Most of the "copper electroplating" videos on youtube are pretty good introductions, but there are two things to keep in mind: first, most just use a 9v battery or similar, which is not a great idea. Better to use a current-controlled source. I use a cheap bench power supply and limit the current to 100-500mA to start, only increasing up to 1-2A after a while (and if I want more plating). Voltage can float at whatever level, as long as it's <5v or so
Second, a lot of YT videos use safer, non-acid mixes. These will work, but not nearly as well as acid copper baths which include sulfuric acid. It's not too bad as long as you're careful while mixing, and despite being low pH the final solution is not terrible if you get some on your hands (mildly irritating, wash it off. Wear gloves though!)
Eh, not so much generation as different way people think. I'm not old, have multiple laptops, desktops and smart phones. More often than not, when I need to seriously think about a paper I print it out and annotate the margins, underline, highlight, etc. I have a notebook (and fountain pens!) that I use to write out plans or projects or sketch designs. I have pads of flip paper for short-term (weekly) TODOs, and bullet-journal longer term life planning.
It's just a different way of organizing one's life. I spend enough time in front of the computer, sitting at the kitchen table to jot down notes or sketch out a project idea works better for me than trying to try the latest XYZ digital notebook app.
A minor note: the LightSail team says the perigee is lowering due to atmospheric drag not due to the sun slowing it down:
> The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft.
That's not to say the solar pressure isn't potentially slowing it down too, but it sounds like the main driver is drag in this case.
It's not that the symptoms don't exist. It's that the symptoms are almost certainly auto-immune or neurological in nature. There is nothing "chronic infection" about the situation, and thus any attempt to treat it with extended anti-biotics, probiotics, diet restriction, etc are almost certainly destined to fail.
Patients need to spend more time listening to rheumatologists and less time listening to "Lyme Literate" providers selling uninsured woo at $2000 a pop.
> The CLD controversy does not, however, straddle a simple divide between 2 opposed scientific factions. Within the scientific community, the concept of CLD has for the most part been rejected. Clinical practice guidelines from numerous North American and European medical societies discourage the diagnosis of CLD and recommend against treating patients with prolonged or repeated antibiotic courses 1-21
> Many patients referred for Lyme disease are ultimately found to have a rheumatologic or neurologic diagnosis. Rheumatologic diagnoses commonly misdiagnosed as Lyme disease include osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative diseases of the spine, and spondyloarthropathies.26,27,41 Some patients are found to have neurologic diseases, including multiple sclerosis, demyelinating diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, neuropathies, and dementia.27 Some CLD advocates have argued that these various conditions are simply manifestations of Lyme disease,24,42–44 but these hypotheses are untenable
In short, there is clearly evidence that people feel symptoms following Lyme Disease, but there is essentially zero evidence that these symptoms are some kind of prolonged, chronic infection that remains impervious to treatment. Extended courses of antibiotics do not improve the situation (and can fatally make it worse), and all the various woo (as mentioned in the article) do not help either.
"Chronic Lyme" is far more likely to be auto-immune (rheumatologic) or neurological in nature. It may be triggered by a lyme infection, just like it can be triggered by other non-lyme infections. Auto-immune responses are commonly triggered by severe bacterial or viral infections, and can persist/linger far after the infection itself has cleared up. But the concept of a "chronic" bacterial lyme infection has little to no medical bearing.
The fact that this continues is largel attributed to A) auto-immune disorders being difficult to diagnose and treat due to their unique nature and B) hucksters, con-artists, and snake-oil salesmen hawking the latest woo to patients desperately trying to solve their problems. And probably C) a general movement towars believeing random blogs (like the OP!) over medical providers, on the basis of "Big Pharma" or other general conspiracy theories.
"Chronic Lyme" is notoriously difficult to diagnose because there is very little evidence that it is a real illness. While there is some research on the subject, the medical community still widely believes that chronic lyme is Not A Thing.
You often find chronic lyme being diagnosed and "treated" by alternative medical practictioners, homeopaths, naturalpaths, etc who then prescribe a wide array of untested treatments, batteries of blood tests and panels of ELISA antigen screens which are so cross-reactive that just about anything will show up. More often than not patients are being swindled out of vast sums of money by these alternative "treatments". A quote from the GP article shows exactly this situation:
> I’ve gobbled up herbal tonics, CBD oil, a universe of different probiotics, antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and an endless array of supplements promising myriad purported benefits. Most provided little, if any, comfort.
> [...] many people with Lyme flock to “Lyme literate” doctors (LLMDs), who, citing the unreliability of Lyme testing, are willing to make a diagnosis based exclusively on symptoms. [...] With no scientific consensus on what causes persistent symptoms and how to treat them, such options aren’t covered by insurance, leaving people like me to fund treatment entirely out of pocket. I’ve visited several LLMDs with mixed results. [...] Finding a trustworthy LLMD can be difficult and expensive for Lyme patients. The LLMDs I consulted in New York offered initial consultations ranging from $800 to $2,000, with each follow-up visit costing anywhere between $300 and $500 each.
It's not to say the symptoms are not real, but they are far more likely to be fibromyalgia or similar than a mysterious chronic infection of lyme which is untreatable. Articles like the above and the GP do not help the situation, and people end up believing random woo on the internet than their medical providers.
As someone that likes to use open tabs as a sort of todo list, I can't live without that extension. Allows me to keep different trees open for various purposes: PRs in one tree, Issues in another, academic/scientific paper to-read list, forum posts, etc
Because enough people will believe it when they see an asteroid looming towards them on CNN, Fox, whatever. There are plenty of people that deny climate change because it's convenient, either politically or economically. There are considerably fewer people that think the moon landing was faked, or the earth is flat, or pluto and mars and jupiter are actually jewels hanging from threads in a crystal sphere.
An asteroid is a sufficiently "concrete" science that the average person would believe if they see it. You can't "see" climate change, which is part of the issue.
There is a real difference between a singular event like an asteroid, and a slowly boiling frog like climate change.
You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." I'd like to think we could collectively get our shit together and find a way to fix that.
But climate change is more insidious because it's so slow. It's in every nations best (short term) interest to ignore climate change. And there are zero short-term consequences to politicians because the average person probably won't measurably see an effect in their lifetime. Sure, summers might get a bit hotter and have worse floods, winters get a bit colder. New pests will pop up, species might start to die. But there's not a galvanizing event to really scare the shit out of people. Even if people believe climate change, they'll shrug, tsk tsk a little (like I'm doing!), maybe stop using plastic bags or install solar on their house or something. But it's negligible, and they know it's a meaningless gesture because everyone else has to make the same gesture for it to work.
Eventually it'll get bad enough -- widespread fires, droughts, rampant pest or diseases, all the pollinators die out, whatever -- that people really start to take things seriously. But by that time we might have 20 billion humans on the brink of starvation and it'll be a bit late to do much more than try to survive.
I doubt humans will ever go extinct completely. We're pretty hardy primates. But it's very possible we get knocked back to hunter/gather tribes (probably with some neat technology!) scraping a living in some kind of post-apocalyptic industrial nightmare.
It's especially tragic because any attempt to fix the situation implicitly crushes nations that are presently bootstrapping themselves into industrialization. E.g. major "developed" countries got a free ride on cheap, dirty fossil fuels. But now the climate is going to shit, and if by some miracle they managed to get themselves to carbon-negative (lol sure), you'd also have to prevent other developing nations from going down the cheap/dirty fossil fuel route themselves.
Which is crazy when you think about it. How's that going to work? Is the US and the EU going to give up half their GDP subsidizing clean energy in foreign nations to prevent further carbon release? Subjugate those countries to forcibly prevent them from industrializing?
It's truly a tragedy of the commons writ large. Short of some breakthrough in carbon sequestration or cold fusion or whatever, we're pretty screwed no matter how you look at it :(
Mars is a radically different planet and has its own climate. It doesn't have anything to do with the sun getting warmer though, e.g. we can't blame the sun for the Earth warming up just because Mars is also warming up.
A few of the key differences off the top of my head:
- The polar caps of mars are mostly frozen CO2 ("dry ice"), and also mostly disappear during the summer. You can see timelapse animations showing them shrinking and growing by like 90% each year. Their behavior is radically different from our frozen water ice caps, and have a huge difference in thermal mass too.
- Mars has a very thin atmosphere, mostly inactive geology, and no oceans. That means it has very little in the way of thermal buffering
- Mars goes through it's own Milankovitch cycles (changes in orbit eccentricity, axial tilt, precession) which means it undergoes it's own warming/cooling cycles just like earth. It happens to be in a warming cycle right now.
- Enormous dust storms can take over the planet for months at a time, which obviously has a huge impact on global climate
- We have a very short record of observing Mars' climate, so we can't really make long term trend analysis like we can on Earth
Some drugs are relatively benign to quit cold turkey (a sizable percentage of people may run into irritating side effects like nausea, etc) but it won't kill you.
Other drugs like benzos can be fatal to quit without tapering. And other classes can induce serious side effects even when properly tapering, let alone quitting cold-turkey (e.g. hallucinations, psychosis, insomnia, etc etc).
I don't think this is fair for several reasons. First, cancer treatment drugs are tested heavily in-vitro first, where the only significant metric is reduction of tumor mass. Clinical trials for cancer treatments are different from other drugs, as you don't generally do double-blind trials (would you want to get a placebo if you had a terminal cancer? No, probably not).
So many cancer treatments go into clinical trials with only the evidence that it shrinks tumors, and tends to kill tumors faster than it kills the rest of your body. Side effects are expected to be severe since most cancer treatments are quite literally killing any cells that divide... tumors just divide faster and thus get hit harder. The end result is cancer treatment often has very poor quality of life.
Clinical researchers _do_ perform analysis to see if survival increases relative to other treatments. But often you don't know until you've already tried it on a cohort of patients (with their consent, obviously).
There is push-back in the medical field in areas for what you suggest. For example, colonoscopies are becoming widely recognized as causing more problems than they solve. The complications they can induce tend to lead to a poorer patient outcome than missing colon cancer because you didn't screen (e.g. survivability is not affected by finding/treating colon cancer early).
I just don't think it's fair to paint cancer treatments with the same brush strokes, since dealing with terminal diseases is a totally different ball game.
Edit: I should say, there are some parts of cancer treatment which is moving towards the dont-treat opton. For example, there is growing evidence that treating prostate cancer is not necessary, since you'll probably die of something else long before prostate cancer kills you (it is very slow growing on average)
Frankly, a lot of this is the patient's fault too. The vast majority of people _do not_ want to change their lifestyle. They don't want to quit smoking, drinking, eating fried food and leading a sedentary life. They don't want to lose weight or start cardio, go hiking/biking/swimming/walking, limit their caloric intake or eat more vegetables and fiber.
What they want is the doctor to provide a pill to fix whatever the immediate issue is, so they can get back to their life. When providers push back on this and try to suggest lifestyle changes, many patients get _angry_. Like, yelling, shouting, complaining to administrators that the provider isn't "listening to them" or "not taking their problems seriously". People want to be fixed, not fix themselves.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but a healthy share falls on patients themselves.
Source: SO is a medical provider. My faith in humanity falls daily and I can't believe the crap providers have to put up with. It's like a service job dealing with irritated people all day long, except these people read a blurb on WebMD and think they are an expert.
Basically, it allows you to define things like hot/warm/cold architecture, rollover, retention, etc at the index-level, inside Elasticsearch. Will be landing as beta
Agreeing here. My SO is a medical practitioner, and some of the stories I hear are just crazy. Folks who can't sleep and come in wanting meds, but after digging into their history you find they are drinking four liters of soda, two extra-large (and extra-sugary) lattes, and a pack of cigarettes every day. And on their phone until 11pm.
The more I hear about healthcare from the inside, the more I realize it's a game of "work on the worst problem, ignore the rest". There's limited time in patient visits, and patients have limited motivation, so you really have to prioritize what to fix. If you tell the patient to fix all the things, the will fix none of them.
Worse, patient education is hard work. Patients don't listen, ignore advice, stop lifestyle changes as soon as it gets hard. So you focus on one or two of the worst offenders; you convince them cigs are going to put them in an early grave and they should cut back to half a pack a day. Maybe drop the soda to two liters a day. The rest of their problems you have to ignore until later. That's often when meds come into play because they can help bridge the gap while you work on their lifestyle issues.
Oh, and all of that happens in 15 minute visits every other month.
There are certainly bad doctors out there over-prescribing all sorts of things, but from what I've seen, it's more a matter of prioritizing what to spend your precious 15 minutes on and going from there. Doctors and other medical professionals are in an impossible situation most of the time.
Edit: for clarity, this is an American healthcare perspective.
Didn't down-vote (or upvote for that matter), but I think this might be glossing over some details. My understanding is that Constellation was ridiculously over-budget, behind schedule and there was no reasonable way it would accomplish it's stated mission without a massive influx of cash. The Augustine Committee results were pretty damning. There's no way the program would have made it to the moon, let alone mars. Keeping Constellation running would have been a classic sunk-cost problem.
That said, while Constellation was canned, large components of it were/are reused by the Space Launch System (SLS), including the Orion crew capsule and Aries I/V rockets. So in reality Constellation lives on as SLS, albeit with a much more vague goal now. Cynics could argue it's even more of a jobs program than Constellation was.
As an aside, what'd you do at NASA? I'm super jealous! Thanks for taking the time to share your summary of the events, I largely agreed with what you wrote :)
Most of the "copper electroplating" videos on youtube are pretty good introductions, but there are two things to keep in mind: first, most just use a 9v battery or similar, which is not a great idea. Better to use a current-controlled source. I use a cheap bench power supply and limit the current to 100-500mA to start, only increasing up to 1-2A after a while (and if I want more plating). Voltage can float at whatever level, as long as it's <5v or so
Second, a lot of YT videos use safer, non-acid mixes. These will work, but not nearly as well as acid copper baths which include sulfuric acid. It's not too bad as long as you're careful while mixing, and despite being low pH the final solution is not terrible if you get some on your hands (mildly irritating, wash it off. Wear gloves though!)
An example acid bath that's pretty decent recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvW5mWbUbU4