nrau's comments

My dentist has been on me for years that flossing is important for your health for more than just teeth. He explained to me recently the role it plays in toughening up your gums (essentially callusing your gums from the repeated abrasion of the dental floss) so that bacteria cannot thrive in there, which they otherwise easily do. And that this bacteria can cause you all kinds of health issues, including cancer.

If you search around you'll find a lot of articles from the dental community that talk about similar benefits from flossing.

After years of being lazy and ignoring their advice, this finally got me into regularly flossing!

I tried Multiple's service out in an early beta preview, and was impressed with the flexibility of the initial product. Customer service and support was very good as well. The current product roadmap will be adding a lot of compelling features in the coming months.

I'd absolutely recommend anyone who needs load testing tooling and infrastructure to evaluate this service, and I am excited to see where they go.

Fortunately I passed the stone in about 5 days. That's the best possible outcome as painful as that can be. I started the lemon juice about 3 days into the event and I do think it helped already in making the stone a bit smaller and getting it out of my body.

I got my first and so far only (fingers crossed!) kidney stone five years ago. At that time I started drinking lemon juice with hot water to start each day before consuming anything else, and it has so far kept any recurrence of kidney stones away. I really do believe the lemon juice has been key for me in this regard, and it is in any case a very healthy thing to do daily anyways (known and practiced by other cultures around the world).

Most folks who have kidney stones get them again and again, and anything that can help prevent this very painful event is critical. For anyone who does unfortunately experience kidney stones I highly recommend you try this option.

For some additional information, the concerns that Boeing and Airbus have are around radar altimeters. These devices are used especially during landing scenarios, especially automated landing scenarios in low visibility weather. The radar altimeter devices that are in the belly of these planes use fairly low wattage power, and are easily overwhelmed by 5g base station equipment that is located on the landing paths of major airports. The concern is that 5g could interfere and render useless automated ILS landing for major airports. This concern also affects helicopters doing automated or assisted landing at helipads on hospitals and other more complicated landing scenarios.

There has been extensive research and testing that led to this conclusion of concern. You can read more about the background from the independent body that did the investigation:

https://www.rtca.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SC-239-5G-In...

And here's a great in depth video explaining the concerns from an actual 777 pilot for a major US airline:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942KXXmMJdY

For solid data points and analysis on how the US economy is performing I follow:

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

The blog is authored by Bill McBride who correctly called the 2008 downturn and housing market blow-up. I find his data points and corresponding analysis to be much better than any coverage in major media organizations, and it has majorly influenced the financial decisions that I have made over the past decade.

At the moment he is posting about a series of 10 questions about how the US economy will perform in 2020 that are worth checking out.

An interesting part of the history of the 737 is that when it launched it originally had a serious rudder design flaw that contributed to several fatal crashes where a lot of folks lost their lives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

However, Boeing did fix the problem, and the 737 went on to be one of the best selling airplanes in history.

This MCAS issue is eerily similar in that it has also resulted in two fatal crashes. But if history is any guide, the problems will be fixed, and the memory of MCAS and MAX issues will likely fade from the public as well.

Having two distinct routers and physical devices just isolates each network that much more. A single device is still exactly that at some point, and in such cases there is always the possibility of an exploit that could compromise the device fundamentally.

I think the author is just advocating for a very locked down approach but I agree it is not feasible for most folks.

There was a good study and results that just came out about this in the past couple of weeks and it backs up that airline crew have higher cancer rates:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/well/airline-crew-have-hi...

What's interesting that if the basic point is true (that modern human brains emerged only 100,000 - 35,000 years ago) then its amazing (and scary) how quickly things have moved from there. It wasn't that long after "relatively speaking" that the Greeks emerged, then the Romans, Egyptians, Europe, Asia, etc, and now our modern technology driven civilization.

Actually, this is the case in some Asian countries as well including parts of Japan and Indonesia.

My mother unfortunately passed away from this horrible disease many years ago when I was not yet 10 years old. Even more unfortunate is that life expectancy once one is diagnosed with glioblastoma today is not any longer than it was back then (35 years ago). Patients on average live 8-12 months. It's depressing to see this, and I hope we can make bigger strides in the years ahead.

Reasonable points, but just because technologies have failed in the past is not predictive of what will come in the future. It's often times hard for us to observe progress in technology development, particularly when exponential change is involved, but the pace of development keeps accelerating and all of the sudden you reach viable points in technologies that historically took a very long time to see any advances or progress.

In this particular case the launch was from Vandenberg in California and they do not yet have permit clearances to land the first stage back on land here. However, as others have said the barge is key for other reasons too.

I completely agree with the author here, far too much weight has been placed on the smartphone as the control device and UI for everything.

This problem has even spread to Sonos which discontinued the dedicated controller a year or so ago. You now have to use either a phone, tablet, or a full computer to select and choose the music you want to play. Granted their apps are well done but the overall experience is nowhere as responsive as the dedicated controller.

I really do not understand their decision, and would think it would be possible to offer a dedicated controller device these days at a reasonable price that they can make profitable.

BART does not currently run 24/7 primarily because they have to perform maintenance on the system, some of which requires that trains are not running. This is especially the case for the Transbay Tube which requires a lot of attention.

If BART had two tubes then they could run 24/7 and still complete the required maintenance with shut down periods staggered at different times for each tube. This would allow the full system to remain running 24/7.

There absolutely is precedence for this.

The US shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

And the Russians shot down a Korean airliner in 1983: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007