It's can be quite unpleasant. The test for it is very straight forward - eye drops and someone looks into your eye. Wear goggles when grinding steel and even if you do, take care when washing your face afterwards. Steel stuck in your cornea, cutting your eyelid when blinking is terrible.
> Wear goggles when grinding steel and even if you do, take care when washing your face afterwards.
Go one further: Goggles and a face shield, minimum. Why?
Have you ever had a right-angle grinder wheel explode? I have (it was actually a cut-off wheel). At the time I wasn't wearing even goggles, just my eye glasses. Amazingly, nothing hit me in the face, but I do remember hearing the part ricochet around my friend's shop (fortunately, I was the only one in it at the time).
Unfortunately, a piece hit my knuckle - extremely hard; I thought I had lost my finger, but amazingly not (oh, I wasn't wearing gloves, either).
I should've got stitches, but my friend took care of it; we washed it out, wrapped it up, then he gave me a percocet to take the edge off the pain. I remember at one point we looked at it after it had been a few hours, to see if I could still move it; I started to flex it, and had a small Monty Python flesh-wound moment (seriously, it made me laugh it was so cliche looking - though completely real); but I could move it. All's good today, still typing with it!
Basically me doing everything wrong (it really was all my fault, I shouldn't have been handling that equipment - I think I was also wearing shorts, a t-shirt and open-toe sandals at the time - a total DERP moment, but that's all it took), I knew better even then, but I was stupid that day. Faster than you can blink, bam, and there it was.
I take a lot more precautions now before I handle spinning cutting/grinding shit moving at 20k RPM (though I am still not a fan of my friend's open-guard 9 inch grinder - the thing will grind anything off anything, but holy hell is it dangerous to use - if that thing let loose, no amount of safety equipment will save you).
Oh - and if you are arc welding, don't wear a white shirt; reflection of the arc can bounce off inside your helmet, and still cause "welder's blindness" - which is basically a nice sunburn to the cornea; generally not a permanent thing, but hurts like hell for a long while.
Also, use a guard on angle grinders! And keep it in between you and the work! A man was killed by an exploding cutting disk at a company I used to work at. Shrapnel lodged in his chest, he took the guard off to get at something more easily.
Yes. It's a tradesman hack to buy a 115mm grinder (it's cheap), take off the guard and fit 125mm disks. People have been killed here recently by broken bits firing out. Cutting disks are so thin that a minor course correction can easily break them. Someone I know had a labourer use a grinder with a broken on off switch. One day the guy put it under his arm and plugged it in, and it cut through artery, vein and nerve. A year later and he is just starting part time work.
Paradoxically it's harder to tell when you have your lenses on. They're a barrier between the surface of the cornea and the inner eye lid so they actually mask the pain you might feel without them.
Although I wear extended wear lenses which are FDA approved to stay in for 30 continuous days my optometrist has emphasized that they need to come out every week for an evening so that you can evaluate the condition of your eyes and how your cornea is feeling. It only takes a few days to develop an abrasion that as folks have noted is very painful.
As long as I can wear lenses overnight I'm never going to try LASIX. Just too many people that run into issues with dry eyes, halos and poor night vision. Since I'd still have to wear reading glasses I don't even see the point - with my multifocal lenses I almost never wear glasses anymore for reading even.
I've been wearing contacts for over 20 years (started in HS) and have never had a corneal abrasion. With a prescription of -8.5, I hate the tunnel-vision effect glasses give me, so I wear my contacts pretty much all the time (I don't sleep in them, however).
A coworker came into work one day with a really ugly looking right eye (red, tearing, etc.) Turns out he got whacked in the face by a tree branch on his way in (he rode his bicycle to work). He was even wearing glasses but apparently that didn't protect his eye (enough). He lasted about an hour before he left to go see his eye doc who diagnosed him with a corneal abrasion. Guy was in pain for weeks.
So my assessment is that corenal abrasions are caused by 'bad luck.'
I sleep in mine, except for once a week when I take them out to disinfect overnight or replace (I have 2-week disposables). I've had a mix of opinions from doctors on this. My current doctor says it's fine if my eyes aren't getting dry/irritated (in which case I should take them out), though I've had past doctors who were against it.
The tradeoff in the current doctor's opinion is that taking them out nightly reduces infection risk theoretically, through nightly disinfection, better access to the eye surface for your immune system, and lower risk of corneal abrasions. But handling the contacts daily for removal/reinsertion provides a new route for infection, as a lot of infections are introduced by fingers, lens cases, etc. So the added handling might offset the benefits of nightly removal enough to make it a net loss, if you're one of the people for whom sleeping in contacts doesn't produce dry eyes or irritation. Real-world data seems not good enough to compare the magnitude of those two effects.
An anecdotal word of warning: I wore bi-weekly disposables as well for quite a few years and would repeatedly sleep in them. Never had dry eyes or irritation, however after a few years I developed tiny capillaries growing in my eye (corneal neovascularization), as it turned out they were not getting enough oxygen.
Supposedly if they continue to grow I could lose my eyesight, and they won't actually go away even if I stopped wearing lenses.
Yeah, that's a good point. I've had that mentioned to me, but I get annual checkups, and have been told that they'd show up in the annual checkup if I were having that problem, at which point I could change my habits (it's not an acute condition that crops up in a month or something). Supposedly that complication has also gotten less common in the past 5-10 years as newer lens materials are much more oxygen-permeable than older ones were.
I caught my eye with the edge of a cardboard box.
On the way to the hospital I had to drive into the sun. Both keeping my eye open or closed was painful.
The test they did was a couple of drops in my eye and a black-light. The end result was just a few days Vicodin script and after a couple days I was fine. The drugs didn't even reduce the pain from what I could tell. Luckily they made me tired so I slept for most of those days anyways.
Generally your eye becomes red, it hurts, and is sensitive to light. There are varying degrees of an abrasion though, and the severity of these symptoms may make the less severe versions harder to determine if it's an abrasion or something else.
Google doesn't share or sell your information. This is a common misunderstanding. No advertiser can identify you individually. Rather you're an anonymous part of a large group with certain characteristics specified by the advertiser. Google also allows you to opt out of targeted advertising. Finally, Google's philosophy is that it will release PII data of its users over Google's dead body.
In comparison, ISPs can share "precise geo-location, financial information, health information, children’s information, social security numbers, web browsing history, app usage history and the content of communications”.
There are powerful financial interests at work here. I think this is going to be a common way to swerve the conversation away from the heart of the issue.
It might also be another thing if major ISPs didn't have protected monopolies and we could speak with our money. But most of us can't.
Not trying to swerve any convoys more just trying to figure out how the head of the FCC could possibly in any way rationalize this without assuming loads of money changing hands. Sigh.
> On the set up, it might be right but unfortunately I do not have a room to spare for a full room VR.
Are you using roomscale? It wasn't clear from your comparison. It's the biggest difference that matters between Vive and Oculus. Roomscale is fundamentally a superior experience. Until Oculus has a generally available implementation of it, Vive is at a different level above Oculus.
Since you already have the Vive, you should at least try roomscale once by temporarily moving around furniture. It changed my perspective on the potential of VR.
I worked at Google some time back. Take a look at the list of products [1] that Google provides. It's pretty long! Of those, 7 products have >1 billion monthly actives: Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Play, Maps, Search, and YouTube. Things at this scale take a lot of effort.
Alternatively, a quantitative measure of effectiveness is the company's revenue or net income per employee. For 2015, that's $1.2M / Googler or $264K / Googler, respectively.
I think the ultimate goal with space travel is to reduce the risk of human extinction, which is a distinct possibility when we are confined to a single planet or planetary system.
Transporting and then returning humans to a "distant" destination will be a worthy milestone that will teach us a lot. We have to start somewhere.
Perhaps you're right: maybe we can more quickly achieve distribution of humanity by solely focusing on robotic exploration. But I just wanted to point out that satisfying science fiction fanboys isn't the only reason to travel to Mars.
It seems incredibly arrogant and short-sited to assume that humans would be able to somehow survive outside of their original environment. There isn't a grocery list of things we need to bring into space or to another planet. Everything on this planet is interrelated and inseparable in largely unknown ways.
You don't need that much to just survive - food/water, atmosphere, low enough radiation, manageable temperature.
All of these problems can be solved with our current level of technology on Mars. After you establish the base near a water source, you can grow your own food, you can make oxygen, you can mine for whatever elements you need.
(replying to pond_lilly, who appears to be shadow/hellbanned)
> pond_lilly 4 hours ago | link [dead]
> Exactly, like bacteria in our guts that gets replenished by consuming foods grown in Earth soil. On Mars this stuff will die out right away, and to replicate it you will need to create another Earth.Gut bacteria is just a tiny example, there is other stuff like bone problems, vision problems, etc. I am appalled that instead of fixing mess here on earth, the only known planet to support life, we waste brains, time and resources on these idiotic fantasies
Well there's one thing, if we can manage to build a survivable habitat on a planet like Mars--relatively mild as it may be, compared to other space places--surviving on a planet on the verge of some global climate catastrophe is going to seem like a piece of cake ;-)
I get the sense we're going to need to do some heavy genetic engineering before we're able to survive long-term on other planets. Probably more than anyone from this generation will be comfortable with. This of course will raise the question, have we really saved ourselves from extinction if what we save isn't exactly human?
Given how far away other earth-like planets are likely to be, the more immediate challenge is long-term survival off earth, either in a spacecraft or on mars.
Once we learn how to survive "on our own" then one could envisage making the journey to some Earth II.
Since this comment is currently at the top, I feel I have to add that michaelochurch's overall Google experience was an extreme outlier, as is well known internally at the company.
> - 3d maps has been done like this already (by bing and others), though this looks a better resolution.
Bing appears to be using a non-scalable approach for Bird's Eye view. E.g., Seattle downtown contains a few 3d buildings in a very confined area. It might even be manually modeled.
What Google has announced is impressive because it is automated and scalable. Small demos are great and all (e.g. C3) but qualitatively different from getting something like this deployed into the real world.
C3 is a "small demo"? C3's 3D maps have been deployed and are publicly usable and cover at least 25 metropolitan areas. Google may be catching up fast, but there is nothing shown in the video that C3 haven't done already.
Growth is so important because that's the reason something is a good investment vehicle. You invest because you want to increase the amount of money you put in, not keep it the same.
Bottom line, the article is talking about growth in revenue and income. The article outlines that growth can come by two ways: growth in the number of users and the growth in $/user. It claims that the former has little upside because of how large Facebook already is. It raises questions about the latter.
From what I've read, Facebook isn't really interested in cultivating investment. Look at the small float, and Mark Z's firm control of the company with over 50% ownership.
In many ways, for the man on the street Facebook isn't a good investment. At the same time, it doesn't seem to be a goal of management to create a company that entices investors. See the line "we make money to create a better product, not create products to make money."
The value of equity for a public company isn't a metric that only investors care about. It is the most comprehensive measure of a public company's well-being. It describes how much money the company is making and it predicts how much money the company is expected to make in the future.
E.g., suppose Facebook's equity takes a significant decline in value on the public market: employees become unhappy as the equity component of their compensation declines; Facebook's ability to make large acquisitions becomes more expenseive when its stock is worth less; and its ability to raise capital diminshes because it's more expensive to borrow exactly because their financials aren't as good, according to their stock price.
I personally believe that the long-term goals of investors and founders are very well-aligned. I believe that the common statment by founders nowadays, that they are building a company not for their investors but for their users, will produce the long-term financial results that investors want. It's the short-term goals of investors that conflict with that.
In short, equity isn't this isolated thing that can be happily ignored. It's tied to everything.
Then why the IPO, except as an exit strategy for the founders?
So Zuckerberg cashes out at Facebook's peak, leaving the subsequent 'investors' with nowhere to go but down. I wouldn't necessarily put that intention past Zuckerberg, and perhaps a Facebook collapse would be a good thing for openness and interoperability on the web, but isn't it a bit of a self-defeating strategy? Can the hype machine generate enough naive investors to generate a substantial cash-out?
