March 13, 2018 at 01:10AM

Today I learned: 1) ...how to replace snap-on buttons! Technically, that's a lie. I looked up how to replace snap-on buttons late last week. But! Today I actually *did* some snap-button replacing, which honestly felt a lot more like learning than watching a video. For the record, the hardest part was removing the old buttons, which wasn't terribly difficult once Andrey Shur provided me with the right tools. 2) One of the most clear-cut problems with the US healthcare system is the use of opt-in organ donation. It's well-known that many, many people who would be fine with donating their organs on death never bother to sign up for organ donation, and lo! We have a chronic, severe shortage of organs for transplantation. It would be SO EASY to switch to an opt-out system where everyone is, by default, signed up for organ donation, and you can fill out a form to not donate if you really want to. This would vastly increase rates of donation, while still giving people the opportunity to not donate if they have any objections serious enough to warrant filling out some paperwork. ...except that it isn't *quite* that clear-cut after all. Opt-out policies *do* correlate with higher rates of donation, but there are opt-out countries with very low donation rates, and Spain, the most widely-cited success story for opt-out policy, has the Very Large Caveat that they implemented a bunch of organ-transplantation-related reforms around the same time as opt-out, which seem to be responsible for a good part of the increased donation rates there. There are also some specific failure modes for opt-out. For example, when Wales switched to an opt-out system, they saw rates of organ donation *decrease* (albeit slightly). A possible reason is that in Wales (and many other countries with opt-out organ donation), the family can still decide to deny access to a deceased organ, so opt-out isn't quite so opt-out as it sounds. Before they switched to opt-out, the family could *also* decide to allow transplantation if the family member wasn't signed up. So really, in both systems, anybody who doesn't bother filling out paperwork to make a decision one way or another is actually at the mercy of their family. In opt-in, there's a way to guarantee that you will donate your organs; in opt-out, there is only a way to guarantee you will *not* donate your organs. Therefore, it's possible that the opt-out system actually creates an extra group of people that don't donate. 3) There is a belief running around that chewing gum is bad for pregnant women. I'm quite skeptical. Some quick googling brought up a bunch of results (with a fairly wide spread of claims), but none from sources I would consider reliable. The only plausible-looking claim, as far as I can tell, is that some gums are sweetened with sorbitol, which is a diuretic and can cause intestinal distress if taken in large quantities. Is that likely to actually be a problem? I'm guessing not.