The reality of saving for a down-payment in a hot housing market

lumpytrout · 20時間前

You don't aim for the median price. You look for a cheaper place.

I've become pretty good at sniffing out the gentrifying neighborhoods. This may sound weird or possibly racist but, I have learned to look for what I call the "taqueria/hipster-cafe border zone" - where you get the two side-by-side - i.e., a traditionally Hispanic immigrant neighborhood that is gentrifying and now has enough artists and college students for some cafes to start opening up (not Starbucks yet - they come later - but the ones before it). If you are doing this right you will notice Whole Foods move in 1 year after you do. (this has happened to me 4x in a row in 3 different cities! Turns out Whole Foods has a whole division of analysts that sniffs out gentrifying areas. They look for neighborhoods where median home income is about to top 70K. You want to spot those areas 1-2 years before that.)

(why Hispanic? Lower crime rate than some other low-income areas, + awesome food)

And look for a smallish place AND GET A ROOMMATE. Your first place is not going to be your dream home. You can typically afford to buy a place of the exact same size, quality, neighborhood, public transit access, and # of roommates as what you are currently renting. The mistake people make is often in trying to jump from a tiny crappy rental that they share, to a huge spiff place that they don't share. It doesn't work like that. Start with the same quality you currently are renting.

Anyway, I saved like fricking hell, had my down payment together in 3 yrs, and bought a gorgeous little 2br here in Boston (Boston is worse than Seattle fwiw). Median prices here run approx 500K but I found a cute place for $311K in a classic taqueria/cafe border zone. (Another hipster cafe AND a Whole Foods have since opened up.) I have a great roommate who makes me cookies, her renta covers 2/3 the mortgage payment, my place is appreciating in value and I'll never have to come up with the down payment again. (in future purchases you leverage the money you've already put into the 1st place).

fattyasid · 20時間前

Try /r/astronomy for this!

outthere20th · 21時間前

Hi, AskScience has a policy of not taking "googleable" questions or questions that have been done a lot in the past, and unfortunately this fits into both those categories. But having done my time in the explain-evolution trenches, I can recommend talkorigins.org - it's got a lot of scientists, a massive archive and a discussion forum and imho they have good information and explain it well. /r/biology or /r/ELI5 might also be good resources. Hope that helps!

origamicrocus · 21時間前

Take him to a licensed wildlife rehab place IMMEDIATELY. This is a sign he may have a crippling dietary insufficiency - people trying to raise baby birds almost never can feed them the right stuff. I used to work in a rehab center and it was appalling how many birds ended up with permanent skeletal annormalities or ruined feathers due to low calcium, low protein etc. Parent birds do an outstanding job collecting high-protein bug meals (every 5-6 minutes, dawn to dusk) and a single human just cannot do that job right.

FIRST THING TOMORROW. DAWN. Even just 1 more day on bad food can leave permanent damage. Google "wildlife rehabilitator" and your town name. If none come up, the nearest zoo or vet will have some names.

surferrex · 4日前

Actually there are details of bone microstructure, density of blood vessels (mean distance of osteocyte cavities to nearest blood vessel cavity, that sort of thing), annual bone growth rate (which is what this study looked at), and even the biomechanics of limb orientation, gait and posture (eg reaction time and MR necessary to maintain gait X with body mass Y w/o risk of falling) that correlate very well with metabolic rate. There's a big difference between a "guess" and a reasonable model that is based on a strong correlation seen in many taxa, and that is backed up by several other lines of evidence too.

But what do I know... I only have a PhD in vertebrate physiology, and I've only taught comparative vertebrate anatomy for a couple decades, hardly any time really.

MeloneFxcker · 6日前

You are my kind of person.

MeloneFxcker · 6日前

Hi, I'm a marine mammal biologist and teach whale anatomy and evolution. The evolution of the horizobtal tail fluke in cetaceans (whales and dolphins) is thought to relate to the "galloping" motion that terrestrial mammals had already evolved much earlier.

Any terrestrial mammal going back into the sea is likely already going have some musculature and wiring set uo for galloping on land. Galloping involves a dorso-ventral motion of the spine (i.e., alternately flexing and extending the spine). You can see this best in a running cheetah - I'll add a link later. It's an ancient locomotory style likely evolved by early mammals when legs were first brought under the body. (Animals with legs that sprawl out to the side, like a salamder or lizard, can't gallop. But quadrupeds that have evolved more upright legs can. Several major grouos evolved an upright stance, and galloping, during the Mesozoic. For example, many dinosaurs like Triceratops are thought to have galloped, and early mammals. This involved was a big shift, in terms of spinal musculture, from the side to side "wiggly" running gait that most lizards, which is really a very fast trot, to the dorso-ventral flexion used in galloping and bounding).

Anyway, early mammals probably all galloped. So, some (but not all) mammals that are headed back to the sea start out by swimming with a style that tales advantage of that galloping spinal musculature. This means swimming with the hind feet held back along the tail and using an up-down kicking movement (like the "dolphin kick" used by human swimmers doing the buttefly). Sea otters still do this, and it appears that early whales did too. At some point the tail started to get flatter and then it developed horizontal extensions. (Also somewhere in here, reproduction began to occue entirely in the water so that there was nonlonger any need to walk around on land). At this point the hind feet were no longer needed and began to shrink, and the horizontal tail flukes took on the main job of propulsion.

It's important to note though that not all marine mammals took this path. Sea lions and "fur seals" (otariids) propel themselves entirely with their front flippers, "flying" through the water kind of like a huge penguin. (btw sea lions are still able to gallop quite effectively on land, with surprising speed). "True" seals - phocids, the pudgier, rounder ones with no ear flaps - are a different family and they propel themselves by alternate sidewards motions of the hind flippers (first the left, then the right, etc). The only time they use anything like a galloping motion is when they awkwardly hump themselves along land like a big inchworm. Polar bears, though they can gallop beautifully on land, swim with a strong, front-paws-only "dog paddle" and let their hind legs trail behind them. (Bears as a family have very short rudimentary tails and also have relatively short hind legs, which might have restricted polar bears from using a galloping gait in wayer). So there is actually a variety of solutions for moving back to the water.

EMERYIVY · 6日前

Try /r/homeworkhelp for this one!

tan_nis · 11日前

As a biologist who has to explain bio to laypeople a lot, if you want anybody other than fellow physicians to understand your story you might want to translate: CCF, T2DM, U/S, DVT, analgesia, inotropic, locules, the implications of seeing gas locules, and "hindquarter" as applied to humans rather than to farm animals.

Anyway, sorry about your patient. Some day you'll save somebody because of what you learned.

DoremusJessup · 13日前

More likely just off-topic or jokes. /r/science is moderated to remove comments that don't add to the scientific discussion.

Jilebinator · 16日前

Blue whales are actually fairly easy to find; we know their vocalizations and their range. They're also pretty easy to id at a distance. Nowadays you can send a robot glider out into the water to listen to their calls and report their location. They're hard to follow after they dive, but spotting them isn't too difficult.

whoami4546 · 16日前

There's a respiratory membrane just inside the eggshell lined with blood vessels. It picks up oxygen (and gives off CO2) through pores in the eggshell. The oxygenated blood then flows into the bird via an umbilical cord. This is what the placenta evolved from actually.

If you put a developing egg in a respiratory chamber you can actually measure how fast it is consuming O2 and giving off CO2.

neobyte999 · 16日前

Actually, yes - if you have an EEG on the person, you can see them transition to beta waves (slower, longer brainwaves than seen during alert attention) for a few seconds while they space out. I used to teach a physiology lab where we would do this: put EEGs on students and correlate beta waves with students' subjective reports of how alert they felt. Beta waves occurred when students felt "relaxed", "spaced out", "stopped paying attention for a sec." etc.

Jilebinator · 16日前

For the whales specifially, pretty slim. All the largest species of whales were well known to commercial whalers in the 1700s-1800s. Medium-sized whales were of less commercial interest and there may be a few unknown ones still out there, especially the beaked whales, but even then we know most of those from skulls and carcasses that have washed up on beaches. (Any very large marine animal eventually washes up dead on some shore somewhere.) There were some beaked-whale-like vocalizations recorded recently in Antarctic waters that don't match the known beaked whale vocalizations - but we're still sorting out which vocalizations go with which beaked whale species anyway, and, again, beaked whales are not large whales.

Future "discoveries" of large whale species will likely be events where an already-known population of an already-known species is elevated to species status after careful analyses of its DNA. This happened recently with the Gulf of Mexico population of Bryde's whale.

For nonmammals the same general idea holds - the large-bodied species tend to wash up dead on shore at some point.

whoami4546 · 16日前

There's an event called "pipping", just before hatching, when the bird breaks through a membrane into an air cell just under the shell. This is when the lungs start working, and it's also when you sometimes start to hear the chick (still in the shell) start to vocalize.

99trumpets · 16日前

They still need more water in the hear, because they cool themselves by panting (even cats will pant when they're hot) and panting causes loss of lots of water from the respiratory tract.

gkiaf0 · 29日前

Endocrinology PhD here. Transgender people actually do have a suite of subtle, but consistent, differences in both neuroanatomy and physiology. It's premature to expect a quick-and-easy diagnostic test because the entire field of research is quite new, there's not much funding for it and also a lot of these tests require complex brain imaging that is at the cutting edge of research.

First off, as background, there's a wide set of differences in neuroanatomy - size of certain brain areas, ratio of grey to white matter, etc. - that normally differ between men and women and that we know now is set in fetal life. Some of these differences are likely driven by the two enormous peaks in testosterone that male fetuses have (one in mid pregnancy and one just after birth), while some others appear affected by "dosage" of the X chromosomes (e.g. 1 or 2 X's). It is uncontroversial among endocrinologists that those aspects that are affected by testosterone can go awry relatively easily if there is some alteration in exposure to testosterone in fetal life. We see this routinely in other animals and can produce "sex-reversed" brains experimentally in species as diverse as rats and birds, with resulting differences in sexual behavior in adulthood, just by altering the hormonal environment of embryonic development.

Based on this background it was originally hypothesized that transgender people would turn out to have "sex-reversed" brains that showed features of their chosen sex but not their natal sex. We will never be able to do the clear-cut experiments in people that we can do in rats and birds, but in general the emerging picture is that transsexuals have (1) partly but not fully sex-reversed brains - that is, some features are like their natal sex, some are like their chosen sex - and also (2) transsexuals have certain unique features of brain anatomy that are neither classically male nor classically female. (e.g. they fall into a 3rd category.) However you cut it there's something distinctly different about their brain anatomy, and this is readily apparent from brain imaging studies. A few recent studies:

2013 study on cortical thickness, a feature that normally differs between men and women. Transsexuals have consistent differences in cortical thickness that match their chosen sex and not their birth sex: "In conclusion, FtMs showed evidence of subcortical gray matter masculinization, while MtFs showed evidence of CTh feminization. In both types of transsexuals, the differences with respect to their biological sex are located in the right hemisphere." (PS - This study was restricted to transsexuals that have not received any treatment, e.g. they hadn't had hormonal treatment yet that could have altered results. The same is true of the studies below.)

2012 study using a grey matter quantification method finding that "transsexual subjects did not differ [in grey matter thickness] significantly from controls sharing their gender identity but were different from those sharing their biological gender (areas in the left and right precentral gyri, the left postcentral gyrus, the left posterior cingulate, precuneus and calcarinus, the right cuneus, the right fusiform, lingual, middle and inferior occipital, and inferior temporal gyri)."

2013 study finds consistent differences in male-to-female transsexuals as compared to control males: "Results revealed thicker cortices in MTF transsexuals, both within regions of the left hemisphere (i.e., frontal and orbito-frontal cortex, central sulcus, perisylvian regions, paracentral gyrus) and right hemisphere (i.e., pre-/post-central gyrus, parietal cortex, temporal cortex, precuneus, fusiform, lingual, and orbito-frontal gyrus). These findings provide further evidence that brain anatomy is associated with gender identity, where measures in MTF transsexuals appear to be shifted away from gender-congruent men."

2014 study using novel methods of assessing neuron connectivity finds consistent differences in MtF and FtM transsexuals (pre hormone therapy) as compared to controls. "Importantly, these parameters separated each patient group from the remaining subjects for the majority of significant findings." This is one of the studies that suggest there is something unique going on in transsexuals' brains that is neither male-like nor female-like.

Brand new 2015 study. Another grey-matter study. This is one of the studies finding evidence for partly but not fully sex-reversed brains. That is, some aspects of brain structure of transsexuals resemble their natal sex while others resemble their chosen sex. Specifically: "region of interest analyses indicated less GM volume in the right cerebellum and more volume in the medial frontal cortex in female-to-males in comparison to girls without GD, while male-to-females had less volume in the bilateral cerebellum and hypothalamus than natal boys."

Caveat: this is not my own area of research and I might have missed some recent studies. But as I said it's uncontroversial among endocrinologists that the brain is permanently "wired" for certain aspects of sexual behavior in early fetal life, and that this "wiring" can and does sometimes go awry, such that it is possible to end up with a brain has features of one sex inside a body that has anatomy of the other sex.

Dizzybro · 1ヶ月前

Emphasis on "young" and "athlete". Example - amenorrhea is actually more common in young female athletes than in old women who are approaching menopause.

MisterCooper8472 · 1ヶ月前

Fun fact, whale baleen is actually compressed sheets of hair.

NinjaDiscoJesus · 1ヶ月前

Nice ideas but - (1) Most female elephants in captivity don't die till they're past menopause. Their eggs would be no good. Wild elephants die younger, but nobody's around when they die; due to the size of hte body and hte large population of gut bacteria, internal organs are typically liquefied before anybody finds the carcass.

(2) Backpack blood sampler: This is my dream. It's not possible with current technology. Hormones are extremely tricky to detect because they are only present in parts-per-billion, such low concentrations that there was a Nobel Prize awarded for the first practical method of measuring them at all. It's not like measuring sodium or potassium or something that's present in much higher concentrations - there are quick-n-easy tests for all of those, but not for hormones. (exception: pregnancy hormones, but that's only possible because you can focus on a hormone that isn't present at all in nonpregnant individuals, e.g. you can do a conceptually simple presence/absence test. But ovulation, unfortunately, is triggered by a subtle shift of the ratio of hormones that are always there - so presence/absence isn't helpful. You need a correct measure of absoulte concentration and that's actually pretty difficult to do when you're dealing with ppm and ppb level concentrations.)

Subsidiary problem: a backpack style device requires an intravenous catheter, which is inevitably a very high infection risk. I used to work in a monkey lab that used IV catheters on the monkeys. They had to be chained into vests and chained into cages to keep the catheter site clean. I can't picture a way to do this with an elephant that would (a) even be possible logistically and (b) that wouldn't result in a breach of animal ethics and/or in the elephant getting a blood infection.

Anyway - if you could develop a backpack style miniaturized hormone-assay device, every wildlife researcher in the world would use it and you'd be a millionaire (I would instantly be putting the thing on every species I study) so let me know if you can pull it off!

Dizzybro · 1ヶ月前

Endocrinologist here, cessation of menstruation (amenorrhea) is surprisingly common in female high school and college athletes among what they call the "thin build" sports - sports in which thinness is an advantage. Thin-build sports include: endurance running, dancing, gymnastics, cheerleading, diving and some others. Amenorrhea is most common in endurance runners and dancers, among which 2/3 of female athletes have very lengthened menstrual cycles (longer than 35 days) or will stop cycling entirely (defined as cycle length of 3mo or more). Even in casual recreational endurance runners that appear to have normal cycles, about 1/3 of those cycles actually have hormonal irregularities indicating that the women are on the edge of amenorrhea.

In cheerleading, gymnastics and diving about 1/4 of female athletes have amenorrhea.

Amenorrhea is one of 3 health disorders that tend to affect young female athletes disproportionately - the other two are eating disorders and osteoporosis. They tend to go together. Sports physicians call this trio of problems - eating disorders, amenorrhea and osteoporosis - the "female athlete triad" and there has been a lot of research on how to identify young women who are starting to slide into this, and how to help them pull out of it. A good sports coach will know about this and will be on the lookout for it.

The mechanism is surprisingly simple: Fat tissue actually makes estrogen. Think of it as the "fat report", from the fat tissue to the reproductive system, telling the reproductive system how much fuel is available to support a pregnancy. Anyway, the less fat you have, the less estrogen is in your blood. Ovulation is triggered by sufficient estrogen in the 1st half of the cycle, and if you don't have enough estrogen from your body fat, you just don't reach the threshold ready to trigger ovulation. There are some other mechanisms too but that's one of them.

NinjaDiscoJesus · 1ヶ月前

I'm a biologist who studies elephant reproduction. I've been saying for years that sequencing the mammoth genome would be the easy part; putting the genome in an egg, the egg in an elephant and getting a baby on the ground, is going to be orders or magnitude more difficult.

People seem to have this idea you can just stick a genome into some handy supply of elephant ova that is sitting around in a freezer somewhere and then magically pop one to a female. You could do that with cows or mice, sure, because we have hundreds of thousands of cows and mice to experiment on and it's already been done hundreds of thousands of times and the techniques are all worked out. Unfortunately you have to work out all those techniques all over again with each new species. And elephants are endangered and there's just not enough study subjects and they have a loooong cycle time.

Here's the current state of reproductive technology in elephants (bear in mind this is after a lot of international efforts by very smart teams for multiple decades to try to save the three existing elephant spectes, all of which are endangered):

Nobody's ever successfully isolated an elephant egg (ever), and not for lack of trying.
most zoo females won't ovulate, and the few that do are erratic. Half are near menopause. Females that in theory should be fertile but that have never bred become infertile for some unknown reason.
The very few that ovulate regularly have a 3 month cycle. Young animals don't breed for a decade. It is maddening trying to work out any repro tech In an animal with a cycle that long.
We've learned that even just identifying the day one of the rare cycling females is likely to ovulate requires daily blood sample collection. This alone requires a ton of investment and commitment: now you need a very well trained and tolerant elephant who will put up with daily blood collection, and that means you need about 4-6 full time trainers to cover all shifts, 2 full time vets, an on site hormone lab and also a half time endocrinologist (me) doing daily assays on the daily fresh blood that is rushed over from the elephant barn each morning (I have done this job for 2 zoos). Your budget is now a million bucks a year just to cover those running salary costs. (+fringe+overhead) All that is just to find out IF and WHEN she ovulates.
If you start doing the budget math here you'll quickly realize you need a full zoo just to support your running costs. This is going take decades and no single 3-year grant can cover it. You need a dedicated full permanent facility with an elephant barn, But no North American or European zoo will help you, because they'll lose their certification if they use a female elephant for any other purpose than breeding baby eleohants. Because Asian elephants are critically endangered.
Ok, assuming you got some elephants somehow and one of them finally ovulates: You are never going to find that egg. The tools to flush the reproductive tract do not exist. Back up here and spend a while considering the size and length of the elephant reproductive tract. It's meters long. You'll have to develop your own tools. BTW elephants do very poorly under full anesthesia so good luck with the abdominal surgery route. Also remember if you miss the one day she ovulated, you can't try again for another 3 months.
Supoosing you get an egg. One isn't enough. You typically need hundreds to develop consistently reliable genome transfer and embryo transfer technology. Repeat the above a hundred times. This is going to require a large stable of some 100 females that are all cycling. There are not 100 cycling females in all zoos worldwide put together. You could possibly do it in Thailand or India with domestic elephants (there are several thousand domesticated female elephants there, classed as livestock).
There's another idea of using genetically engineered mice to house elephant ovaries - but even just developing that (and getting the ovary, and then figuring out the hormonal milieu and schedule to coax it to ovulate) will take a long time, imho on the order of a couple decades.
Suppose we get the genome into an egg and coax the thing to develop. Quick, put it in a surrogate female! Oh wait - back to the original problem - not enough cycling females. Also we can't hormonally prime a female to accept an embryo at any old time because it turns out elephants use a unique form of progesterone that no other mammal in the world uses and it is not commercially available, They also have a unique double LH surge right before ovulation - no other animal in the world does that. We're back here to needing a stable of females all cycling so that hopefully one of them wil be cycling at the right time. Even if you get all that done, there's no physical way to get the egg into the girl - the tools don't exist. Also the abdominal surgery problem again.
So basically you need a rich crazy billionaire, a stable of 100 cycling females and a high-tech lab in Thailand, and even then it's going to be failure after failure for decades.

Not saying it can never happen, but it's going to be a very long road. It took 20 years just to work out AI in elephants (the simplest possible thing: stick sperm into a female) and even that's still very erratic. I don't expect to see a baby mammoth in my lifetime.

findingmydirection · 1ヶ月前

I turn 50 in a week. I move a lot, am not sentimental, and I'm at the stage in life where you start jettisoning stuff. I've long since ditched all the childhood stuff and I don't keep heirlooms since I have no kids and have nobody to pass them on to. But there's still a few things I hold on and as my 50th rolls around I find myself taking stock of what I've chosen to keep. My list:

the tiny "finish line" made of cardboard and a piece of medal ribbon that was set up after the Boston marathon bombing, two years ago, at the place the runners all came the next day to collect their personal bags. These were runners who'd trained for years and had been unable to finish. They'd step over this tiny little finish line we'd made and we'd take a picture and put their medal around their neck and they'd burst into tears. At the end of night the organizers were going to throw it away so I stuck it in my pocket. My little piece of history. I need to remember that week and what happened and how I reacted, so I will keep that.
my grandmother's amber butterfly pin that she gave to me when she knew she was dying.
the Sambodromo admission cards for the seven Rio de Janeiro Carnavals that I've gone to. Too many awesome memories to toss those, and they're little.
Tichets for the London Olympics. Ditto.
The backstage pass for when I got to play with Pink Martini, and one copy of the cd that I'm on with them.
a quilt that was started by my great-grandmother and finished by my mom. But I am eventually going to pass this on to my nephews if they ever have any kids of their own.
the drum I used the one and only time that I led a major city parade.
a tiny box of the tiny yellow field data boxes that have all the raw data from my PhD in Alaska.
a small caribou antler from Alaska. I used to have a bunch, then tossed them, then regretted it, so when I went back last year I searched for (and found) a small antler from a female, one small enough I can take it with me if I move again. I don't ever want to forget Alaska.
On my bookshelf: my dad's copy of Moby Dick, given to him by his dad back in the 40s. I study whales now so it's a meaningful gift. Next to that is a copy of my mom's PhD, then a copy of my own. Then the complete works of Shakespeare that my mom gave me when I was a teenager, 35 years ago now. Then Birds of Peru from my dad.
a black Takamine guitar given to me by the love of my life. Our relationship did not last but it's a very fond memory and looking back it was the best relationship I ever had, and the closest I ever came to getting married. He gave me the guitar long after we split up, as a gesture of friendship.

I think that's it.

Betsy514 · 1ヶ月前

Yup, they're pointless - as is absolutely everything else we do in life! That's kind of why I love them - seeing people set a goal, a difficult goal, and attain it, even if it doesn't even lead to anything after that. I've never done a marathon (my knees won't allow it, which is why I volunteer instead) but I've done many much more pointless things in my life: learned to kayak whitewater rivers, mastered a completely pointless 4-part harmony advanced barbership song, got a goal in my head at one point of playing snare drum and making the cut to play in the Rio de Janeiro Carnaval parades (this took three years out of my life), then I decided to write a series of books, then I wanted to hike around the American West, then I decided to go to Alaska and study birds... I did do all of those things and when I look back, maybe they were all pointless but they were also the best times of my life. In a way it feels to me like that's what life is FOR: doing those oddly crazy pointless things where you push yourself to excel.

There's just something really engrossing and cool about setting yourself a challenge, in this case a physical one, alongside bunches of other people who are also into the same thing, and seeing if you can do it.

I'll never be able to run a marathon myself but I get why people do it.

And yeah, it's just a fun day!

Betsy514 · 1ヶ月前

omg that's awesome.

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