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!
Coworker didn't go to the dentist for 30 years. Then needed a bunch of dental work to clear out a chronic infection before he could have surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. I'd heard that infections can spread from gums to your heart. This is the first case I've seen in the wild where that happened.
It’s something I need to get better about, but man, it’s so tedious and if I try to do something else while flossing in invariably do a bad job at flossing.
Get a waterpik or the Sonicare equivalent. Use it with very warm but not hot water and a half cap full of Peridex or mouthwash.
My dentist told me I build plaque faster than most, and asked me to floss more (I hadn't been flossing any.) Like you, I found straight flossing to be pretty challenging, but the hydrofloss routing I described takes less than a minute to floss, and is pleasant to boot,and my dentist finds it more effective for me than straight flossing ever was.
Peridex nukes your mouth biome. That leaves it temporarily vulnerable to pathogenic bacteria. Normally you would prefer to have a biome consisting of benign bacteria which outcompete the pathogenic ones.
Here’s my one unsolicited advice for the day, keep a pack of those little flossers in your car, at your desk, or somewhere else you are commonly. Then, use those after lunch daily, or while on a meeting.
I hate floss, and while I dislike the little flosser picks less, they still annoy me too, but I have now discovered they sell large (8 inch long or so, similar to a toothbrush) sticks with a flosser head (replacable, extremely cheap) on them.
I love them and they've helped me floss more often! I can just get through it so quickly and it doesn't feel like a chore. Just great manueverability that lets you fly through it rather than keep figuring out how to reposition.
If you have a hard time getting yourself to floss daily, try them.
(I won't mention a specific brand name because that rankles my anticonsumerism, but, you can easily find it at the drugstore)
This. This is the one. I have those little flossies in an opaque jar on my coffee table and invariably, every night after dinner, I have flossed. Make it easy to do and you might do it more often.
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.
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.
You're going to erode your teeth enamel like that. Hot water has nothing to do with it. Timing has nothing to do with it. Citrate and water increase; oxalate, protein, and cola decrease are generally important. Also, being endocrinologically stable is important.
See a urologist because they form silently again and again. Unless you have x-ray vision, it's impossible to know their status.
>You're going to erode your teeth enamel like that.
Honestly, this gets repeated a lot, but I've yet to see literature that shows this is true. It is true that you can show erosion under ridiculous conditions that don't mirror the real world like immersing loose teeth in acidic beverages for days. But I've yet to find evidence that drinking unsweetened acidic beverages like carbonated water or water with a little lemon juice has any meaningful impact on tooth decay. Over and over again the actual epidemiology shows an association between sugar / processed carbohydrates and tooth decay.
I've had a couple over the last few years. I've also started throwing lemon juice in my water bottle whenever I refill it. My urologist also suggested apple cider vinegar, I try to take a bit of that every day too (usually hot). It can help dissolve stones.
I personally don't find them particularly 'painful' more like profoundly uncomfortable. I find that I constantly am in a cycle of sitting for a few minutes then pacing around then maybe try and lay down, rinse repeat. A little heating pad time on my kidneys seems to make it less of a problem.
I’d say in your case your stones probably haven’t been that big. My stones were the worst experience of my life - only IV morphine helped. And even that made the pain just tolerable. Horrible!
I do identify with the constant uncomfortableness though.
I don't think size has much to do with it, or at least there is no deterministic correlation to pain. Mine, just removed, was only 3-4mm, but it caused immense pain. The pain was 11/10, such that I cried and vomited from the pain, and the pain pushed through toradol, hydrocodone, and oxycodone. The second hydrocodone IV juice I got was described as 10x more potent than morphine. On my second ER visit in just two days, I had to have a stent installed until the stone could be removed because my kidney was doing poorly. The stone still hadn't passed after a month.
The shape of the stone and size of the ureter have an effect as well. I think the main thing on pain is: is the stone blocking urine. If yes, then you will experience pain that you didn't think existed. And if things stay that way, you risk kidney failure, infection, and/or sepsis.
The insane-o pain comes not from the stone itself but from the stone causing urine to backup which causes the kidney to expand in its casing. I had more discomfort from the stent than I did pain from the stone while I had both, but the stent kept the insane-o pain and my kidney from failing since it kept urine flowing.
I literally cannot describe the pain I had when the stone first entered my ureter. It was existential pain, my back and abdomen muscles locked up and felt like they were dying and turning into stone, and the nausea was unbearable. The best analogy I can come up with is that it felt like someone was taking a screwdriver and stabbing me in the side all the way to my spine without it piercing, and then some, all the while having the worst stomach ache, immense pressure to void, etc. And I don't think that even gets to it.
Ouch, I had my first one a few weeks ago, 4mm too and this hits home.
3 days before the acute crisis which led me, vomitting with pain, to the ER, the symptoms were weird and not easily attributable to a kidney stone: a few drops of pink urine at first, discomfort more than pain, mostly in the morning after peeing, then almost ok for the rest of the day.
The ct scan showed swelling of the kidney. When I finally ejected the stone (more like peeing black sand) 6 days later, I lost ~2kg over the next 24h.
The medicine that helped with the pain was ketoprofene (and antispasmodics) but 2 doses a day were clearly not enough to cover 24h :(
Was your pain acute? I get a stone in my right kidney every 5 to 7 years. My pain is usually very acute. I like to describe it as somebody slamming a large needle into my abdomen. Think Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.
These days my regimen is to avoid caffeine. I don't know if it's working, I had a year long relapse during COVID as caffeine free coke became unavailable.
The pain was beyond acute. When it first occurred I was sitting on the couch. I went from being perfectly normal, to being slightly uncomfortable, to thinking I had a back or stomach cramp, to thinking I needed to use the restroom, to thinking I needed to go to urgent care, to knowing I needed to go to the emergency room all in about 5-10 minutes. But at times, the pain was so radiating that I thought my abdomen would explode. I honestly thought I would die any minute.
I've been caffeine free since 2020, stopping it due to severe anxiety during that whole debacle of a year. I have been dealing with acid reflux in the prior months, and I have a suspicion my stone was caused by low water intake and Tums. Hopefully the stone analysis correlates with that because it would be an easy fix. I'm certainly increasing my water intake now and staying completely away from Tums.
I hope to everything this is my only experience. It was my first stone, and I hope my last.
Sounds like me. I occasionally get heartburn and worry that the Tums are a contributing factor but they are the only thing that provides consistent and immediate relief.
That sounds horrible, something I don’t ever want to experience. I’m sorry you had to go through that, you’ve just convinced me to start including more lemon juice in my diet.
Yea, 0/10, would not recommend. Lol. Even dealing with the stent for four weeks was unpleasant. Everything's out now, and I'm so much better now. I think even just a lot water is supposed to help since it decreases concentrates.
Increasing citric acid intake does seem to be helpful, at least for calcium oxalate stones (one of the more command kinds).
I've had more than a few stones over the past couple decades, and when I finally got myself in to see a urologist, that was one of her primary recommendations.
That, along with some other treatment, seems to have helped considerably (only one non-trivial stone in the last ~12mo & the few others were barely noticeable).
In fairness, I keep the stuff around mainly for cocktails, but if Kingsley Amis is any example, having one of those every morning will certainly cause me many more problems than it's at all likely to solve.
I opted for surgery on my 2nd stone and it was a terrible mistake IMHO I should have tried to let it pass. The first was painful but not THAT bad. Worst experience I've ever had.
Now when I get a tinge of pain I immediately take Chanca Piedra and it seems to have helped for past few years, no reoccurrence, but could just be anecdotal & conicendental.
What procedure, and what was a mistake about it? I've had to have a 5mm stone removed endoscopically, and that didn't seem to do me any harm, although I was anesthetized for the procedure - if that's the difference, then say no more, as I'm sure it would have been fairly agonizing if I'd been aware of what was going on at the time.
Is blowing them up using ultrasound not an option where you’re from? Surgery sounds horrible. Would have probably also opted for passing the stones if that was an alternative…
Also the procedure is pretty sci-fi - https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
I asked about this after I passed my first stone (went to my gp, they gave me flomax and a painkiller, the later of which I really only used to help me sleep, I didn't find the stone particularly 'painful' just very uncomfortable). My urologist said they really only use ultrasound for stones they consider large.
They consider it a surgery, but it’s not unlike a colonoscopy where there is no investing, just instruments entering orifices.
I’ve had two ureteroscopies while awake without any kind of anesthetic. It’s likely the worst experience I’ve had another human inflict on me. You’re in a very vulnerable position, it’s very painful, and it induces the sensation of urinating uncontrollably.
After my first, the doc decided he might as well do a prostate exam as well. I went in not knowing either was going to happen. I was shaken for about a week afterwards.
> two ureteroscopies while awake without any kind of anesthetic. It’s likely the worst experience I’ve had another human inflict on me
well, that makes me feel good, because there were trace amounts of urine in my blood not long ago and they wanted to do one of those to me, but instead I got a second opinion and test done and the trace blood had disappeared, so hopefully I dodged that bullet. it sounds terrifying
Oh no, I was fully asleep. I remember nothing of the surgery.
The bad experience was after I woke up. The pain was excruciating. They had first tried to zap it with ultrasound but it didn't work. Then they went in and did some kind of scraping of the urethra. I know this because there was a descent amount of discharge that I can only describe as skin scrapings. It was insanely painful to pass each of these and I think it was that painful because it was passing them through the raw skin that was scraped off itself (within the urethra).
To alleviate the pain I was put on some kind of opioid pain meds for 2.5 weeks that had an insidious effect on my personality. During that time I was (without realizing it) a total unhinged ass it had a terrible effect on my working and personal relationships.
Beforehand I asked the Dr. do I need the surgery? He said "Well we don't really know. You haven't passed it yet (2 weeks) and the only way we can be absolutely sure is with with surgery." There was no real explanation about the tradeoffs of how painful scrapings etc would be.
After the fact, the cynic in me wondered, was this guy gaming the system by tipping the scales in favor of surgery (since he was the one to do the surgery in private US medical healthcare system). FYI It was a 4-5mm stone.
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.
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:
Is there a reason that this is a huge concern in the US while flights not passing over US airspace freely allow the use of 5G equipment including during take off/landing?
What western airlines allow the use of cell phone radios during takeoff and landing? I’ve flown in over a dozen countries, and they all require “airplane mode” at those times.
Maybe about half the passengers actually turn airplane mode on. Or turn it on for their phone, but forget their tablet and smart watch.
It's just theatre. It's there mostly to stop you playing with your phone and pay attention to the flight attendant doing the safety speech. One time, many years ago when phones were literally the size and weight of bricks and avionics weren't prepared for the interference of these new fangled "moveable phones", there may have been a problem with some of them, so the FAA put a rule in.
These days, every single passenger has at least one 4G or 5G device. If this was truly a problem, really truly actually causing radio interference, this wouldn't be allowed. You'd have to walk through an RF detector at the gate, and they would confiscate your devices and put them in a Faraday cage.
Do you know why they don't confiscate your phones?
Because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because avionics has had to deal with RF interference from mobile phones for decades, and no commercial plane would be deemed airworthy if it had any such problem!
Famously, some of the victims of the 9/11 hijackings got to make phone calls from the air, and/or received SMS texts notifying them of what happened to the other planes.
> It's just theatre. It's there mostly to stop you playing with your phone and pay attention to the flight attendant doing the safety speech.
They frequently give the safety demonstration before requesting people turn on airplane mode. And besides, there’s no safety demonstration when landing.
> If this was truly a problem, really truly actually causing radio interference, this wouldn't be allowed.
And they would drug and alcohol test pilots before flight, yet you can still read NTSB reports showing toxicology in fatal crashes.
> Famously, some of the victims of the 9/11 hijackings got to make phone calls from the air, and/or received SMS texts notifying them of what happened to the other planes.
Those were satellite phones (or used special ground-based receivers) they weren’t regular cell phones. And they were embedded in your seat-back and presumably certified as being airworthy.
The calls that I recall being reported on used telephones available to flight crew for communications unrelated to flight and possibly made available for crazy prices to passengers.
You generally can't receive cell phone signal at segment of airliner flight except immediately after takeoff and in final stages of landing, due to optimizations involved in providing said signal (directional segment antennas, with attempts to beam-form towards specific terminals in latest versions). In practice I had hard time and required special tricks to keep a call running above 500m AGL and it probably depended on BTS located on hill above my reference point.
There actually tends to be avionics interference from mobile devices, especially outside 2.4GHz band (which is a "junk" band because of airliners - unlicensed use of 2.4GHz band exists so that airliners could use microwave ovens).
Airplanes actually aren't tested for mobile phone interference unless the plane is going to explicitly allow use of in-flight wireless internet. Yes, with modern devices, you have much less risk of interference, but interference happened in the past, and the rule stays mostly to lower the amount of loose, hard and heavy devices that become possibly dangerous projectiles in case of Rejected Take-Off or a crash.
After all, it's easier to put a "theatre" on than try to use reason with barely mentally present (on average) and possibly unruly passengers.
My understanding is it's an FAA rule to prevent talking on the phone during flight (as well as listening to crew like you mentioned, etc.), not some kind of theater (which I understand would be an FCC rule, ostensibly to prevent interference).
The concern is specific to allowed frequencies - if the network doesn't advertise the frequencies involved then your phone is not going to transmit on them.
It seems to me that the plane-based altimeter hardware here is incredibly antiquated; honestly, it seems incredibly vulnerable to jamming and attack scenarios, not just interference from 5G.
Now, it's reasonable for aircraft manufacturers to say "hey, in the absence of guidance, we haven't had the time to improve this hardware, let's ensure that the replacement timetable and the 5G rollout timetable in landing pathways are well coordinated." And if guidance is indeed absent, that's an incredible failure on the part of regulators, and one we should hold them to task for.
But it's another thing entirely to try to say "5G around airports should be restricted indefinitely." The OP article doesn't give enough detail to determine what it actually is that manufacturers are proposing, but one imagines that if a timeline were specified in their proposal, one reasonable enough for the manufacturers to publicize, it would have been reported on.
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:
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.
The Boeing of those days was a different company than Boeing today, and the public knows it. That Boeing was driven by engineers with safety as their highest priority. Today's Boeing is driven by suits with profit as their highest priority. This Boeing has lost the public's trust. Even if they fix MCAS, how do we know there aren't other safety corners cut in the design just waiting to kill somebody?
The "suits" didn't just take over last year. The complaint is at least as old as their move to Chicago in 2001. That would at least put the 787 in the same class of "suit-designed" aircraft.
And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding. Considering air travel has increased by almost an order of magnitude since the heydays of engineering-run Boeing in the 60s, and fatalities have decreased by a similar factor, air travel today is about 70x safer than it was in the past.
Based on this data, any nostalgic theories of how safety today is being ruined by <x> are really hard to defend.
> That would at least put the 787 in the same class of "suit-designed" aircraft.
The 787 is a suit-designed aircraft. Composite materials are not ready for prime time. They are a gamble that Boeing suits have made against passenger lives. If the bet pays out, the planes save a miniscule amount of fuel compared to planes made of traditional materials. If the bet does not pay out, people die.
Only a few months ago, we discovered more 737 problems. These were unrelated to MCAS. Instead, they affected the part that holds the wing to the fuselage:
Strongly disagree there. The material is perfectly fine, in part due to massive safety margins.
Composites have been in use in crewed aerospace vehicles for ~55 years (or arguably >80 years).
Composite aircraft were developed in the early 1960s, although first use of composites goes back to the 1930s, and even the Space Shuttle developed in the 1970s made extensive use of composites... not just carbon fiber and kevlar, but also materials considered cutting edge today, like metal-matrix boron fiber and carbon-carbon.
The materials are perfectly ready, if you're willing to pay the cost of testing, analysis, and margin. It took just ~35 years to go from Wright Brothers and their wooden aircraft to all-aluminum pressurized airliners (and yeah, there were folks who were skeptical of aluminum at that time as well).
Given at least 50 years in extensive use, I can't see how waiting longer will help[0]. The alternative is permanent stasis.
[0]More analysis or more margin or more testing is an argument I could buy into, but not being "too early for prime time."
"Composite materials are not ready for prime time."
Wow, I didn't know the 787 was built with that in mind. Seriously, my dad has worked at Beechcraft since the 80s and he remembers when they tried that nonsense with the Starship. It's like no one remembers why the idea was scrapped beyond the initial costs (composites have to have aluminum weave to allow lightning strikes and static discharge dissipate through the wings otherwise it'll blow off said wing).
people still die more driving to the airport than in a plane crash.
The fact that people smoke, drive while texting, drive drunk, don't exercise and so on, show that they don't really care about not dying. They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.
The data we have is the 737 MAX itself that stands out in the backdrop of ever increasing safety. That happened. The 787 possibly being a safe plane is irrelevant and doesn’t change that.
> And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding.
Boeing doesn’t get to take credit for all the advances in air safety in the past 40 years.
What arguments do you have that show that lots and lots of articles about about Boeings culture change are all wrong or insignificant (not a contributor to the Max's issues)?
I'm also not sure why you think a heuristic that uses amount of outrage as an inverse measure of the validity of an issue is a useful one. I would assume the connection is either non-existent or very weak, meaning you cannot infer anything useful about an issue from how much it is being discussed in the media and in public forums.
Given what we know now, after the outrage took out of the closet a lot of information previously obscured and out of the limelight, about Boeing's issues in production and design and the regulatory capture of the FAA: do you still think this whole backlash against the 737 MAX is purely the internet hyper analysis and outrage machine?
I'm not so sure about that. Besides what was already mentioned about news getting around much faster in 2019 vs 1991, the problems with the Max are harder to fix.
It's a fundamentally unstable airframe. The engines are too big and too far forward. They can't fix that without a major redesign of the fuselage to lengthen the landing gear. At which point it may better to simply design and build a whole new airplane.
The 737 MAX is not a 'fundamentally unstable airframe', though there are points in the flight envelope where it is close to becoming unstable. The definition of an unstable aircraft is when the center of pressure is forward of the center of gravity, a condition which never occurs in the 747 MAX flight envelope, though it comes perilously close to it in some edge cases.
As you correctly identify the engines being 'too big and too far forward' is a factor here, but the most important part of it is the extra lift created by the engine bodies, not the power of the engines themselves.
Let's just say that Boeing pushed a 50 year old design to places to which it never was supposed to pushed to.
Full blown panic about Airbus' offerings had a lot to do with this faithful decision.
The first crash was a combination of greed, bad design decisions, rush to market and all that in combination with an FAA that was in Boeing's pocket.
The fact that they didn't immediately pulled the plane after the Lion Air crash and the second crash was nothing less than corporate mass murder for profit.
I was under the impression the Max vs a clean room design was actually pushed by airlines, rather than by Boeing it’s self. They wanted a new form scratch design, much like the 787.
Now not to remove responsibility from them, ultimately they buckled under pressure and did the deed.
That's exactly what happened, Boeing wanted to re-design the 737 with a new type certificate and all that, but the airlines pushed for a re-engined 737.
In the end the 737 MAX is largely a good design, just with one big fuckup.
There's also a certain irony that Boeing would have been able to push out a software update before the Ethiopian crash if the government was not shut down for a month over Dec 2018-Jan 2019.
> You keep pushing the blame on the government shutdown.
I've actually only mentioned it in two or maybe three comments over the last year.
Your operating from the benefit of hindsight. All the information about the Lion Air crash is out now, you can look at it and decide it should have been grounded. At the time it was not very clear what had happened and why and if it was issues with the pilots or the aircraft or both. Boeing had more information than the public, but not as much as came to light after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Also, Boeing does not actually have the authority to ground aircraft they make, they have to push the FAA to do it. The FAA will want to have a good reason, because if the FAA does something that needlessly costs the airline industry lots of money, people at the FAA loose their jobs.
It should haven't been flown in the first place, as it breaks the rule of having a full-authority control system dependent on a single non-redundant sensor.
Boeing got approval for a limited-authority control system, and then modified it to be full-authority without redoing the paperwork. They KNOWINGLY LIED on the type certification documentation. If they wouldn't have lied the aircraft wouldn't have gotten of the ground in the first place.
> Boeing does not actually have the authority to ground aircraft
They do, it's called an Airworthiness Directive and a manufacturer can ask for it and FAA will comply. Even if the FAA is un-operative due to a US government shutdown, they could've notified EASA, CAA, etc. to prevent a knowingly-faulty plane from flying. They CHOSE to cover it.
> the FAA does something that needlessly costs the airline
industry lots of money
Try to balance corporate greed vs safety, and it won't end well because lives of people some place far away don't have monetary value to FAA. Safety MUST be paramount in all aspects, trumping profit, because otherwise people will die.
Yes, from everything that I've researched about this (not working in this industry anymore), MCAS was to adjust the feel of the controls when at the edge of the flight envelope. The plane, during normal flight, would behave very similarly to existing 737s.
What I read that shocked me was that Boeing was relying on a single angle of attack sensor at a time, with software rules that should have never flown. Such as: not tossing out obviously impossible angle of attack readings, doubling down on nose-down stall corrections, and not limiting MCAS to an input that ensured pilot controllability if the electric trim had to be disabled. (this may not have been possible, actually, in certain flight regimes)
The system pushed the plane into a regime where, from everything I have read, the aerodynamic forces were strong enough that manual pilot trimming (via a physical wheel near the control column) was not possible for a normal human, especially while the pilots were experiencing negative G's from such a strong nose-down trim. The flight log information I could find showed a very difficult cockpit situation. Enabling electric trim (and MCAS) shoved the nose downward, but also allowed some level of trim correction by the pilots that they could not achieve with the trim wheel. Stick forces were also enormous on the elevator, having to pull back over 50lbs if my memory serves.
Imagine yanking back with all your might while fiddling with secondary controls that also required enormous force to move, while the plane is forcing you up and out of your seat, against the seatbelt. This is where any cockpit communication issues between the two pilots would be severely complicating.
That Boeing released this with such flaws, and the FAA accepted it, seems quite damning to Boeing and the FAA. This is something that I can imagine technical leadership and management at Boeing would know about and should have caught and stopped much earlier in the process.
A part of me joins you in this pessimistic view, but the other side of me recognizes that the rudder issues took place in 1991 and most likely the vast majority of the public was never made aware of those issues. I had never heard of it, though that doesn't mean much as a statistical sample.
I know a lot of people are now aware of this particular design flaw and I would put money on it being more generally known now then then.
The 80s and 90s were loaded with severe accidents where the NTSB was really giving the taxpayers their money’s worth since there would be a major accident almost every month and the agency had to create a new division to handle all the cases.
Most weren’t design issues like the MCAS and the 91’ rudder issue but faulty 3rd party parts, poor maintenance, unknown stresses on aging fleets, pilot issues, and on and on.
We are in an unprecedented age of aviation safety and the MCAS issue is a huge blow to that record, thus you’re hearing about it in this level because it is fresh in the news. Accidents were common place back then, so common that I’d wager the 91 crash wasn’t on peoples radars since they just accepted that aircraft crash frequently and to be honest the general public doesn’t know what a rudder is in the first place.
In 1991, the number of deaths in air crashes was also nearly 5x the number of deaths in 2017. A plane crashing in 1991 was, for better or worse, just news.
But today, a plane crashing due to an engineering failure is rare enough that it makes headlines that people don't forget easily
I also believe most people hadn't heard of it. For one, news gets around much faster and easier nowadays with the advent of the internet. Anecdotally, it appears as if anyone who flies would've had the right exposure to Western media to hear about it.
The difference between them is that the rudder flaw could be fixed; once the problem was identified it was a trivial fix. They replaced a single part the size of a soda can.
The 737 Max can't be fixed. The engine location unbalances the plane. Full stop. Huge changes to the entire plane must be made to fix that. Software fixes are bandaids and any time the software either fails to activate when it should, or activates when it should not, people die. Unless you think software is 100% infallible, this plane is going to be much less safe than it could have been, forever, unfixably.
Yeah, the stories about how the new requirements didn't fit the limitations of the 737 design, and how they had to make it unbalanced and correct that inherent instability in software, throws up a bunch of red flags. At some point, you need to accept that the original design doesn't work anymore for the current requirements and redesign the whole thing from scratch. Or at least more thoroughly than the quick & dirty fix they used here.
The position of the engines causes the plane to pitch up more significantly when power is added. This is not necessarily bad, but it's different enough from the 737 NG that it would have required retraining pilots. MCAS was designed to remove the need for retraining, by using software to make the MAX act like the NG.
If everyone would have simply accepted that pilots needed to be retrained for the 737 MAX, MCAS wouldn't have been developed and those planes wouldn't have crashed.
You’re right in the first point, but wrong on the second and then maybe right again on the third. There’s a specific federal law concerning the pitch force curve stability (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.173) that the Max violated, meaning it was not going to be able to be certified as a 737 or as a new, clean sheet airplane, with the demonstrated stick force curve.
Now, if you’re going to make a clean sheet design and allow a new type rating, you can change the landing gear and wing design to achieve enough room to set the engines farther back and change the airfoil around them to design a plane that meets 25.173. Boeing already has such a plane: the 757.
It basically is a new plane but fitted in the box of the old which did not fit and was 'altered' by a software system to behave like it fitted in the box.
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:
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.
Speed of evolutionary change is basically proportional to the population size. Thanks to the huge increase in population size after the rise of agriculture, more human evolution has happened in the last 5000 years than the previous 500,000.
Really? I thought selective pressure was required to cause a major shift in the average human. The reason that our population has boomed is because our selective pressure has declined significantly. Or are you more talking about the adaptability of the species overall has increased?
Evolution acts on genetic diversity present in the population. The rate at which new genes (mutations) appear is basically a constant proportional to the population size (i.e. double the population and you double the rate new genes are formed). The rate at which new genes under positive selection spread through the population is approximantly equal to the log of the population size. This means it only taken 3x longer for a new gene to spread through a population of 100 million as it does to spread through a population of 1 million.
The end result is the bigger the population the more evolution even if in a static environment most of the evolution is invisible. Of course the environment of farmers is very different to hunter-gathers so there has been a large amount of visible evolution in the last 5000 years.
In a booming population, it seems to me that evolution can be more rapid in "selection" with less "pressure". For instance, if humans start exploring a new continent, some might have 10 times the normal number of grandchildren, and their genes would rapidly outnumber the others. Whereas if population is static, then you could say there's more "pressure" but there's probably less "selection", because there's less opportunity and variance in success.
I think that depends on pressures and variation as well; without selection pressure I don't think that there is a reason why the variation in the overall population will change.
There are still selection pressures, only they are more focused on sexual selection rather than survival selection.
There still remain advantages to being smart healthy and athletic. What has changed is the lower bound on these required for survival. What has happened to pressures on these required for reproduction seems like a much harder to judge question.
Certainly though, those with advantageous mutations seem to have a better chance of reproduction.
Selection pressure doesn't just mean people being killed by things. Some groups having significantly more surviving offspring is also a selective pressure.
Here in Japan, I've never been to a place where you don't flush your toilet paper. In fact, they sometimes run into the opposite problem, with tourists not knowing you're supposed to flush the paper (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/26/national/kyoto-...). Part of this might be because you're not supposed to flush sanitary napkins or anything but toilet paper, so there's often a bin next to the toilets for disposing of those, which I could see as confusing to someone who comes from a culture where you don't flush toilet paper.
Not uncommon in Europe either. Especially in non-renovated parts of old cities or middle-of-nowhere kind of places. Old pipes just can't handle too much paper.
Come to Baltic states or Poland then. It does happen in either super old and not yet renovated downtown buildings or roadside establishments in the middle of nowhere. Old narrow pipes just can't take paper. Especially if someone loves to fold it few times...
I think I've seen that in the UK as well, but memory may be playing tricks on me.
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!