taxicabjesus
Joined 10 years ago
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Jan 31
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 days ago
I bought Sully Sullenberger's book in early 2012. He's the pilot who perfectly ditched his Airbus A320 in the Hudson River after losing both engines on takeoff to bird strikes.
One of the things from the book was how Sully spent a lot of time investigating other pilots' accidents: 'was there anything that pilot could have done to have survived?' When he got to his own emergency situation over the Hudson, time slowed down and he decided over the course of a few seconds that ditching in the river was their only option.
"One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sully_Sullenberger
Comment · 4 months ago
What is it that motivates you to continue wearing a mask?
I take note of people who are still masking, but I have compassion for their fear so I don't say anything.
Comment · 9 months ago
https://www.taxiwars.org/ - this site is mostly composed of my diaries and stories from Kuro5hin.org (RIP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802 ). "I posted at K5 because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193286
My submission of my then-new website got a little time on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193273
I have a bunch of notes for posts I started but haven't yet finished. The Predicaments of Old People seems important. A Medical Hack Job is about a young woman who couldn't afford the pills the ER doctors had prescribed her.
There have been a few posts since K5 went away. 'False Prophecy' was about the time I became a false prophet. I'd forgotten all about this anecdote until the next time I went out to look at a lunar eclipse. https://www.taxiwars.org/2020/10/false-prophesy.html
Comment · 10 months ago
One of the earliest findings of the investigations into oxygen that O2 is toxic in excess.
Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) (google.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728
The Haldane Effect and the Bohr Effect are the central findings that explain the transportation and exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane_effect / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
People who hyperventilate exhale too much carbon dioxide, which disrupts the acid/alkaline balance of the blood and makes it harder for the body to use the oxygen available to it.
The Apollo capsules were originally spec'd to use a mixed gas atmosphere. When the capsule got too heavy they switched to using a pure-O2 atmosphere. After the Apollo 1 fire they switched to using an atmospheric mix (80/20 N2/O2) at launch, which gradually changed to pure oxygen as the flights progressed.
Treatment with pure oxygen is not helpful for sick people:
Mortality/morbidity: acutely ill adults liberal vs. conservative Oxygen Tx (2018) (thelancet.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993262
I typed up some notes about oxygen toxicity: https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...
Medicine decided that the antidote to oxygen toxicity didn't need to be used anymore in the mid-1950's.
Comment · 1 year ago
The more you drive the more you notice things. After a few years in the taxi, while going through the tunnel in central Phoenix, I pointed at the cars in the far-left lanes of the freeway and said to my passenger, "you see that car right there? It's going to change into the next lane, and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes." My passenger was amazed when exactly this happened seconds later.
Comment · 1 year ago
The Egyptian pyramids are an elephant in the room. Conventional thinking is they're burial chambers built with copper tools and ramps.
But other historians believe they reflect a lost technological sophistication. The pyramids are incredibly precise: perfectly aligned to true north (within ~0.05°), made with millions of 2-70 ton blocks and precise internal engineering for passageways and chambers. Someone recently advocated that there's substantial subterranean infrastructure under the pyramids. The technology to move 70 ton blocks didn't exist again until the 1800's.
One of modern science's ideological straitjackets is Oliver Heaviside's restatement of Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns into four vector calculus equations. Heaviside's restatements made the math accessible to regular engineers who wanted to build things. But the restatements are arguably a simplification that neutered electromagnetism: https://x.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1964345590604845487 (Grok had a nice answer for "what phenomenon are inadequately explained by Heaviside's four equations?").
The Coral Castle in Florida was a labor of love, built by a single man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle
The stones are fastened together without mortar.
They are set on top of each other using their
weight to keep them together. The craftsmanship
detail is so fine and the stones are connected
with such precision that no light passes through
the joints.
Comment · 1 year ago
My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.
My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.
The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...
Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...
Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21
> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.
I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.
U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]
Comment · 1 year ago
> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes
I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> but ended up sowing distrust.
Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?
Comment · 1 year ago
There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet
Contaminants are a common problem in industrial food manufacturing: citric acid (fungal contaminants), vitamin C (heavy metals), and "enzymes" (?).
I'm glad Italians insist their cheeses be made following the traditional methods.
Comment · 1 year ago
The story is about how medicine assumes that if a little oxygen is good, more is better. But in the real world too much oxygen destroys lungs, and we’re all deteriorated by even a little too much O2.
I, for one, welcome the reconsideration of oxygen anti-therapy.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is an important story. A lot of people are over-oxygenated by their health care professionals.
A common way that people induce 'too much oxygen' is by hyperventilating. One effect of hyperventilating is that it shrinks the peripheral arteries - in the brain, fingers, toes.
The simplest treatment for hyperventilation is recycling exhaled carbon dioxide with a paper bag.
Comment · 1 year ago
I put a top-level post on this submission requesting more poll options.
> contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science"
My poll attempted to ascribed malice to the powerful people who use the trappings of science to concentrate wealth. I made a similar comment 2 days ago: "[...] the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053362
> self corrections or false accusations
I went to a seminar around 2004. The speaker mentioned a foundational science mistake from the 1800's. In the past year I've heard this mistake was corrected, but the correction was classified. <shrug>.
There is no official guide to "how to prevent your child from becoming Autistic", so this issue is still open.
Thanks for the feedback.
Comment · 1 year ago
What if admitting science-mistakes made the weight loss drugs unnecessary? I'm sure the causes of the obesity epidemic could be acknowledged without framing it as a mistake.
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