall effect sensor and magnets to maximise the lifetime of the button.
In Finland there is just a light above button in the box. It will light up when it is activated. Or actually when cycle is activated so also for other side. Decent enough UI for non blind, with blind I think there is sound in some cases.
Floor 3. It goes to floor 3. At least in my building, which I think has 5 floors. So I guess it wants to wait in the middle to be equidistant to all floors, but I suspect there is a flaw in that math because ground floor probably gets more traffic.
I find this so interesting because I also live in Australia but I will always press the button if close enough without much thought. I’ve gone my whole life thinking of this as just a normal thing, if not a slightly good thing for being the person who can be bothered to press it. So i was completely unaware of this unspoken thing haha.
Makes sense for the big buttons, but some of them have tiny ones with a little rain hat, inexplicably. Why don't they all have big buttons, which are much easier to push?
We just have these stupid unpressable buttons near me. They're big with an embossed arrow on them, but if try to press it it might budge a quarter of a millimeter. I still don't understand how they work, if they're supposed to be capacitive or just have really tiny press windows. But they give zero satisfying feedback that you've successfully pressed the button. I hate them so much. And if you hit them hard they will murder your hand.
You had to turn a doorknob to leave the house, but you're too disabled to push a fucking button designed for handicapped UX?
You're going to touch traces of a million other people's gender fluids on every single other thing you touch during your errand. Germophobia is very selective.
One downside I've encountered: some crosswalk buttons in Arlington VA make very loud robo-voice announcements about their status only after you've pressed them. Very good for the visually impaired, I assume, but irritating for me. And the signals are on a timer, so it doesn't help to press them.
Yeah, it's not much. In any other circumstance I press the dang button.
If they understood significant figures, it would be less suspicious. Besides, when a vendor uses their own special metric, instead of a well known standard, I lose respect for them.
