July 16, 2016 at 03:32AM

Today I Learned: 1) Honey badgers are really good at getting out of enclosures, and they really enjoy the process of escape. They're extraordinarily clever about executing escapes, and will use tools, cooperation, and sheer grit to worm their way out of a surprising variety of prisons. See http://ift.tt/29EWS5S for details. 2) A QALY is a Quality Adjusted Life Year. It's a number used to calculate the value of life with different medical problems/conditions. By way of example, suppose you have a terminal illness that will kill you in a week. There are two mutually exclusive treatments. One will stave off the illness completely for X years, then will wear off and you will die. The other will completely cure the illness, but has the permanent side effect of giving you occasional painful stomach cramps for the rest of your life. Which do you take? If you're a doctor, which do you recommend? One standard way to evaluate this choice is to say that every year with stomach cramps is worth some fraction of a healthy year. By varying X above and asking a lot of people which treatment they would take, you can get a quantitative sense of how much people value not having stomach cramps. To figure out how much a treatment is worth, you multiply that value by the number of years you expect to get out of the treatment, giving you some number of year-equivalents of value for that treatment. This is what we call a QALY. Today I learned of a very similar, closely related concept called the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY). DALYs are very similar, in that they attempt to quantify the value of remaining life, except that they typically come from calculations of disease burdon rather than treatment gains. DALYs attempt to account for the loss of quality of life caused by the disease in addition to the straight-out loss of life it might cause. This fact brought to you by Erik Jue. 3) Either shelving units are super expensive or I've gotten far too used to cheap used furniture pricing....