taxicabjesus

19일 전discuss

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.

taxicabjesus

6개월 전discuss

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

taxicabjesus

7개월 전discuss

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.

taxicabjesus

9개월 전discuss

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.

taxicabjesus

10개월 전discuss

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.

Modern humans are at least 100,000 years old. Most of our earlier civilizations are probably along the coasts of the continents, and were submerged at the end of the last ice age. It's silly to think that technology has not been lost and rediscovered over and over again.

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