The magic of chronic disease prevention

+ I am obsessed with hemnet.se, where you can see the listings for all (or most of) the apartments and houses for sale in Sweden. When you're looking at apartments in Stockholm, they make the listings look remarkably homogenous - white, bright, light, airy, modern seem to be the golden standard. Despite the fact that real estate prices are at an all-time high in Sweden because of low interest rates and all sorts of political factors I don't understand, it is not actually that expensive to buy a nice apartment in Stockholm, especially compared to the ludicrous prices in New York and the Bay Area. Someday I am going to own either an apartment in Stockholm or, preferably, a big old farmhouse nearby. There was a NYT article a few weeks ago about a non-Swedish family who bought this big gorgeous house a few miles outside of Stockholm. I liked them. Also our neighbors in Berkeley who we idolize apparently have a friend (American) who lives on a farm south of Stockholm. Very exciting news to me.

+ Whenever I get sad, I just remind myself that the NBA season starts in less than two weeks. It would be difficult to adequately convey the amount of joy and rapture this brings to my heart. Plus, basketball is not respected as it should be. I am looking forward to many evenings of 1 am Knicks and Pistons games, and, most of all, many mornings of 4:30 am Warriors games, thanks to the glorious NBA League Pass internet feed.

Incidentally, there are some Swedish basketball leagues, but they appear to be a bit lackluster. It might be funny to go to one of the games. There is one Stockholm team called the Stockholmspolisen. Ok. The other one is called "08 Stockholm Human Rights." What kind of city names their professional men's basketball team "Human Rights"??? Stockholm. Incredible. The other Swedish team names aren't nearly as exciting: Solna Vikings, Norrköping Dolphins, Sundsvall Dragons. Jake discovered the Helsingborg Basket Pearls in a different league. There's also the Visby Ladies.

+ Sunrise and sunset times for the next few weeks:

Today: sunrise 7:42, sunset 5:22.
Saturday: sunrise 7:54, sunset 5:09.
And then, daylight savings!
Sunday: sunrise 6:56, sunset 4:06.
A month from today, sunrise will be at 7:58, and sunset will be at 3:10.

+ In a meeting recently someone made a joke about "postage stamps, photocopies, and lipoproteins." It was actually really funny, to the extent that jokes about grant applications and lipoproteins can be funny. There have been many more that I can't believe I didn't write down. One good line from the Helsinki conference was when the audience was rhetorically invited to a research center in Finland to "learn more about the magic of chronic disease prevention."

+ I'm starting to piece together names and approximate dates of the Swedish side of my family, and I've started looking through some of the Ellis Island immigration records. Steffen Olsen, Lillian Carlsson, Amanda Carlsson, Oskar Carlsson, Karin and George Wallstrom (who would visit my mom and her family on the Olsen farm in New Jersey but still lived in Sweden, so I guess if I can track down their grandchildren here those would be my mom's second cousins?)...

+ There was an interesting presentation at CHESS today by a British psychiatrist who does some collaboration with Ilona, about the association between school grades and functional psychotic disorders (schizophrenia and bipolar). The general theme, like most of the work here, is trying to examine whether there are social factors that contribute to higher risk, not just purely biomedical or neurodevelopmental. On a powerpoint slide showing a lifecourse view of psychosis development, he used an incredible picture of our wonderful president with a bizarre expression to demonstrate the final outcome of psychosis. It was pretty funny.