Issue #21

Hey friends 👋🏽,

Welcome back to Thought Caffeine, a weekly newsletter where I share my favourite discoveries during the week.

This week, I rotated to the Community Medicine department. I'm covering shifts in a semi-remote area north of where I'm based and three times a week, I make an hour-long commute with my friends, which means earlier wake-up time 🙁. While that's certainly a predicament, it's a nice change from the bustling city ambience I'm all too familiar with. At least I think the fresh air will do me some good.

🔖 Poem I’m pondering upon

Sunsets are never simple

Twilight is refracted and reflected

But never true.

Eventide is a disguise

Covering tracks,

Covering lies.

We don’t care

That dusk deceives.

We see brilliant colors,

And never learn

The sun has dropped

Beneath the earth

By the time we see the burn.

Sunsets in disguise,

Covering truths, covering lies.

-A.H

🚨 The 5150 Hold

5150 is the number of the section of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which allows a person with a mental illness to be involuntarily detained for a 72-hour psychiatric hospitalisation.

A person on a 5150 can be held in the psychiatric hospital against their will for up to 72 hours. This does not mean that they will necessarily be held for the entire 72 hours; it means that psychiatric hospitals have the legal right to do so if determined to be necessary.

A person is eligible for the 5150 Hold if they meet at least one of the three basic criteria:

1. The person is a danger to others
2. The person is a danger to self
3. The person is gravely disabled

Upon reevaluation after 72 hours, the person is usually either released or taken (consensually) to the wards for further treatment. However, if a person continues to meet one of the three criteria, the attending psychiatrist can file for a 5250, which extends the involuntary holding to 14 days.

🔵 Blue Holes

Are not only pretty to look at, but they're also really cool:

• Most blue holes are formed from sinkholes and caves that collapse inward and fill up with water. The caves existed way back during the Ice Age, so when the ice started melting, their roofs collapsed and ultimately formed these in-ocean sinkholes.
• The deep blue tint of a blue hole is produced because of the radical change in depth. The deepest blue hole in the world measures 300m deep! (The Dragon Long in the South China Sea).
• The high walls lining sinkholes tend to preserve what lies below from damaging weather. Some biologists think that rare corals are being preserved in the still depths of blue holes.
• The famous French explorer Jacques Cousteau in 1971 declared the Belize Blue Hole to be one of the top diving sites in the world.

✍️ Why Restricting Calories Doesn’t Work

If you've ever wondered why it's so hard to lose weight on a caloric restriction diet, this post may provide some answers. I talk about:

1. How homeostasis seeks to keep your body weight in equilibrium
2. Why your body burns fewer calories with caloric restriction
3. What you should do instead to maximise fat burn during rest

Click here to read more

🙂 Other things I've been enjoying

1. Blog: Stratechery – a blog that demystifies complicated financial and tech analysis to a point of (radical) simplicity. I dig it for Ben’s conversational tone & intellectual insight. Here are two posts I recently read about concerning Clubhouse and Tesla.
2. Book: Where The Crawdad’s Sing. Delia Owen’s first work of fiction is a literary masterpiece, swamped with beautiful prose that stuck true to its historical setting & an unbelievably engaging plot.
3. Podcast: Behind The Glass. Not gonna lie, I listen to British podcasts for the conversational banter – rarely for the content itself. British phrases always fascinate me, even if they’re seemingly unglamorous slang. Through some weird artistic sense that I can’t quite put a finger to, the Brits have a knack for setting musical cadence to their sentences that always makes their conversation sound very fluid and eloquent.

📖 Quote of the Week

"Friendship is vital to your whole spirit — your being, your character, your mind, and your health. And yet, all too often, humans don’t realize what’s essential until they are in trouble, so they dismiss the power of friendship when things are going well."

From Fruits of Friendship (Article) by David Perell. Resurfaced via Readwise.

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Hope you have a great week! ⚽️

John