Oh no! With 'worthless for weapons' Pu238 and $100 of explosives someone has caused billion of dollars of damage.
The explosion would warrant news, and a response by the bomb squad. In a short time, the news would leak that there was plutonium in the explosion. At that point, the entire population of the city would panic and head out of town. At least several dozen would be killed (migrate a large city at a moment's notice and statistically deaths will occur)
All the people in that city know at this moment is that a bomb went off, and radiation was detected. If it gets announced that the radiation is from Plutonium and not Gadolinium or Americium, then it's going to be a panic. Plutonium = nuclear bomb to the general public.
So now you have an entire city on panic, and the nation will be glued to the news reports, or headed home themselves. A copycat bomber at this point would be devastating, a second actual dirty bomb would be the call to 'Shut Down Everything' as no one is going to remain in a city while dirty bombs are exploding.
So now you have the entire country in fear, thanks to 'Up to the minute latest reports' coming from CNN/FOX/etc.
Let's go forward a few weeks:
Bills need to be paid, and people are going back to work, but not the people of the original sites. Those places are going to be off limits, both due to crime scene investigation, and people's fear of radiation, especially plutonium. Everyone in the city will be wearing dust masks, even if miles away.
It's going to be a good long time before the government can convince people that the radiation zones are small. Until then, people will take no chances. Cleanup is going to be expensive as hell as material must be removed enmass.
Buildings adjacent to the target will likely remain closed for a longer period of time than necessary. Lawsuits are going to be coming for any building that even clicks once/minute on a geigercounter, so owners will be ultracautious....
Ok, I could go on, but you can see that the 'damage' from the dirty bomb is not in the literal physical damage. A cheap bomb can cause millions of damage, and one that utilizes 'bomb' associated components like plutonium will cause billions and several deaths even if the initial blast fails to kill any.
Out of print books can also be brought back into print. If nothing else, buy the rights from the publisher and just print it yourself. It won't be the $4.95 you'd pay for the paperback in a random bookstore, though.
So who do you negotiate with when the rights to publish have been sold, split, lost, forgotten, claimed, claimed again, and partially resold again?
I would wager that there exists a great deal of work out there which is still under copyright, but of unknown ownership.
That's what the two-year contract is for -- to amortize the cost of the $600 phone over 2 years while still giving them (Verizon, et al) service profits.
Fair enough, if that's how the cost plays out so you don't have to pay for a laptop equivalent up front. But you are still buying it, so it should be yours at the end.
You are almost there...
The carriers are not amortizing the phones. From a legal perspective, the ownership of the physical device is transferred at the start of the contract when the person pays the agreed upon price. Sales taxes on the phone are paid at the beginning, and any future payments are against the service being provided, not the phone itself.
Therefore, the phone is yours at the beginning, regardless of the terms of the service contract.
For the phone to be yours at the end, you would have to be paying against an amortized debt, and you would be gaining equity in the property until the debt is paid in full. The carriers do NOT want to do it this way because such a transfer incurs a different set of laws and obligations.
There is nothing limiting the width of the birth canal
Wait what? I don't believe that. It is estimated that historically 1/100 childbirths resulted in the death of the mother (not even counting death of the child). Granted not all of those deaths are the result of a narrow birth canal, but even if only a fraction of them were, that would be a HUGE evolutionary pressure.
If there were no limits, then we would not be seeing so many deaths as a result of narrow birth canals. So there MUST be something limiting it. My understanding is that the limit is because when you get any larger, it began to significantly impact womens' walking gait and hip joint complications.
Burial sites were typically small things, typically limited to familial units. IIRC if there were burial sites with many Neanderthals, they were 'reused' in series rather than simultaneously used by a larger clan.
In otherwords, they had cooperation, but not complex organization. The closest analog in the animal kingdom would probably be something like the matrilinial grouping of Elephants. Tight knit groups who stay together their entire lives, but with a few exceptions, they don't really join up to form tribes.
So while Neanderthals would cooperate in groups of 10-12 (Not sure on the number), Homo Sapiens would form tribes of dozens of individuals (obviously eventually going far beyond that).
I'd say that being able to organize in that manner was a huge evolutionary advantage. In a tribe of 60 individuals, children could be raised by the semi-fit while the most productive members were allowed to be productive (sewing/repairing/hunting/gathering). If 5 people got injured in a group of 60, it was bad, but you had perhaps 75% of the tribe (excluding small children) to pick up the slack. If 5 people got injured in a group of 15, there were probably only 5 highly productive members left to pick up the burden.
So in 3 weeks when the registered owners of the SUV receive a letter containing an automated speeding fine, they can admonish the kids for spe.... Oh yeah, there might be a flaw in that cunning plan.
The delayed notice of infraction is another issue with these cameras. Very often people will speed right along, never knowing that in 2-3 weeks someone will be receiving a letter. At least when a police officer pulls you over, it's immediately after the fact and gives instant feedback to a person's driving habits.
The first time I ever saw a speeding camera trigger its flash, someone was passing me doing about 60 in a 50mph zone. Unfortunately I was right between him and the camera, so I had 3 weeks to wonder if I'd be getting a random tax in the mail. Even though I never received a ticket, it was still annoying to have the feeling that something was hanging over my head. These cameras really degrade the quality of life even when you don't speed.
Intentional harm is rare, but make no mistake: this sort of "honest mistake" IS negligence.
Part of my frustration with the situation, is that there is very little true culpability for non-obvious mistakes. When I say 'non-obvious' I'm not talking about mistakes which are easy to make, but consequences which are not easily traced back to actual blatant mistakes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not even sure it is possible to fix, which is why it is a frustration. I mean, unless someone drops dead the instant they walk out of the office, it's very hard to say that 'xyz happened because the doctor did or didn't do such and such'. I'm not sure I need such mistakes to be traceable back to doctors in all situations, but I do want doctors to be aware of it and work to minimize those errors.
(And I know many do, but in general, no one reforms unless pressured to)
That said, if you felt the patient was being intentionally mis-treated or incompetently treated then one has to ask why you continued to let this doctor treat the patient? If this guy was such an "asshole" then you can and should demand a different doctor be involved. You always have that right and you should exercise it if needed. What you are describing is grounds for a lawsuit. Did you bring one or are you just trying to bash doctors in general based on one anecdote?
It was the non-surgical doctors/staff which caused the acetaminophen headaches because it was a repeat occurance by which we would constantly discover that they were trying to administer acetaminophen. Basically what was happening was that my relative would tell them not to give him acetaminophen, they would give it to him, and he would have to argue with them and explain exactly why he couldn't take it, then grudgingly they would go back, and get something without acetaminophen. However, this never made it into his records, or was forgotten by the time the next rotation of staff came around. So every day, he would have to check to make sure that they weren't giving him acetaminophen and give the same explanations. The big problem with this, is that at times, due to a MRSA infection (detailed below) he would be out of sorts with a high fever, even hallucinating. So it was a real scary time because he couldn't be relied upon to always verify that they didn't slip back into their old standard delivery of acetaminophen containing drugs. Because of this his primary care doctor recommended that we identify him as allergic to acetaminophen. Because allergies are flagged differently in their systems, and a special allergy tag was placed on his arm, he didn't have to keep reminding them of the reasons why they needed to avoid giving him acetaminophen.
So when I refer to the asshole doctor, it should be taken to be all the doctors who ignored the warning, and didn't ensure that once explained the information was passed on to their replacement. In fact, it was the non-communication/interaction from the doctors, pleasant or otherwise, which resulted in a lot of the problems. Heck, a doctor who was coarse and cranky but actually listened would have been ok by me. It was their ignorance and lapses into convenience which angered me.
Details follow if you are interested:
What was originally supposed to be a single knee surgery turned into an ignored (by the hospital) MRSA infection in the prosthesis, a second surgery to remove the prosthesis and insert an antibiotic disc, an accidental attempted discharge of the patient; stopped only at the last minute after a patient advocate from the VA stopped them, 3 months of recovery from the infection and a secondary infection of a port installed to help treat the first infection, a third surgery to remove the antibiotic treatment and reinstall a knee prosthesis. During the third surgery (performed by a new surgeon) discovered that the first surgeon did not remove all of the original bits of the prosthesis (basically leaving boneshards/glue/etc) and that he couldn't just install the new knee without first cleaning up the mistakes of the first surgeon. Then a fourth surgery to finally install the knee.
I think may have only claimed three surgeries in my other post, but now that I'm trying to type out the details, I realize that there was only supposed to be one surgery, which became three, which became four when the third surgery had to be split into two due to the discovery of mistakes from the second. It was a complicated mess.
There are also two sets of doctors to consider here, there are the doctors/staff which attended my relative during his stay at the hospital, and the surgical doctors. Of the surgical doctors, only the first one seemed to have made mistakes, and his weren't necessarily bad (infections do happen, and in an infected knee I can expect it to be difficult to remove all bits and pieces of a prosthetic knee).
And thank you for illustrating the fact that when people assume they know what is best for the patient and don't involve them in health decisions, you can make some really deadly mistakes.
Antibiotics are a vital weapon in combating serious bacterial infections. To maximize the benefit-to-risk ratio of antibiotic therapy,... it is critical to be vigilant for potential risk factors that may increase the likelihood of a patient experiencing adverse hepatic events,... The latter mainly include a previous experience of hepatic dysfunction with the same antibiotic drug, the co-administration of other drugs known to cause hepatotoxic reactions, a pre-existing hepatic insufficiency without close monitoring of the hepatic function and, depending on the drug, one of several other risk factors
In this case, my relative was going in for a SECOND knee surgery because the first replacement resulted in a MRSA infection which required a second removal surgery to remove the replacement, treatment period to elminate the MRSA, and a third surgery to put in the replacement again.
The doctor screwed up bigtime.
1. He ignored what the patient said 2. He prescribed a drug which was unnecessary because non-acetaminophen containing versions were available but required more oversight (schedule 2 vs schedule 1) 3. He did NOT inform the patient that he was ignoring the other doctor's recommendation against Acetaminophen.
The only reason we caught it was because I explicity told my relative to get confirmation of exactly what pills they gave him or tried to inject into his IV. At the time, I wasn't sure what Paracetamol was, and was able to use google to discover that they were trying to give him something that likely would have killed him.
From first surgery to this incident, due to the MRSA infection he had lost over 60lbs. By any measure he exhibited many risk factors for liver failure, and should never have been given acetaminophen.
The doctor, like you did right now, assumed that he knew more than the patient, and the results were almost deadly.
(If you want to get into the risk of getting surgery so soon after getting over an infection, welcome to the world of working for a living and your disability insurance getting maxed out months earlier. So, surgery and get back to work, or go homeless AND have a leg with no knee, remember the first one was removed to treat the infection)
Moral of the story: Don't tell the doctor you have been advised to not take Acetaminophen, tell them you are allergic so they put a bright pink wristband on you. (isn't that great, we have to lie to the doctor just so they won't ignore your other doctor's directives)
If they want to cast Chairman Mao for the part, they can afford to pay to have him dug him up, fixed up to look good, and reanimated with robotics and a vocoder.
I read that as robotics and a voodooer. So naturally I would definately watch that.
Hmm. I don't see how the company that is sending me my utility bills is getting impacted by spam mitigation measures. I'm pretty sure they just arranged with the ISP to bypass the outgoing filter.
5 minutes on google will tell me that the self-protecting asshole doctor prescribed a relative of mine a drug containing paracetamol, which google helped me learn was a synonym for acetaminophen.
What's the big deal? Well the relative had knee replacement surgery, so painkillers were necessary. The asshole doctor ignored the fact that he was explicitly told not to administer anything containing acetaminophen because the patient had liver disease and explicitly stated such on multiple occassions. The doctor didn't want to go through the hassle/overhead of dealing with a schedule 2 drug, and just prescribed the drug containing acetaminophen.
Even after explaining to him that 'No, this person really needs to not take acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol/etc' we still discovered that they kept 'resetting' and going back to giving him the drug.
So you will have to forgive me for not trusting 10+ years of experience vs google when the asshole kept giving tylenol to a guy with liver disease.
That's exactly WHY these sorts of things get proposed. They are pointless issues that can allow politicians to have a cause which either has no real opponents, or is not possible to oppose. Something not possible to oppose is increasing sentences against Child Rapists. Who would be against THAT? Yet it's the type of legislation that allows a politician to 'Do' while not actually making a difference. (Child rapists are not exactly the kind to consider the consequences for their actions, so increasing the penalty is going to have a negligible effect on the rate of occurrence).
The same thing is going on in the US right now. Because actually doing something on the important issues is 'hard', you will see an increased focus on token legislation or legislation that targets an indefensible group.
You are being unreasonable. You might as well state that anyone who doesnt simultaneously spit on the ground every time 'thing_you_hate' is mentioned is somehow condoning it.
It's especially unreasonable since you complain about him suggesting something concluded in the past when 'has been' is the present perfect tense. In otherwords, it is used when describing a period of time which starts sometime in the past and continues to the present, with no implication that such a thing has stopped unless explicitly stated.
I know it's a bit of a kneejerk reaction whenever someone associated with Theology is mentioned, but given some other statements in the same text, I think that you might be a bit too quick to attack him since he explicitly calls out the behavior you mention. For example:
I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands 'Thus saith the Lord', it lies, and lies dangerously.
and here:
That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity.
I mean, he specifically calls it out as one of the very culprits of tyrrany, so I'm not sure how it's ironic at all.
You are missing the point. We aren't trying to keep a dead planet dead, we are trying to keep it dead long enough so that we know it WAS dead. The equipment we currently can send out now, can generally only tell us if there is life, and some basic details about it. So if we accidentally seeded the life, we would have no way of knowing if the discovery was 'real' or not.
However, there are some very good reasons to not want to contaminate a planet. What if you were trying to evaluate the chemical composition, or soil development process of a 'dead' planet so that you could get a good baseline for what types of chemicals can be produced in the absence of life? Such information would be very useful in scanning for life on other planets. If you know for certain that a 'dead' planet can still produce Methane, then you can save a lot of time and money by NOT running your search for life based only on scanning for methane in the atmosphere. That's just one example, but there are countless tests that you would want to run on a sterile planet which would be impossible to run on a planet that has life (extraterrestrial origin or terrestrial).
One recent example is when a meteor lands on Earth, it is a huge boon to science if they can get that meteorite before it rains. Once it rains, water seeps into the meteorite and chemical processes change the chemistry, and bacteria begin to grow further changing the composition of the meteorite which makes evaluation of just what chemicals/composition/state or even source of the meteorite much more difficult.
So keeping things sterile is very important because there is no going back to the original state once life starts changing the environment. That doesn't mean that seeding life is wrong, just that you don't want to destroy evidence before you have a chance to study and record it.
Another example is the fact that nearly every museum dinosaur fossil on display now is useless from a paleontology standpoint because the original excavators didn't record important information that modern paleontologists now realize is critical. Information that is now permanently lost: What strata was the fossil located, how close was it to other strata? Where was the fossil found (Montana doesn't help, what they want to know is was the fossil discovered in an old extinct stream bed, or 30 meters South, etc.) That information is lost forever because it was never collected before the site was permanently altered. That's what you want to avoid.
I don't program for any tangible practical purpose, but what you said has been very true (for me, at least).
Now... I did my undergrad in Computer Engineering, so I got my fair share of programming, but certainly not to any level where I would be comfortable doing it for a living, but to 'exercise my brain', I took the MITx Intro to programming class mostly as way to remind myself of some of the principles of programming, and I actually felt it helped me quite a bit. It was like doing crossword puzzles to keep my vocabulary up. Nothing I was doing was particularly difficult, but the process of solving the problems was what I was interested in. (That and fixing my terrible grasp of programming syntax. I can give you pseudocode fit for a flight computer, but actually writing the code was anathema to me)
Programming requires a very methodical way of thinking and breaking apart problems into solvable chunks, and because of that, even though I'm not so great at it, I would advocate it as part of a suite of mental 'exercises'.
In no particular order, I recommend:
1. Programming 2. Learning a foreign language to an advanced-beginner stage. 3. Taking a free philosophy course on a topic you are interested in. 4. Design and Build a wood worktable from scratch (2x4s and plywood sheets) 5. Read a highly rated book from a genre you avoid. (for me, it's standard fiction and biographies, so I'm trying out some William Faulkner atm) 6. Start a journal 7. Learn to sketch. Just do one sketch/day 8. Learn an instrument (Ukeleles are cheap, and don't require long fingers) 9. Walk in the park or meditate.
There is no way I can believe that there is a single player game out there that requires more processing power than a single PC can deliver. That seems rather... expensive.
Could you imagine the programmer who approached his boss with THAT one?
Programmer: Yeah boss, turns out that we made the computational requirements of this engine so complex that it requires us to maintain extra servers to handle the calculations for each gamer. So, that's cool right? Boss: So help me god, if you actually think my answer would be yes I may have to throw you out of the window.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis
This seems appropriate to the situation, as a good many in that culture genuinely believe that the censorship performed is not only necessary, but beneficial to their society.
It doesn't matter how well you do in your endeavours if we continuously push 'Chance of life' as a way to get the general public interested. How many times do you think the public can hear about 'Nope, nothing there' when the original headline was 'Amazing new possible discovery that will rock the foundations of the space program". Don't get me wrong, I find the concept of alien geology to be very interesting and love these stories, but please cut back on the 'hints/signs/rumor/promise of life' in headlines.
Before anyone responds with "But we have to make it interesting for the unwashed masses...", I'm going to preempt that with the fact that you don't want space exploration to be relegated to the same 'Overhype/Overpromise' location in the collective consciousness currently reserved for late night infomercials and miracle health products.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! With 'worthless for weapons' Pu238 and $100 of explosives someone has caused billion of dollars of damage.
The explosion would warrant news, and a response by the bomb squad. In a short time, the news would leak that there was plutonium in the explosion. At that point, the entire population of the city would panic and head out of town. At least several dozen would be killed (migrate a large city at a moment's notice and statistically deaths will occur)
All the people in that city know at this moment is that a bomb went off, and radiation was detected. If it gets announced that the radiation is from Plutonium and not Gadolinium or Americium, then it's going to be a panic. Plutonium = nuclear bomb to the general public.
So now you have an entire city on panic, and the nation will be glued to the news reports, or headed home themselves. A copycat bomber at this point would be devastating, a second actual dirty bomb would be the call to 'Shut Down Everything' as no one is going to remain in a city while dirty bombs are exploding.
So now you have the entire country in fear, thanks to 'Up to the minute latest reports' coming from CNN/FOX/etc.
Let's go forward a few weeks:
Bills need to be paid, and people are going back to work, but not the people of the original sites. Those places are going to be off limits, both due to crime scene investigation, and people's fear of radiation, especially plutonium. Everyone in the city will be wearing dust masks, even if miles away.
It's going to be a good long time before the government can convince people that the radiation zones are small. Until then, people will take no chances. Cleanup is going to be expensive as hell as material must be removed enmass.
Buildings adjacent to the target will likely remain closed for a longer period of time than necessary. Lawsuits are going to be coming for any building that even clicks once/minute on a geigercounter, so owners will be ultracautious. ...
Ok, I could go on, but you can see that the 'damage' from the dirty bomb is not in the literal physical damage. A cheap bomb can cause millions of damage, and one that utilizes 'bomb' associated components like plutonium will cause billions and several deaths even if the initial blast fails to kill any.
Out of print books can also be brought back into print. If nothing else, buy the rights from the publisher and just print it yourself. It won't be the $4.95 you'd pay for the paperback in a random bookstore, though.
So who do you negotiate with when the rights to publish have been sold, split, lost, forgotten, claimed, claimed again, and partially resold again?
I would wager that there exists a great deal of work out there which is still under copyright, but of unknown ownership.
That's what the two-year contract is for -- to amortize the cost of the $600 phone over 2 years while still giving them (Verizon, et al) service profits.
Fair enough, if that's how the cost plays out so you don't have to pay for a laptop equivalent up front. But you are still buying it, so it should be yours at the end.
You are almost there...
The carriers are not amortizing the phones. From a legal perspective, the ownership of the physical device is transferred at the start of the contract when the person pays the agreed upon price. Sales taxes on the phone are paid at the beginning, and any future payments are against the service being provided, not the phone itself.
Therefore, the phone is yours at the beginning, regardless of the terms of the service contract.
For the phone to be yours at the end, you would have to be paying against an amortized debt, and you would be gaining equity in the property until the debt is paid in full. The carriers do NOT want to do it this way because such a transfer incurs a different set of laws and obligations.
There is nothing limiting the width of the birth canal
Wait what? I don't believe that. It is estimated that historically 1/100 childbirths resulted in the death of the mother (not even counting death of the child). Granted not all of those deaths are the result of a narrow birth canal, but even if only a fraction of them were, that would be a HUGE evolutionary pressure.
If there were no limits, then we would not be seeing so many deaths as a result of narrow birth canals. So there MUST be something limiting it. My understanding is that the limit is because when you get any larger, it began to significantly impact womens' walking gait and hip joint complications.
Burial sites were typically small things, typically limited to familial units. IIRC if there were burial sites with many Neanderthals, they were 'reused' in series rather than simultaneously used by a larger clan.
In otherwords, they had cooperation, but not complex organization. The closest analog in the animal kingdom would probably be something like the matrilinial grouping of Elephants. Tight knit groups who stay together their entire lives, but with a few exceptions, they don't really join up to form tribes.
So while Neanderthals would cooperate in groups of 10-12 (Not sure on the number), Homo Sapiens would form tribes of dozens of individuals (obviously eventually going far beyond that).
I'd say that being able to organize in that manner was a huge evolutionary advantage. In a tribe of 60 individuals, children could be raised by the semi-fit while the most productive members were allowed to be productive (sewing/repairing/hunting/gathering). If 5 people got injured in a group of 60, it was bad, but you had perhaps 75% of the tribe (excluding small children) to pick up the slack. If 5 people got injured in a group of 15, there were probably only 5 highly productive members left to pick up the burden.
You got it all wrong, this campaign is played as zerg.
No, he could be right. Perhaps he just isn't a very good player! ;)
Define 'sighted in properly'. It only takes a few shots to know how far off the sight is, and then you can easily compensate for that.
So in 3 weeks when the registered owners of the SUV receive a letter containing an automated speeding fine, they can admonish the kids for spe.... Oh yeah, there might be a flaw in that cunning plan.
The delayed notice of infraction is another issue with these cameras. Very often people will speed right along, never knowing that in 2-3 weeks someone will be receiving a letter. At least when a police officer pulls you over, it's immediately after the fact and gives instant feedback to a person's driving habits.
The first time I ever saw a speeding camera trigger its flash, someone was passing me doing about 60 in a 50mph zone. Unfortunately I was right between him and the camera, so I had 3 weeks to wonder if I'd be getting a random tax in the mail. Even though I never received a ticket, it was still annoying to have the feeling that something was hanging over my head. These cameras really degrade the quality of life even when you don't speed.
18-22' of snow? Good for you Paul, unfortunately the rest of us don't have giant blue oxen to help us dig out.
Intentional harm is rare, but make no mistake: this sort of "honest mistake" IS negligence.
Part of my frustration with the situation, is that there is very little true culpability for non-obvious mistakes. When I say 'non-obvious' I'm not talking about mistakes which are easy to make, but consequences which are not easily traced back to actual blatant mistakes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not even sure it is possible to fix, which is why it is a frustration. I mean, unless someone drops dead the instant they walk out of the office, it's very hard to say that 'xyz happened because the doctor did or didn't do such and such'. I'm not sure I need such mistakes to be traceable back to doctors in all situations, but I do want doctors to be aware of it and work to minimize those errors.
(And I know many do, but in general, no one reforms unless pressured to)
That said, if you felt the patient was being intentionally mis-treated or incompetently treated then one has to ask why you continued to let this doctor treat the patient? If this guy was such an "asshole" then you can and should demand a different doctor be involved. You always have that right and you should exercise it if needed. What you are describing is grounds for a lawsuit. Did you bring one or are you just trying to bash doctors in general based on one anecdote?
It was the non-surgical doctors/staff which caused the acetaminophen headaches because it was a repeat occurance by which we would constantly discover that they were trying to administer acetaminophen. Basically what was happening was that my relative would tell them not to give him acetaminophen, they would give it to him, and he would have to argue with them and explain exactly why he couldn't take it, then grudgingly they would go back, and get something without acetaminophen. However, this never made it into his records, or was forgotten by the time the next rotation of staff came around. So every day, he would have to check to make sure that they weren't giving him acetaminophen and give the same explanations. The big problem with this, is that at times, due to a MRSA infection (detailed below) he would be out of sorts with a high fever, even hallucinating. So it was a real scary time because he couldn't be relied upon to always verify that they didn't slip back into their old standard delivery of acetaminophen containing drugs. Because of this his primary care doctor recommended that we identify him as allergic to acetaminophen. Because allergies are flagged differently in their systems, and a special allergy tag was placed on his arm, he didn't have to keep reminding them of the reasons why they needed to avoid giving him acetaminophen.
So when I refer to the asshole doctor, it should be taken to be all the doctors who ignored the warning, and didn't ensure that once explained the information was passed on to their replacement. In fact, it was the non-communication/interaction from the doctors, pleasant or otherwise, which resulted in a lot of the problems. Heck, a doctor who was coarse and cranky but actually listened would have been ok by me. It was their ignorance and lapses into convenience which angered me.
Details follow if you are interested:
What was originally supposed to be a single knee surgery turned into an ignored (by the hospital) MRSA infection in the prosthesis, a second surgery to remove the prosthesis and insert an antibiotic disc, an accidental attempted discharge of the patient; stopped only at the last minute after a patient advocate from the VA stopped them, 3 months of recovery from the infection and a secondary infection of a port installed to help treat the first infection, a third surgery to remove the antibiotic treatment and reinstall a knee prosthesis. During the third surgery (performed by a new surgeon) discovered that the first surgeon did not remove all of the original bits of the prosthesis (basically leaving boneshards/glue/etc) and that he couldn't just install the new knee without first cleaning up the mistakes of the first surgeon. Then a fourth surgery to finally install the knee.
I think may have only claimed three surgeries in my other post, but now that I'm trying to type out the details, I realize that there was only supposed to be one surgery, which became three, which became four when the third surgery had to be split into two due to the discovery of mistakes from the second. It was a complicated mess.
There are also two sets of doctors to consider here, there are the doctors/staff which attended my relative during his stay at the hospital, and the surgical doctors. Of the surgical doctors, only the first one seemed to have made mistakes, and his weren't necessarily bad (infections do happen, and in an infected knee I can expect it to be difficult to remove all bits and pieces of a prosthetic knee).
We did get in contact with a lawyer
And thank you for illustrating the fact that when people assume they know what is best for the patient and don't involve them in health decisions, you can make some really deadly mistakes.
For example, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3112029/
In this case, my relative was going in for a SECOND knee surgery because the first replacement resulted in a MRSA infection which required a second removal surgery to remove the replacement, treatment period to elminate the MRSA, and a third surgery to put in the replacement again.
The doctor screwed up bigtime.
1. He ignored what the patient said
2. He prescribed a drug which was unnecessary because non-acetaminophen containing versions were available but required more oversight (schedule 2 vs schedule 1)
3. He did NOT inform the patient that he was ignoring the other doctor's recommendation against Acetaminophen.
The only reason we caught it was because I explicity told my relative to get confirmation of exactly what pills they gave him or tried to inject into his IV. At the time, I wasn't sure what Paracetamol was, and was able to use google to discover that they were trying to give him something that likely would have killed him.
From first surgery to this incident, due to the MRSA infection he had lost over 60lbs. By any measure he exhibited many risk factors for liver failure, and should never have been given acetaminophen.
The doctor, like you did right now, assumed that he knew more than the patient, and the results were almost deadly.
(If you want to get into the risk of getting surgery so soon after getting over an infection, welcome to the world of working for a living and your disability insurance getting maxed out months earlier. So, surgery and get back to work, or go homeless AND have a leg with no knee, remember the first one was removed to treat the infection)
Moral of the story: Don't tell the doctor you have been advised to not take Acetaminophen, tell them you are allergic so they put a bright pink wristband on you. (isn't that great, we have to lie to the doctor just so they won't ignore your other doctor's directives)
If they want to cast Chairman Mao for the part, they can afford to pay to have him dug him up, fixed up to look good, and reanimated with robotics and a vocoder.
I read that as robotics and a voodooer. So naturally I would definately watch that.
Hmm. I don't see how the company that is sending me my utility bills is getting impacted by spam mitigation measures. I'm pretty sure they just arranged with the ISP to bypass the outgoing filter.
I'm much worse than a pedant, I'm a punner, and nobody likes those.
Its true, British stock speculators are the worst.
5 minutes on google will tell me that the self-protecting asshole doctor prescribed a relative of mine a drug containing paracetamol, which google helped me learn was a synonym for acetaminophen.
What's the big deal? Well the relative had knee replacement surgery, so painkillers were necessary. The asshole doctor ignored the fact that he was explicitly told not to administer anything containing acetaminophen because the patient had liver disease and explicitly stated such on multiple occassions. The doctor didn't want to go through the hassle/overhead of dealing with a schedule 2 drug, and just prescribed the drug containing acetaminophen.
Even after explaining to him that 'No, this person really needs to not take acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol/etc' we still discovered that they kept 'resetting' and going back to giving him the drug.
So you will have to forgive me for not trusting 10+ years of experience vs google when the asshole kept giving tylenol to a guy with liver disease.
That's exactly WHY these sorts of things get proposed. They are pointless issues that can allow politicians to have a cause which either has no real opponents, or is not possible to oppose. Something not possible to oppose is increasing sentences against Child Rapists. Who would be against THAT? Yet it's the type of legislation that allows a politician to 'Do' while not actually making a difference. (Child rapists are not exactly the kind to consider the consequences for their actions, so increasing the penalty is going to have a negligible effect on the rate of occurrence).
The same thing is going on in the US right now. Because actually doing something on the important issues is 'hard', you will see an increased focus on token legislation or legislation that targets an indefensible group.
You are being unreasonable. You might as well state that anyone who doesnt simultaneously spit on the ground every time 'thing_you_hate' is mentioned is somehow condoning it.
It's especially unreasonable since you complain about him suggesting something concluded in the past when 'has been' is the present perfect tense. In otherwords, it is used when describing a period of time which starts sometime in the past and continues to the present, with no implication that such a thing has stopped unless explicitly stated.
I know it's a bit of a kneejerk reaction whenever someone associated with Theology is mentioned, but given some other statements in the same text, I think that you might be a bit too quick to attack him since he explicitly calls out the behavior you mention. For example:
and here:
I mean, he specifically calls it out as one of the very culprits of tyrrany, so I'm not sure how it's ironic at all.
You are missing the point. We aren't trying to keep a dead planet dead, we are trying to keep it dead long enough so that we know it WAS dead. The equipment we currently can send out now, can generally only tell us if there is life, and some basic details about it. So if we accidentally seeded the life, we would have no way of knowing if the discovery was 'real' or not.
However, there are some very good reasons to not want to contaminate a planet. What if you were trying to evaluate the chemical composition, or soil development process of a 'dead' planet so that you could get a good baseline for what types of chemicals can be produced in the absence of life? Such information would be very useful in scanning for life on other planets. If you know for certain that a 'dead' planet can still produce Methane, then you can save a lot of time and money by NOT running your search for life based only on scanning for methane in the atmosphere. That's just one example, but there are countless tests that you would want to run on a sterile planet which would be impossible to run on a planet that has life (extraterrestrial origin or terrestrial).
One recent example is when a meteor lands on Earth, it is a huge boon to science if they can get that meteorite before it rains. Once it rains, water seeps into the meteorite and chemical processes change the chemistry, and bacteria begin to grow further changing the composition of the meteorite which makes evaluation of just what chemicals/composition/state or even source of the meteorite much more difficult.
So keeping things sterile is very important because there is no going back to the original state once life starts changing the environment. That doesn't mean that seeding life is wrong, just that you don't want to destroy evidence before you have a chance to study and record it.
Another example is the fact that nearly every museum dinosaur fossil on display now is useless from a paleontology standpoint because the original excavators didn't record important information that modern paleontologists now realize is critical. Information that is now permanently lost: What strata was the fossil located, how close was it to other strata? Where was the fossil found (Montana doesn't help, what they want to know is was the fossil discovered in an old extinct stream bed, or 30 meters South, etc.) That information is lost forever because it was never collected before the site was permanently altered. That's what you want to avoid.
I don't program for any tangible practical purpose, but what you said has been very true (for me, at least).
Now... I did my undergrad in Computer Engineering, so I got my fair share of programming, but certainly not to any level where I would be comfortable doing it for a living, but to 'exercise my brain', I took the MITx Intro to programming class mostly as way to remind myself of some of the principles of programming, and I actually felt it helped me quite a bit. It was like doing crossword puzzles to keep my vocabulary up. Nothing I was doing was particularly difficult, but the process of solving the problems was what I was interested in. (That and fixing my terrible grasp of programming syntax. I can give you pseudocode fit for a flight computer, but actually writing the code was anathema to me)
Programming requires a very methodical way of thinking and breaking apart problems into solvable chunks, and because of that, even though I'm not so great at it, I would advocate it as part of a suite of mental 'exercises'.
In no particular order, I recommend:
1. Programming
2. Learning a foreign language to an advanced-beginner stage.
3. Taking a free philosophy course on a topic you are interested in.
4. Design and Build a wood worktable from scratch (2x4s and plywood sheets)
5. Read a highly rated book from a genre you avoid. (for me, it's standard fiction and biographies, so I'm trying out some William Faulkner atm)
6. Start a journal
7. Learn to sketch. Just do one sketch/day
8. Learn an instrument (Ukeleles are cheap, and don't require long fingers)
9. Walk in the park or meditate.
Any other 'brain teasing' exercises recommended?
There is no way I can believe that there is a single player game out there that requires more processing power than a single PC can deliver. That seems rather... expensive.
Could you imagine the programmer who approached his boss with THAT one?
Programmer: Yeah boss, turns out that we made the computational requirements of this engine so complex that it requires us to maintain extra servers to handle the calculations for each gamer. So, that's cool right?
Boss: So help me god, if you actually think my answer would be yes I may have to throw you out of the window.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis
This seems appropriate to the situation, as a good many in that culture genuinely believe that the censorship performed is not only necessary, but beneficial to their society.
I'd be willing to bet that the addition of mass roughly the size of Europa might also be the solution to that problem as well.
It doesn't matter how well you do in your endeavours if we continuously push 'Chance of life' as a way to get the general public interested. How many times do you think the public can hear about 'Nope, nothing there' when the original headline was 'Amazing new possible discovery that will rock the foundations of the space program". Don't get me wrong, I find the concept of alien geology to be very interesting and love these stories, but please cut back on the 'hints/signs/rumor/promise of life' in headlines.
Before anyone responds with "But we have to make it interesting for the unwashed masses...", I'm going to preempt that with the fact that you don't want space exploration to be relegated to the same 'Overhype/Overpromise' location in the collective consciousness currently reserved for late night infomercials and miracle health products.