dmclain's comments

dmclain | 9 years ago | on: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

I think you are misunderstanding the figure, it is 72 pill/year/person, so if an average person with a prescription is taking 2-4 (let's just use 3) they will need 365*3 = 1095 pills/year. That rate of consumption implies that 72/1095 = 6.5% of the total population is on a never ending prescription for opiates.

As a percentage of the population, that still seems really high, but WV is taking 0.2 pills/person/day not 2-4 pills/person/day

dmclain | 9 years ago | on: Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas

They listed MWh/y which is a pretty strange unit. The farm is 253 MW, so not a significant percentage of total US generation.

Source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-ne...

dmclain | 10 years ago | on: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

I don't think a show featuring a lawyer, college professor, media personality and whatever the heck it is Barney does is a counterpoint at all. All those jobs are upper class, college degree requiring positions.

Other than a few episodes where Marshal (the lawyer) contemplates a job he doesn't love to pay off the massive consumer debt accrued by his wife (the teacher), the money problems and job tradeoffs on the show are very much in the classless hanging out genre the article describes.

Even the consumer debt is from spending on luxury goods, which is surprising for a teacher supporting a law school student in New York, ostensibly the arrangement in the first few seasons.

dmclain | 11 years ago | on: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

The bitcoin protocol defines the longest chain as the correct/canonical chain.

At 51% you have more hashing power than the rest of the network combined, so you can start mining blocks on your own and create your own chain with the knowledge that eventually your chain will be longer than the 49% chain everyone else is working on. When that happens, the 49% will abandon their chain and start working on yours.

dmclain | 12 years ago | on: Smash: The game changing tennis wearable

I work for MapMyFitness, and we're aiming at the software side of the equation. We used to be a startup until we were acquired by UnderArmour, so now we're starting to plot out projects that will be taking years to pay off.

Drop me a line if you want to talk more: [email protected]

dmclain | 15 years ago | on: Introducing Nemo: A Pythonic Haml

I've been contributing to another HAML derivitive for python called HamlPy (https://github.com/jessemiller/HamlPy). It compiles down to Django templates, which made it very easy for me to convert my existing project. It's under pretty active development right now.

dmclain | 15 years ago | on: Time lost by driving fast

They may have taken this into account, but the worse equivalency in my mind is that a second saved today is equivalent to a second decades from now at the end of my life expectancy. It seems like even a conservative discount rate would completely eliminate any perceived time loss.

Computing the discount rate in light of the probability of the singularity or skynet is left as an exercise for the reader.