> A toxicological screening of the “white curdled material” had detected codeine but not morphine. But Koren had claimed that the gastric contents “exhibited high morphine” levels—with no mention of codeine—“ruling out administration of Tylenol-3 to the baby.”
> “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”
Does no one care that this is potentially a murder case?
> Does no one care that this is potentially a murder case?
I'd say, a very low chance of murder, and a near-certainty of at least manslaughter (unintentional killing), with a zero chance of prosecution due to lack of evidence.
Plus, I hardly see any value of jailing any of the caregivers for this. Whether an investigation should be made, I don't disagree.
I'd guess that everybody involved (including the coroner's office) tacitly understands that even if the baby was deliberately or negligently killed, there's very little chance after 20 years of finding evidence of who did it, in order to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.
The scientific case about infant opioid poisoning in general is a separate issue, of course. But assigning blame in this particular case doesn't have any bearing on that.
> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.
It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".
The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.
Man, SIDS. It's specifically non-specific, but the worry it causes is quite specific.
My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).
I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.
Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.
Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)
I swear, all the shit they push at new parents. You can see the point to much of it, and it's obviously going to be a very stressful time regardless. But there's the same inescapable bureaucratic dynamic where once something becomes legible, the system pathologically emphasizes those few bits over and over and over, to the detriment of balanced judgement - both your own and most healthcare providers if you try to get some nuance out of them.
It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.
We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.
during covid they actually laid hospital patients face down (suspended i think?) to help with breathing when a ventilator wasnt available. this behaviour reminds me of that, perhaps your baby was doing this to help with breathing? i dont know...
> The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
While "happy" isn't the word I'd use, that seems better than knowing that this could happen to any baby at any time and nothing would be done.
I mean, if it was the case that one parent killed the child (Which, to be clear, we don't know. It could have been anybody who had access to the child at the time), then I'd think the best outcome is them getting convicted of it. I don't know why so many people treat homicide as "not a big deal" when it comes to babies.
Consider an unrelated hypothetical scenario, a family father accidentally hits and kills somebody with his car. He flees from the scene and is not discovered for 20 years. Would you then not attempt to prosecute him because it would be sad for his family to know? And now consider the case if it was his own child that died.
It's not that it's "not a big deal", rather the problem is you're up against the limits of details fading to time, negligence, etc. The best case here you're probably looking at each parent blaming the other parent for either doing it or at least letting it happen.
But really my main issue was with characterizing such a thing as a "happy ending". While it's generally good for justice to be served, we should still be wary of people who are a bit too gleeful about punishment.
> However, since immunizations are given to about 90 percent of children less than 1 year of age, and about 1,600 cases of SIDS occur every year, it would be expected, statistically, that every year about 50 cases of SIDS will occur within 24 hours of receipt of a vaccine. However, because the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines, we know that SIDS is not caused by vaccines.
Serious question: if the chance of evidence leading to a convistion is very very small, what would be the benefit of opening an investigation? Just to go through the motions on principle? And what would they even investigate?
It's a cost-benefit analysis like many other things. There are limited resources, they should be spent on investigating cases that have a chance of getting closed.
Cold cases might get reopened because of advances in technology or other changes over time.
There is no potential "principal" here that is distinguishable from posturing and dick swinging.
Unless you find some unforeseeable smoking gun any conviction will necessarily be questionable at best. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond saying "we're the prosecutor's office, look how bad ass we are, look how we somehow manage to convict someone decades later, fear us". Never mind the fact that dredging this stuff up is not likely to be good for the family and that odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent so it's not like you're going after a "real criminal".
Investigating a murder is posturing? I really don't understand the "bad ass, fear us" language. Do you consider all criminal investigations to be as frivolous?
> odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent
How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that
> "... someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula
Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?
>Investigating a murder is posturing? I really don't understand the "bad ass, fear us" language. Do you consider all criminal investigations to be as frivolous?
>How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that
Take a freakin step back and look at the big picture. Someone lost their kid, their first kid FFS. Even if a crime was technically committed along the way call it time served.
On a technical level, this is almost certainly not chargeable as a murder. Evidince of intent is lacking and almost certainly does not exist. The best you might be able to do is some negligent wrongful death manslaughter type thing, exact details depending on how such things are defined in the jurisdiction. Just based on plausibility these cases are almost certainly accidents. Very few mothers or the people around them murder newborns in the jurisdictions we're talking about. So if you did find intent, like a text exchange or something, the best you're likely to do is prove intent in the exact opposite direction and that no harm was meant. So then you have to prove negligence or something, which is also likely to be uphill. And this all assumes you can pin it on one person.
No good purpose is served by this. You're not getting some hardened criminal off the streets or putting someone in jail for an act committed with a bad frame of mind. Best case you wind up punishing someone using some negligince wrongful death type statues that's written based on the assumption that the person who caused the death DGAF about the deceased. Even if you pull that off this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid for it so there's a real tinge of double jeopardy to the whole thing. This serves no purpose other than a show of force by the prosecuting office. The "real" crime committed here is not accidentally giving one's infant the wrong pills (someone gave a kid Tylenol, it's not like it was Xanax or booze to shut them up or some other thing everyone knows you don't do), the facts are likely to stack up in a way that make that act a non-criminal accident. So what you're doing in practice is screwing up one or more people's lives, to much fanfare, because they failed to tell the whole truth to the state a decade or more ago. Now, I get that that might sound like a good thing to some people, but those people are bad people and their ideas are bad ideas.
>Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?
Stop trying to re-frame my assertion as an issue with the article rather than a critique of the proposed action (prosecuting someone). I know you'd rather discuss that, because that's much more defensible than a hypothetical decision to prosecute, and I do not accept your slight of hand.
Calm down. I'm not trying to re-frame anything, perhaps I misunderstood you because your reasons for not prosecuting are incomprehensible to me. Do I understand correctly that you think a murder (or involuntary manslaughter etc) is not "as bad" because the perpetrator was close to the victim?
> this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid
Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."
Speaking as a parent, giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.
>Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."
There is a massive gulf of intent there and I think it speaks volumes that you cannot (or worse, decline to) identify it.
>Speaking as a parent,
And also speaking as a person who's been espousing the opinions you've been espousing thus far, that's more than just "parent"
>giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.
People are stupid. Shit happens. I know it seems wild now and everyone turns into a screeching moron about it now but the "suck on a finger dipped in booze" thing was not abnormal (note for said screeching morons: I did not say "considered tasteful") for decades. Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot.
> Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot
Note that this is just a story you made up, we really don't know what happened. You're also leaving out that if somebody did this by accident, they also chose to keep quiet about it for 20 years. Doesn't that speak about "intent"?
Also, giving a 12 days old baby a "normal" Tylenol, say one with 500 mg acetaminophen, is a very bad idea. The normal dose for a 3 month old is 60 mg (for fever, not as a "sleep aid"). Doses above 200 mg/kg can cause acute toxicity, so for a slightly small baby of 2500 g, you're there already. Perhaps thinking that there's a "safe" type of Tylenol to give a baby as a "sleep aid" (what??) is a good example of "People are stupid".
With my example with the wife, I'm simply trying to establish why you seem to consider children (or rather babies) to be not worthy of the same justice as adults. How about an adult who accidentally kills their elderly parent, would you consider that worth investigating, or should it also not be investigated on the principle of "they lost their parent"? Or further, at what age do you no longer consider it morally justifiable to accidentally (or otherwise) kill one's child and cover it up? 5 years old, 10, 18?
To me, being stupid does not mean you're allowed to give your elderly father 10 Tylenols as a "sleep aid" and claim "shit happens" if he dies. I might want to call a person of that viewpoint a "bad person with bad ideas" or a "screeching moron", but I'd like to stay above such childish namecalling.
Why do you think someone intended to kill the baby?
>But the forensic-toxicology laboratory’s measurements showed that his acetaminophen concentration was in the range of what you’d expect to find in a baby’s bloodstream soon after he’d been administered a standard dose.
>“I am familiar with patients whose babies have died after a caregiver gave the opiate directly.”
Maybe the person thought the tylenol-3 would help the baby.
Maybe the person thought that, but that would still be an absurd belief for them to hold. First of all, it doesn't seem like he had any problems he needed "help" with, the article only says he was "developing normally". Second of all, why would you give a random pill meant for adults to a baby not even two weeks old, without asking a nurse or at least reading the package insert?
Maybe the person thought "I've given Tylenol to babies in the past and it was fine" without realizing the difference between Tylenol and Tylenol-3.
It's possible the person even thought "Tylenol-3, hmm, that must be another term for children's Tylenol, Tylenol for 3-year-olds. I've given that to babies before."
> Does no one care that this is potentially a murder case?
Did we read the same article? Why are you so quick to jump the gun here?
> Koren obtained a sample of Rani’s breast milk, which she had kept in her freezer. His lab measured its morphine concentration at eighty-seven nanograms per millilitre.
If this is in the breastmilk, it will end up in the stomach, and it may end up in gastric contents. I don't understand this urge to demonize the parents, who on top of having lost a child, have to stand these witchtrials.
Are you Koren? Did we read the same article? The one that calls into question anything Koren says or claims?
From the article I read:
"A twelve-day-old infant cannot crawl. It cannot grab, and it cannot put something into its own mouth. “It also cannot swallow a Tylenol-3 pill,” Juurlink told me. “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”"
Also relevant to the quote selected by 'steelbrain:
> Recently, Parvaz Madadi has undergone a painful process of revisiting her past work and memories. [...] She added that she had no confidence in the measurement of Rani’s breast-milk sample, because it had been handled by Koren’s lab.
There is a lot to process in this long article. The quote selected by 'steelbrain, concerning Koren's measurement occurs very, very early on, and much of the rest of the article is about contrasting Koren's early presentations of the material against others' testimony. It's worth reading the whole thing
To 'steelbrain: cherry-picking one single quote out of a nuanced article does the journalism here a dire disservice. It's okay for different people to have different beliefs and takeaways from the article. However, your own defense of the biological mechanism here is directly argued against in the "same article" you are admonishing others over reading. That is not conducive to a discussion in good faith.
Note that you and GP are talking about different values of "this." GP is talking about codeine, you're talking about morphine. The difference between the two is at the crux of this article.
The original death finding falls just from simple back-of-napkin math.
87 ng/mL.
Baby eats 30mL per hour. That's 2.6 micrograms of morphine.
Elimination half life in neonates of ~8 hours means 30 micrograms in system at equilibrium if constantly fed this and the baby absorbs all of it (takes 4-5 half lives to get to that) and pharmacokinetics are linear. In reality a neonate likely absorbs well under 1/3rd, so you'd expect under 10 micrograms in equilibrium.
25-50 micrograms/kilogram is normal dosing of morphine in a neonate when it is necessary, every 6 hours (resulting in a peak systemic concentration of ~60-120 ug/kg after repeated dosing).
Compare -- 60-120 ug/kg therapeutic dosing to 10 micrograms in the neonate's body (3-4 kilos, so 3 ug/kg??)
And then, you end up with acetaminophen and codeine in the neonate's stomach, with no morphine... Even though these do not end up in breast milk in significant quantities.
> I don't understand this urge to demonize the parents, who on top of having lost a child, have to stand these witchtrials.
Neither the article nor the commenter you replied to has demonized the parents. Yes, both the evidence discussed in the article and the opinions of those interviewed indicate direct administration of a pharmaceutical; it is appropriate to discuss this. Nobody has pointed the finger at anyone; it would indeed be quite inappropriate for such a discussion to be held in this forum.
The article goes into detail about how this level of morphine in the breastmilk could not have given the baby a lethal (or even clinically effective) dose.
Furthermore, Koren lied about what the tests showed the stomach contents to be: he omitted codeine entirely. Codeine (per the article) would not be expected to be transferred by breastmilk -- it's metabolized into morphine to be effective.
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
I appreciate the disclosures about Gemeni and Nano Banana, but does that start to feel a little like a conflict of interest or something similar in an article discussing their competition?
I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person.
Say, there are 10^80 atoms, then there are like 2^(10^80) possible things, and 2^(2^(10^80)) grouping/categorization/ordering on the things, and so on, you can go higher, and the number of possibilities go up really fast.
Not surprising since concepts are virtual. There is a person, a person with a partner is a couple. A couple with a kid is a family. That’s 5 concepts alone.
I’m not sure you grok how big a number 10^43741 is.
If we assume that a "concept" is something that can be uniquely encoded as a finite string of English text, you could go up to concepts that are so complex that every single one would take all the matter in the universe to encode (so say 10^80 universes, each with 10^80 particles), and out of 10^43741 concepts you’d still have 10^43741 left undefined.
A concept space of 10^43741 needs about 43741*3 bits to identify each concept uniquely (by the information theoretic concept of bit, which is more a lower bound on what we traditionally think of as bits in the computer world than a match), or about 16000-ish "bytes", which you can approximate reasonably as a "compressed text size". There's a couple orders of magnitude of fiddling around the edges you can do there but you still end up with human-sized quantities of information to identify specific concepts in a space that size rather than massively-larger-than-the-universe sized.
Things like novels come from that space. We sample it all the time. Extremely, extremely sparsely, of course.
Or to put it another way, in a space of a given size, identifying a specific component takes the log2 of the space's size in bits to identify a concept, not something the size of the space itself. 10^43741 is a very large space by our standards, but the log2 of it is not impossibly large.
If it seems weird for models to work in this space, remember that as the models themselves in their full glory are clocking in at multiple hundreds of gigabytes that the space of possible AIs using this neural architecture is itself 2^trillion-ish, which makes 10^43741 look pedestrian. Understanding how to do anything useful with that amount of possibility is quite the challenge.
I ran it last night using docker and it worked extremely well. You need a HuggingFace read-only API token for the Diarization. I found that the web UI ignored the token, but worked fine when I added it to docker compose as an environment variable.
Politicians, almost without fail, subscribe to climate hysteria, as that allows them to do whatever they want and claim they are doing it for the climate. It's a perfect boondoggle for them.
> “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”
Does no one care that this is potentially a murder case?