This headline isn't exactly accurate and the article is misleading. PFOA was used in the process of affixing Teflon to surfaces but is not present in the pan itself. PFOA has built up in the environment as a result of the manufacturing processes that use it.
It would be more accurate to say "3M knew that manufacturing non-stick pans, and a number of other products, was poisoning all of us in the '70s".
You didn't have to have a Teflon pan to be exposed and having a Teflon pan didn't increase your exposure significantly. Microwave popcorn bags and other food wrappers were hundreds of times worse.
Teflon pans remain safe to use. All these other non-stick products are potential problems but it's impractical to try to identify which ones have PFOA or PFOS... so it's a good thing it's being phased out.
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
Moving the actual pieces of paper around is more expensive than moving bits around. This should be obvious. Sometimes you're paying an armored truck to move cash or somebody to count it. Other times you're accepting that tonight's deposit was stolen from you on the way to the bank.
I'm all for physical currency and we should vote and campaign to keep that part of our financial system but this isn't a conspiracy. Cashless will out-compete cash almost every time. The only exceptions are local businesses trying to avoid taxes.
I had the same experience so I just bought their iOS port of Graphing Calculator. It's cheap at $10, it's excellent, but mostly I wanted to say thank you for doing such a ridiculous amount of unpaid work, at personal legal risk, for the sake of math students.
Not even a little bit but that's a fascinating device.
The hearing aid you linked uses light to activate a transducer that's been placed against the tympanic membrane (eardrum). It could have used a wire, radio waves, whatever.
This technique is a combination of a viral infection that transfers light-sensitivity genes into the inner ear and a surgical implant that produces light in the inner ear modulated in response to sound.
One is an externally worn device and the other is a combination of surgery and viral gene-editing. They're "akin" in that they both use light as part of the system. Well, I guess they also both use devices made from baryonic matter.
When you hear a siren you're to become alert for the possibility of flashers behind you. You are not supposed to just start pulling over because it may not be on the same road as you and pulling over may block traffic. Imagine if every car in a crowded downtown pulled over every time the drivers could hear a siren. Instant gridlock.
So a siren played loudly on the radio will not cause a rule-following car to pull over, regardless of who or what is driving it. I presume you're talking about siren sounds in music, but...
Installing flashers that produce the same pattern as official police flashers and/or playing a continual siren is impersonating an officer. That's a serious crime.
Fake flashers will probably cause self-driving cars to pull over but they'll also cause humans to pull over. Not a self-driving car problem.
In the future police flashers can have a cryptographic element emdedded in the flash pattern that a self-driving car or a human-driven car with sensors can authenticate but that's an enhancement over the current situation.
It's one of the best-defined situations in traffic because it's precisely the fallback behavior. Detect emergency vehicle behind you, pull over as far as is safe, wait. If a self-driving car can't do that then it's hardly self-driving at all.
The real trouble, which you haven't brought up, is when the traffic is already at a standstill and an emergency vehicle approaches. The soft and gradual scooch-scooch movements that we have to do to clear enough space for the emergency vehicle are a much tougher case.
You can pull over a self-driving car. You just may have difficulty getting past it to an emergency.
The only reason this even looks like a problem is that humans don't follow the law.
In most jurisdictions if there's an emergency vehicle running flashers and/or siren behind you on the same side of the road you're supposed to slow, pull over, stop, then proceed only when the vehicle passes you.
If the emergency vehicle parks behind you then you have effectively been pulled over.
Pulling over safely is practically the first thing a self-driving car team works on. It is very easy to detect flashers and sirens. So... no problem.
Well, except that self-driving vehicles may accidentally be pulled over by firetrucks.
To some extent for Big Tobacco this might be like BP hedging on solar power. Nicotine is still best extracted from the tobacco plant. I doubt they'll fight vaping forever.
What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying "if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping."
And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung. Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the catch because last time there was a catch.
A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity that doesn't justify the ostracism.
I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is disappearing.
We're missing a chance to kill cigarettes in the developed world. We should embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.
Note that I'm addressing the Snopes conclusion more than the comments of the HN poster, except insofar as he/she used Snopes as a source.
The key elements of the Snopes article are these:
-Victim was crushed by machinery.
-Victim is still alive.
-Victim is not in much pain.
-If the machinery is removed the victim will probably die quickly.
-There's time to have them communicate with loved ones, a priest, whoever.
There are literally videos of this situation on liveleak. It happens with trains, with elevators, with forklifts and freight, and most commonly with car accidents.
The reason you don't remove the person at first is that they'll bleed out. The crushing material is an effective tourniquet so the person just sits there, alive and moving.
By the time that emergency responders get there to address the blood loss crush syndrome is a definite possibility. The person is generally going to faint the moment the equipment is removed because of the sudden loss of blood pressure. If they don't die of blood loss then they may have kidney failure and die on the way to treatment.
Everything about this is shockingly common except bringing the victim's family down to say goodbye or bringing in a priest.
To suggest that this has not happened in any of the hundreds or thousands of crushing cases since the industrial revolution occurred is ludicrous. It used to be that companies provided housing for workers near the factory/trainyard/loading dock. It would often have been the case that the victim's family could get there before an emergency responder.
The sense in which this is a "legend" is that people claim it happened to a friend-of-a-friend or whatever, and it's true that's an urban legend channel, but the actual events are documented except for the dramatic last kiss. I wouldn't even be sure that isn't documented. I just haven't seen it.
You're hitting the nail on its flattest head here. The metaphors are deliberately broken. The ways in which they break are meant to show aspects of the system.
Theorems have characteristics that aren't obvious to non-mathematicians. Hofstatder's goal was to convey some of these characteristics. A metaphor that says "if a theorem were a record and a mathematical system were a record player, here is what would happen to the record player when it played a self-referential theorem record" is an excellent way to show how theorems are different than anything we normally deal with.
A more modern book would have been able to rely on the metaphor of a program "crashing" which would have been sad and inept. There are a thousand ways a program can crash and very few of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the track that breaks the record needle.
There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.
I think GEBEGB is most useful in exposing people who don't yet have any formal training in mathematical theory to some deeper concepts and inspiring them to find the subtle edges of these systems. I read it at about 12 and it changed my life by exposing subtle fripperies of thought. If I'd read it at 20, as the author of this article did, I too would probably have experienced these little amusements as lack of rigor. Instead I experienced them as mysteries, and now as an adult I experience them as very dry jokes and thought prompts.
It's hard to understand why Snopes has this marked as a myth. The specific anecdote structure with the wife showing up is clearly a meme but that doesn't make it a mythical type of event.
We're much better at dealing with this situation in developed countries now. It's still a serious hazard. Around the turn of the 20th century it was very difficult to handle.
It does sound a bit like Thud, doesn't it? From your link:
Thud is a board game based on the earlier dwarfish game of Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl. It is played mainly by Dwarfs and Trolls... The game itself echos the game played by Vikings and Anglo-Saxons "Hnafletafle"- which literally means "Kings Table". Hnafletafle echos go beyond just the name. Like 'Thud' it is unusual in that it is an 'asymmetrical' game...
It would be more accurate to say "3M knew that manufacturing non-stick pans, and a number of other products, was poisoning all of us in the '70s".
You didn't have to have a Teflon pan to be exposed and having a Teflon pan didn't increase your exposure significantly. Microwave popcorn bags and other food wrappers were hundreds of times worse.
Teflon pans remain safe to use. All these other non-stick products are potential problems but it's impractical to try to identify which ones have PFOA or PFOS... so it's a good thing it's being phased out.