slr555's comments

I get so tired of the kind of hyperbole that opens this article. If an untrained person deliberately dives into 28F water mostly they get cold and quickly get out. How do I know this? Am I a physiologist? No. Am I survival expert? No. I took a trip to Antarctica and the tour operator let passengers dive into the water, swim to a nearby platform and get out. The group of braves souls was about a dozen in number and aged from mid-teens to mid-50's. I even have pictures.

Yes, if you unexpectedly fall into freezing water you can involuntarily inhale and drown. Diving in, swimming a few strokes and climbing out is nowhere near invariably fatal.

All the intrepid divers I saw survived unscathed.

I am an Extra class licensee in the US and while I have a lot of respect for the Ham community, deeply entrenched thinking places the future of amateur radio in jeopardy. If we only allow CW and SSB phone as truly open and accessible operating modes a whole world of technical innovation and integration will be lost. While the letter of the FCC rules might exclude some of the more recent digital modes listed, the traffic is not encrypted. With all the strong encryption out there in the world, it's hard to buy amateur radio as a threat to national security unless we're worried that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to take up arms against the republic.

To me it sounds like some operators have sour grapes because they can't immediately listen to everybody's traffic. In short I support Ham moving forward and not becoming even more antiquated than it is.

I do think the headline of the article is poorly written as I don't think this is about spectrum allocation in any way.

My father worked for Aerojet General in the early 60's. I have clear memories as a child of hearing thunderous booms while the northern California sky was a cloudless deep blue. I remember the sound as loud but by no means intolerable. I do not know how far the flights were occurring from where our house was in Sacramento.

You are right. NYPL is about the best public library one could hope for and much is available from home login. City College is one option to look at but I don't think they have a medical library. I am an NYU alum and had extensive conversations with the alumni office and library and both confirmed that access to med school library resources was a non-starter. I guess its a big issue for me because people need information to make informed healthcare decisions and so much medical research has a component of public funding. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

Stunningly in NYC there is not a single medical library that offers journal access open to the general public. The only publicly accessible medical library has been described to me as primarily a "historical" library without journal access.

Columbia and NYU's medical libraries are only open to medical school students and faculty. No undergraduates. No alumni. The New York Public Library has surprisingly good online access but is missing a number of important journals and current issues are often delayed by agreement for several months.

If in this nation's largest city, current healthcare knowledge is bulkheaded from public access there is a serious problem. Whatever the publisher's rights these knowledge and information asymmetries must not be allowed to continue.

Motion smoothing TVs have to please two very different viewers. Motion smoothing is great for for sports. Football and basketball, auto racing are good examples. When a pass is thrown downfield and the camera whip pans to follow it, motion smoothing helps the picture stay coherent and prevents ugly artifacts and fans presumably enjoy the game they are watching more.

For movie fans it's a different story. People want a certain filmic softness to motion pictures. Motion smoothing makes a lot of content look like it was shot with very deep focus. The soap opera effect. Early video cameras were not super versatile in terms of depth of field.

I guess my question for the engineers here is this. It there a way to encode a content type code within the signal or the sideband (if that's the right term) that sets could use to automatically optimize their settings. It's not like sports fans ever say, "hey I love those artifacts", or movie buffs "hey, I want it to look like Search for Tomorrow".

I observed a total knee replacement surgery where the surgeons were not using their preferred system due to the fact that the patient already had one knee replacement and the doctors felt the same system should be used on both sides. The representative from the implant company was in the OR for a couple of good reasons. The first was that every system uses different jigs and guides to aid in the resection of the bone and placement of the appliance, the representative helped the doctors understand how to use the system. The second reason was that the surgeons needed to have access to a range of component sizes to make sure they could place a correctly sized implant. Using the same system on both knees also helped ensure that the geometry of both knees would be consistent.

At the time I was pretty stunned that the rep was talking the docs through the operation but the procedure was successful and I learned that when new devices are introduced it is very often the company that trains surgeons in its use.

The practical takeaway here underscores the advice in Auerbach's authoritative text Wilderness Medicine. If a person interacts with potentially rabid animals and that interaction results in even the smallest scratch or contact with saliva the victim should undergo rabies treatment and if possible have the animal undergo necroscopy.

The odds of surviving rabies once it becomes symptomatic are negligible. They can throw the hail Mary from the 5 yard line in a snowstorm but the chances of winning the game with it are slim.

Europe's historically much higher petrol prices have created a long standing culture of smaller cars as well as smaller trucks competing for the same space. Massive Suburban's are among the most common car service vehicles in Manhattan.

But the population of Manhattan is within a stone's throw of Paris overall and the density is significantly greater in Manhattan. Overall population and density matter as the equate to more diverse needs in the population and more users in any transit space.

Population size matters as does density because there are more people that need to fit in a smaller footprint. The original post states that other cities should employ Copenhagen like solutions but the room simply does not exist in NYC no matter how much we would wish it so.

Amenable means open and responsive to suggestion; easily persuaded or controlled. NYC is none of those things. Yes cars take physical space but I think you underestimate the diverse needs and populations that drive the use of cars vs. bikes. Commuters from Westchester county are not going to ride bikes. Frail elderly people and de-conditioned office dwellers are not going to ride bikes.

Comparisons with Northern European cities simply do not make sense however much people would like to force fit them

Apologies, Wikipedia list km2 first for one and mi2 for the other. I still land in the middle though with Manhattan being 6 and change more dense than Copenhagen. I apologize for my haste and error.

Commenting on cycling is always fraught but here are a couple of observations. The population of NYC is 10x that of the city of Copenhagen. The population density of Manhattan is approximately 6x that of Copenhagen (corrected from earlier mistake). Solutions that work in small European cities do not necessarily scale in a manner that would be useful in other international metropolitan cities. Cycling advocates often point to successes in Northern European cities that represent entire different transportation landscapes from other larger cities around the world.

I agree that at this point everything is computational. And you are right that consumers are winning big time. I'm pretty serious about photography and there are far fewer situations that arise where I think, "crud, I've only got my phone". My hope is that there is still room to squeeze low light, low noise performance out of future sensors. Again, great article, a good read!!!

The implicit subtitle of this article is: In Smartphone Cameras.

The modern smartphone certainly adds computational strength that likely exceeds the image processing sophistication of even pro-level DSLRs. After all the performance gap between desktop and mobile CPUs is quite narrow at this point. The author rightly implies that the form factor of the phone creates an inherent set of limitations.

Outside the phone realm there are fewer and somewhat different limitations to deal with and that is where really interesting things are happening in photography today. Modern sensors have made great strides towards closing the gap between film and digital in terms of dynamic range. Full frame sensors with a large number of pixels allow for far greater resolution in images. Looking on DXO mark on how far sensors have come in the last decade is amazing. When I look at images created on my Nikon D200s they were very good and acceptable for a broad range of applications. Compared to the images from my D850, however, there is a quantum difference. Shooting RAW files gives me unprecedented creative control over the final image using a laptop instead of expansive requirements of a full darkroom. While, I shoot Nikon other companies like Sony, and Canon are more or less in the same place. We have reached the point where output from a DSLR sized body compares very favorably to a medium format sensor.

While computational adjuncts to image acquisition, whether in the form of phone software or Adobe like products, will play an increasingly important role in photography, there are still areas where hardware such as sensors, lenses, and physical stabilizers will improve.

It's a bit like academia. The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.

I just submitted my vote for N2RJ. ARRL leadership has seemed out of touch for quite some time. They seem more interested in selling wildly over priced books than advancing the interests of the Ham community. Amateur radio may seem like a quaint hobby for old timers but there are a number of newer hybrid operating modes that play nicely with the digital world. Ham's need a strong advocacy voice so that relevant policy decisions don't overlook the needs of amateur operators. Amateur radio is a great way to learn physics and electronics. I was a liberal arts major and now have my Extra class license. What I learned getting there is so much more valuable than the rag chews and 73s. Keep Ham strong!

You're point is valid but some of the participants are spending 10K+ for Vectronix range finders so they are pretty far down that rabbit hole already. Wind is a dark art because at those ranges it likely varies in intensity and direction over the distance to the target. I guess you could say they are having to estimate the effect of multiple competing force vectors. I have read that some people consider the spotter the more skilled member of a two person shooting team, implying that the wind calls and environment are more difficult than the holdover and breaking the shot.

Reloading is a contemplative and exacting pursuit. And single missed powder measure could cause a bullet to lodge in the barrel and the round following could cause an injurious catastrophic failure. My father reloaded on a single stage press (one operation on one round at a time) due to economics. As a boy I was always given the "privilege" of shagging brass (no cracks from the Brits please) at the range. Each usable casing was worth a few cents and it added up.

Today, reloading is the stock and trade of top shooters in competitions such as the Precision Rifle Series and the King of Two Miles, where shooters attempt targets at ultra long range. Each case is sized trimmed and annealed by hand and measured with micrometers. Powder is measured down to the individual particle using scales costing over 1,000 dollars. Primer pockets are treated as well. Consistency wins these matches and these hand loads are more consistent than even match grade factory ammo.

Shooters use doppler chronograph to create their own data on how these loads perform in their rifles.

Last comment. This article puts a lot of emphasis on cast bullets. Lead only bullets aren't used nearly as much as the used to be. Pistols, as opposed to revolvers can be finicky with lead and the vast majority of rifle rounds are jacketed.