When I was at the Stanford cardiac unit last, they let me sleep. That wasn't the problem but they had a problem giving me privacy: door wide open, curtain wide open.
Nurses cluck in packs like chickens, completely without concern for patients interrupting their social hour. You have to order them around because they're not smart or conscientious enough to do that on their own. If they were smarter, they would be doctors. They don't have empathy, so you have to pull rank or use a stick, because a carrot won't work.
Cults and other extreme forms of magical thinking take root whenever survival seems difficult. Chris Hedges' latest book delves into paths to anomie, self-destruction and insanity that are more likely as a civilization crumbles and slowly cannibalizes itself into oblivion.
Also note that Telegram and WhatsApp are insecure and horrible. I would use Signal, OTR and maybe iMessage if you trust the Apple bean-counter-turned-CEO.
The 1% don't care how money is made (who it kills or destroys the planet) so long that it flows. An existential threat from externalities is just another new inelastic market to exploit.
We played the beta and first release of CS in college (UCD). Ah the memories of AWP and skywalking (jumping up on crates with aid of a buddy and walking on top of the map's bounding box "sky").
Yes. What's missing from modern life is somewhat intended by corporations and the political elite: the atomizing of people from each other via glowing screens and burning down of community that churches functioned to anchor people together. The multitude of consequences are loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, depression, anxiety and more suicidal than ever. I'm not arguing magical thinking in any form has any inherent value, but the caring about each other and the social commonwealth collectivism, empathy and support it provided are indispensable to sane, decent, good and successful people. The charity, forgiveness and nonviolent disobedience by deed part of many traditional religous traditions embody virtues that to most are inherently inspirational, noble and provide the foundation of civilization as functional, decent and possessing integrity. If we let society devolve into Orwellian, Kafkaesque, social Darwinism, then feudalism, inverted or outright totalitarianism, bullshit and brutality will comprise the primary palette of the social contract.
Many organizations are in dire need of departmental NAT firewalls and VPN solutions. I had to beg, bitch and moan before a Pac10 uni would offer such a service to protect our users.
Yup. I have a horrible GPA due to a bunch of personal and disability stuff but they never look at it due to experience. If they did, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that favors GPA and/or nonsense certifications. In fact when I hire, I measure candidates inversely proportionate to their list of certs.
It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions.
Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.
Estimated mass: 1.51e10 kg - heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza but lighter than the Three Gorges Dam
(4/3) * pi * (213/2 [m])^3 * 3 [g/cm^3]
Mean diameter: 213m
Kinetic energy is 0.5 * m * v^2, so figure 10 [km/s] which works out to 7.59e17 [J] or 181 MT of KE total. The airburst is around the square root of that, so 13.5 MT.
If it hit just right, it would be big enough to wipe out a large city metropolitan area. The odds of it hitting at all aren't that great.
Postscript: There ought to be a scifi weapon that flings pyramids.
Long period waves and their decay signature makes me suspect "water hammering" of a large volume of magma came to an abrupt stop inside a magma chamber or tube.