thecyborganizer

Joined 13 years ago

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Mar 20

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Comment · 8 months ago

xkcd explored this question. too fuel-inefficient to be practical. much better to use that same fuel to run a giant snowblower (and move the snow rather than melt it).

https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/

Comment · 2 years ago

An enormous amount - see, for example, this study: https://www.voteriders.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDCE_V...

About 10% of eligible voters don't have the ID they would need. The people most likely to lack proper ID for voting are young, Black or Hispanic, and poor.

Lots more details in the report!

Comment · 2 years ago

Total nonsense, there are no studies that link colic to formula feeding. Some newborns have digestive problems with formula; some newborns have digestive problems with breast milk. Formula digestive problems can sometimes be helped by switching to a different formulation, while breast milk digestive problems can sometimes be helped by changing the diet of the breastfeeding parent.

And there are sources of colic that have nothing to do with digestion - a quick perusal of WebMD lists noise/light sensitivity, nervous system misfires, and baby migraines (poor babies)!

Colic certainly might be an indicator that something is not quite right, but that doesn't mean there's always something you can do about it. As I write this with my exhausted newborn son sleeping in my arms, sometimes you just have to wait for them to grow out of it.

EDIT: I looked into this a little more since I'm pinned by a sleepy baby and as with everything with babies it's complicated. Here's a study that shows that formula-fed babies cry more at 2 weeks than breast-fed babies, but less at 6 weeks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10193923/

This is probably also hindered by the fact that "colic" is an imprecise term - all babies cry, but at a certain point if they cry enough you call it "colic".

Comment · 2 years ago

It would be safe and effective if we had a mechanism of distributing nuclear waste evenly throughout the entire volume of the Earth's oceans. But we don't have that and that's impossible to build!

Dumping nuclear waste into the ocean will, mathematically, result in a globally acceptable concentration of nuclear waste in ocean water - but it will be locally problematic for wherever we put it, and that's assuming it stays put.

Comment · 2 years ago

As a doctor, why bother spending your time learning about exotic foreign cancer treatments that aren't available in your country, and your patients couldn't afford if they were?

It would be nice if doctors did anyway, but I can certainly understand why they wouldn't.

Comment · 2 years ago

I shared this with my spouse, who worked for an ag startup in Boston (still exists, different leadership, who knows what they're up to now). They had this to say on the matter:

One big competitive advantage of [company] was that we were able to hire smart, young ag scientists, especially LBGTQ+ ones, who wanted to live in a big, queer-friendly city. We had a lot of great people who were really excited that they didn't have to live in Davis or Ithaca, as well as people whose partners' careers tied them to a big city in some way (doctors, lawyers, finance).

(They would also add UMich, University of Minnesota, and the Research Triangle in NC to your list.)

Comment · 3 years ago

Paying a fee per job done, rather than a wage per hour of labor, is literally the entire point of the gig economy. Uber/DoorDash/etc. claim this is a perk, since you can set your own hours.

However, food delivery gig workers in New York City and a few other places have recently successfully won the right to earn a fixed minimum wage: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/09/28/minimum-hourly-pay-court-...

Comment · 3 years ago

From STYLE.TXT:

  - True=7 -

  Having lots of very low-level code and hardware experience, I developed a bit
  of tendancy to "minimize what can go wrong at low levels" - C treats 0==FALSE
  and !0==TRUE - most people use 0/1 ... but thats only 1 bit "difference".  I
  sometimes use 7=TRUE as thats 3 bits with no more chars to type (and of course
  foolish as such a 1 bit hardware error would "trash" pretty much any system -
  but I do tend to be a creature of habit :)

I have never heard of this convention before! Was "random bitflips messing with your conditionals" a common problem back in the day?

Comment · 3 years ago