There is also the MRI intended to help kids understand what they will be going through.

Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.

Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)

Yes, or come to a halt. You'd be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.

It's always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.

The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.

The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.

Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.

Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).

Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:

Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]

My grandfather had Parkinson's. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.

What took so long? If you think about the history and the talking points of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception movements, this outcome is guaranteed when letting them gain power.

If you believe that a new human, with all associated rights and freedoms, is created at the moment of conception, then this outcome is obvious.

The only way it could have gone any differently would be to declare that conception can only occur as a result of actual sexual intercourse. And that leads to the conclusion that these embryos are not and can never be human.

Same as all the crap that gets sold today. Some scammer, recognizing the inherent gullibility or natural cognitive biases of people invents a product or service or story, claims expertise and success, and gains some combination of wealth, power, and fame.

For example Gwyneth Paltrow makes bank by selling all kinds of crap on her Goop website.

Humans are easy to fool because our brains don't work the way we think they do and other humans exploit that for their own gain. Some, like Penn and Teller, do it honestly for entertainment, others, like Sylvia Browne, do it dishonestly by claiming powers they don't have.

I think of my username as being like a lock on the door. It's not going to stop someone who is dedicated to fucking with me, but it keeps the opportunistic fuckery at bay.

I hope Canada at least pretends to push back.

There is a toggle in the admin settings to enable/disable downvotes, and several instances do disable them.

I didn't realize that.

Strictly as a user, from what I can tell, there doesn't seem to be anything that resembles rampant abuse of downvotes. I'm glad that is what is visible at the admin level.

Carry on, you're doing great work as a community builder/manager.

I've long had concerns with up/down votes and like/dislike, especially the down/dislike. Nothing major, and I have no real solutions.

My concerns are only to do with the ambiguity. There are so many different reasons why someone might vote one way or the other or even just not vote at all that I think it's kind of weird that compiling the votes into a score seems to mostly work pretty good. That ambiguity means that it's difficult to derive meaning from any individual vote, which I think argues in favour of keeping it somewhat private. Just because a non-admin can jump through hoops to get someone's voting history, doesn't mean it should be deliberately made public.

As for keeping down votes, I'd be reluctant to mess with a system that works as well as it seems to. Personally, I very rarely downvote, as even that is more engagement than I'm willing to provide. In fact, one of the things I like about the client I use, Thunder, is that I have to long press a comment in order to vote. That little bit of friction means that I vote less often. When I vote, it's because I really mean whatever I intend the vote to mean.

My first thought was "wait, people still think it's psychosomatic?" Then I read the article and realized that they were not referring to people in general, but to actual doctors!

It never fails to amaze -- and annoy! -- me how often simple curiosity and wide-ranging reading leaves me better informed than many actual professionals. It's almost like they got their education and training, then stopped engaging.

Anyway, rant over. I'm glad there are people out there taking things seriously and I hope you continue to meet with success in your treatment.

I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don't seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.

Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it's building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.

This is an amazing resource. I bought the first edition of the book when it came out and it completely transformed the way I look at plants. Also, I might have had fun building funky tree-like objects on my computer screen. :)

No, that's not what I was thinking, but that sounds like a decent idea. Maybe a better idea than just simple labels representing the facing sphere.

I think for maximum uselessness, they should not be overlapping spheres, but deform at the interface, like soap bubbles or rubber balls. As long as the spheres are the same size and modelled with the same "surface tension" or "elasticity", the "intersection" of two sets would then be a circular interface with an area proportional to what would otherwise be an overlap (I think). If the spheres have different sizes or are modelled with different surface tension or elasticity, one would "intrude" into the other.

Multiple sets would have increasingly complex shapes that may or not also create volumes external to the deformed spheres but still surrounded by the various interfaces.

Time to break out the mathematics of bubbles and foam. This data ain't gonna obscure itself!

Might there actually be utility to something like this? Scrunch the spheres together but make invisible everything that is not an interface and label the faces accordingly. I suppose the same could be said of the shape described by overlapping. (Jesus, you'd think I was high or something. Just riffing.)

Thanks. Sometimes overviews are the most important things to create. It's tough to know where to start without a map!

I read the introduction (linked page) in detail and skimmed the next two chapters. That's not enough to form a concrete opinion, but plenty to judge this worthy of my reading list.

One problem might be that some people use the word "antibiotics" as a synonym for "prescription medication". I found that out when trying to find out what problems my mother was dealing with.

There were quite a few of my relatives and her friends who all said the same thing "she's on 4 antibiotics," but nobody knew any of the drug names. I finally got the drug names and from the names alone (specifically the suffixes) it was clear that there was one antibiotic and one antiviral. I recognized one of the names as a "blood thinner", leaving the last as a glaucoma medication (l looked it up: it's a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, whatever that is, and diuretic).

They all still refer to all of them as "antibiotics", telling me that I'm overly pedantic.

Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it's more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?

Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for "other skin appendages" in vertebrates).