I wish all of you a Happy New Year! May 2021 prove to be better than what we experienced in 2020. For everyone!

I’ve been hard at work all though the holidays and you’ll hopefully be able to see and read some of the things that I’ve been working on in the new year. Whatever else happens, I promise you there will be more stories here on the blog, in my newsletter and elsewhere for you to read. And there will be even more podcasts and probably more streams, too, than you’ve got in 2020. I promise I won’t slow down in 2021, so let’s go! Let’s make it an awesome year!

When I was just deleting some old drafts that I will never finish out of the file structure for this website and commiting the changes to my version control system, I titled the commit “cutting my losses”. I began to wonder where that expression came from. Well, I looked it up and I’m here to share the knowledge with you. According to the English Language Stack Exchange, the expression to cut one’s losses dates back to the early days of the London Stock Exchange, which was founded in 1801:

The original form was “cut short your losses” and was popularly attributed to the economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), though this maxim never appeared in any of his published works. He had what he called his own three golden rules; the observance of which he used to press on his private friends. These were:

“Never to refuse an option when you can get it.
“Cut short your loses.
“Let your profits run on.”

By cutting short one’s losses, Mr. Ricardo meant that, when a member had made a purchase of stock, and prices were falling, he ought to resell immediately. These are indeed golden rules, and may be applied with advantage to innumerable transactions other than those connected with the Stock Exchange. – “A Practical Treatise on Business,” The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, vol. 27, New York, 1852, p. 436f.

Divorced from any mention of Ricardo, the maxim could vary: “Cut your losses. Your profits will take care of themselves. (Provided you let them.)” An NGram shows that around 1900, cut your losses short began to be more frequent, most likely because of the more pleasing rhythm.

At the same time, more and more speakers were, as the 1852 Merchant’s Magazine article suggests, applying the maxim “with advantage to innumerable transactions other than those connected with the Stock Exchange.” The saying has entered general use divorced from any connection to stock trading and can describe getting out of any bad situation before it gets even worse.

So I’m listening to this cover by the principal composer of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack (P. T. Adamczyk) of a song from that very soundtrack (Never Fade Away by SAMURAI, Keanu Reeves' fictional band in the game) and I’m thinking to myself: This could literally be a Bond title song.

I saw in you what life was missing
You lit a flame that consumed my hate
I’m not one for reminiscing but
I’d trade it all for your sweet embrace

Down to the lyrics and the actual title of the song.

There’s a canvas with two faces
Of fallen angels who loved and lost
It was a passion for the ages
And in the end, guess we paid the cost

Just imagine it… 007: Never Fade Away.

I see your eyes, I know you see me
You’re like a ghost how you’re everywhere
I am your demon never leaving
A metal soul of rage and fear

It would totally work.

Right. Still here on my mission to finish my blog to-do list before the year is up. Here are a few streams I did in November and early December, before the Cyberpunk 2077 bug bit me. Maybe some of these are interesting to you after the fact. First off, I streamed about six hours of Elite Dangerous:

Then, I built another one of these great Cobi sets:

And lastly, I also played some World of Warcraft. For the first time in literally decades.

This photo was taken in Isernhagen, in November of 2016. The last time we had proper snow. I wish we had this kind of weather today. It’s my preferred mood for Christmas Eve, which is when the main Christmas celebration happens here in Germany.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Whatever you celebrate – or don’t – I hope you have a good time with your loved ones over the next few days.

Science never sleeps. Certainly not during the holidays. My wife has just published a new paper on the autonomic nervous system and its role with respect to cardiac electrophysiology.

→ Location, Dissection, and Analysis of the Murine Stellate Ganglion, Scherschel, Bräuninger et al., JoVE

The autonomic nervous system is a substantial driver of cardiac electrophysiology. Especially the role of its sympathetic branch is an ongoing matter of investigation in the pathophysiology of ventricular arrhythmias (VA). Neurons in the stellate ganglia (SG) – bilateral star-shaped structures of the sympathetic chain – are an important component of the sympathetic infrastructure.

The SG are a recognized target for treatment via cardiac sympathetic denervation in patients with therapy-refractory VA. While neuronal remodeling and glial activation in the SG have been described in patients with VA, the underlying cellular and molecular processes that potentially precede the onset of arrhythmia are only insufficiently understood and should be elucidated to improve autonomic modulation. Mouse models allow us to study sympathetic neuronal remodeling, but identification of the murine SG is challenging for the inexperienced investigator. Thus, in-depth cellular and molecular biological studies of the murine SG are lacking for many common cardiac diseases.

Here, we describe a basic repertoire for dissecting and studying the SG in adult mice for analyses at RNA level (RNA isolation for gene expression analyses, in situ hybridization), protein level (immunofluorescent whole mount staining), and cellular level (basic morphology, cell size measurement). We present potential solutions to overcome challenges in the preparation technique, and how to improve staining via quenching of autofluorescence. This allows for the visualization of neurons as well as glial cells via established markers in order to determine cell composition and remodeling processes. The methods presented here allow characterizing the SG to gain further information on autonomic dysfunction in mice prone to VA and can be complemented by additional techniques investigating neuronal and glial components of the autonomic nervous system in the heart.

Since JoVE is a video journal, there soon will be a video version of the paper. Which should have some nice visuals. Just look at this beautiful microscopy!

Image: Dr. Katharina Scherschel

Here’s more of the Cyberpunk 2077 music on Spotify:

I also made a playlist for the music of SAMURAI, Keanu Reeves' fictional band in the game, which is portrayed by the Swedish punk band Refused:

I’m currently going through my to-do list of all the things I still need to do before the year is up and there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve done that I haven’t posted on the blog about. Like this stream of me doing some voxel art with Magica Voxel. Might be interesting to some.

Need to continue with that, actually. More stuff to do in the new year…

I really dig the music in Cyberpunk 2077. The first parts of the soundtrack have now started to crop up on Spotify. Well worth a listen:

Yesterday, I streamed twelve and a half hours of Cyberpunk 2077. Longest stream I’ve ever done. Twitch managed to export it to YouTube, but it got split up after twelve hours. Probably some kind of limit somewhere.

“Writer's Delight”

Next Thursday, 10 December, Cyberpunk 2077 is finally going to be released. A game we’ve been waiting on since 2012. To mark the occasion, I will be streaming it all day, starting at 09:00 CET. See you in Twitch chat next Thursday, I hope!

Stay up-to-date with my streaming schedule by checking this page frequently.

Image: CD Projekt Red / Twitter

I’ve just released the final episode of the year for The Private Citizen. Here, I’m taking a look back at the year through the lens of all the topics I’ve covered. It’s also a good episode to listen to if you haven’t been on board from the beginning and want to know what episodes are particularly interesting to go back to.

Enjoy this last one for the year. And enjoy the holidays. I know I will. And I’ll be back in January recharged and with a fresh outlook on the show.

→ The Private Citizen 50: The Year 2020 in Review

A look back at the first year of this podcast, the topics covered and how the show changed with them.

You can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

“Eye of the Beholder”