People who get paid to do things with social media have invented various alliterative themes for content. Everyone has picked up on #throwbackthursday, but apparently there is also #wednesdaywisdom and who knows what for the other days of the week. And just like anniversary gifts come in both “modern” and “traditional” themes, I think that the days of the week hashtags also have warring factions.

Now that my sleep schedule is back on track and the construction no longer makes it impossible to park at the gym, I was thinking of going back to the gym. I was hoping to go to the gym today. But I have a headache, and going to the gym is even more unpleasant when I have a headache. Going to the gym can sometimes trigger a really bad headache. Once it even triggered a “thunderclap” headache, which led to a same-day CT-scan whose risks outweighed its benefits. (I have since become much more discerning about CT scans.)

I really wish I knew more about the Radon transform (one of the standard mathematical techniques for turning the collected data about beam intensities into an image, that is one of the techniques used for the computing in computed tomography). But a few years ago I went to a talk where the researcher was solving these sorts of inverse problems using linear algebra. Probably in part because computers these days are being optimized to do linear algebra and to mine cryptocurrency. If you want to solve a scientific problem computationally, it had better be something that can be solved by linear algebra over the real numbers approximated within machine epsilon (do not expect exact calculations) or something that can be solved by a GPU. That was one of the nice things about working at ORNL: There was always someone giving a talk about using computation to solve some sort of interesting problem, and since I worked as part of a high performance computing group, it totally counted as work to go listen to researchers talk about how they were using our computing resources.

(Aside: We are starting to get cryptocurrency mining spam on our message boards at work. A spammer will post a link to a site that uses Javascript to mine in your browser. It doesn’t matter quite so much what the architecture is when you’re not paying for it.)

While a lot of computational problems can be convinced to become linear algebra problems or can be forced onto a grid or can be otherwise bent to conform with our biases in computer architectures and software libraries, my headache issues are much harder to resolve because it is really hard to tell if a rat has a headache.

So that is my advice to you: Study computational problems that can be reduced to linear algebra (and/or parallelized on a grid with minimal communication), and develop medical problems that can be easily modeled in rats. It’s probably too much to hope for to expect my neurological issues to be reflected in C. elegans, a creature so primitive that it only has 302 neurons (all of which have been mapped) and that you can research without IRB approval.

Sure, you need to fill out a bunch of paperwork to do research on rats, but it’s not that bad compared to doing medical research on people. You can keep a lot of rats in your lab. You know what your rats are doing. They are maintaining their special diets and taking all ther medication and doing everything else according to protocol. You can sacrifice your rats and put little pieces of their brain under a microscope or blend it into a slurry and see which genes are being expressed.

But it’s hard to know if a rat is having a headache. Rats can’t vomit, so they can never get one of those migraines that is so bad that it makes you throw up. Does a rat see the flashing rainbow crystal or the zig-zag rainbow snake or some other migraine aura? No way to know.

That MD/PhD who is setting up a brand new neurology research lab and needs to get some publishable results in order to keep the lights on and get tenure has a choice: Basic science with C. elegans? Maybe even something genomic, so you don’t even need to maintain a physical lab? Or perhaps something that has a rat model. Maybe cut some rats’ spinal cords and put out press releases about helping wounded soldiers walk again every time there is some incremental breakthrough. What about studying migraine? Recruit a bunch of opinionated people, some of whom don’t follow directions, others of whom drop out of the study. Still others who believe assorted junk science that their racist relatives share on Facebook. And mountains of paperwork.

There is one upcoming treatment that my neurologist has heard promising news about. The studies were all funded by the drug company that developed it. (It’s a biologic, not a small molecule drug.) Preliminary word on the street says that it’s only somewhat effective and costs tens of thousands of dollars per dose. Long-term effects? Unknown.

So instead of taking my headache to the gym, I’m going to put on my pajamas, listen to my audio book for a little while, and go to sleep. Perhaps I’ll dream about a way to model migraines in terms of inverting a large matrix of rats.