Yep. I had endocarditis a couple of years ago. No warning, just slightly lowered energy levels, then a sudden bout of gout. After going to the doctor I got some meds for the gout but the pain increased and progressed to a lung infection. That got worse for a couple of days then suddenly oral thrush. Big "Oh no" energy, so I drove to the emergency room. I walked in, taking four stops along the way to catch my breath on a 100m walk, then once in the ER I had a doctor listen to my left lung, expression of concern, right lung, deepenitg concern, then worst heart, definite oh shit moment.
I had Streptococcus Sanguinus, a typical oral bacteria, in my Aortic valve. It has eaten the valve until it was back flowing by 75%, so I needed four pumps to match one normal pump.
They said the source was probably biting my cheek, ADHD comes with lots of benefits, so yeah, not a virulent or particularly dangerous bacteria, just in the wrong place. Got the valve replaced, now I am on Warfarin for the rest of my life, but wow, I am glad to be in Australia, the only money I spent was on snacks. I was flown to and from hospital, 6 weeks in hospital, surgery with 11 staff, and not a single solitary cent spent.
The averages are not the same as the median values, I think this is where some of the problem comes from. The plots have quartiles with the boundaries shown as lines. The line showing the median value for the Ampre system is near the middle of the plot, but the median value for the AMD plot is far over to the right end of that plot, suggesting that many of the results were in a narrow range just above that value. This would skew the total average energy consumption way up, so we would see the difference shown in average Joules per run. This is probably not a good type of plot for this type of data, a scatter plot or line chart may be better.
I disagree. Making a satellite for observing space is great and all but you have a massive turnaround and it is super expensive. A ground based observatory can have upgrades, different equipment, lots and lots of modes of operation, and is much more accessible to the public. Sure it would be nice to have satellites with various spectra of analysis and it would be great for that to happen sooner, but the number of ground assets which have been impacted is very high and science gas been set back because of it.
Will this pay off? Eventually very likely it will. Will it be soon? Probably not, and while making space cheaper to access is great it is not a universal good. Remember that if a satellite has a collision we could be in for a cascade of awful and we could lose those satellites we were aiming to benefit from. Maybe if we had some much further away satellites I would agree, but LEO is becoming quite crowded and the benefit is not being shared around, it is enriching and small number of wealthy people.
It is also good to remember that everything started off inefficient with virtualization, it was incredibly slow and broke lots of things, but now it runs the modern web. I can run a VM on consumer grade hardware and reach most of the way to performance parity with native hardware with no technical skill past installing a few packages and running a wizard. Given the number if ARM based systems on the market now with built in battery and wireless I can imagine a lot of people wanting to repurposed then into home servers with power redundancy and remote access. The future looks bright for ARM servers
with pcs you had so little variation compared to smartphones. some 5 cpus. ram was dumb. disk had a very predictable api but was the worst. serial etc was just dumb pipes and interrupts. then there was some dozen video and network cards. those two took longer to get drivers.
with smartphones you have, i can't even ballpark a number... half chips are SoC in disguise which hardware changes every week then on top of that there's a custom firmware backed for each customer. multiply that for each little piece of the device.
there's a reason Android alternatives are stuck on last released kernel version: they just copy paste the binary drivers
Wow, sounds like a game changer. A totally different mechanism with almost no effect on healthy cells and it can be used as an adjunct to other chemotherapies? I mean, if it pans out, wow, that would be amazing. I remember reading about how with HIV if you have 1 drug it works for a while but evolves out from under you, 2 drugs extends this time, and a third just flattens it so much there isnt enough popation to mutate away. In the same way adding this as an adjunct could prevent the drift which can happen to some cancers when under selection from a chemo drug. Exciting times.
A fundamental problem with this approach is it is managing the end points of the insulin system while ignoring the start points. And you intake sugars your body will digest them and absorb through the gut into the bloodstream. As the level raises your body needs to burn or store the glucose to keep the blood level within safe ranges. One option is to store the glucose as glycogen primarily in muscle tissue and insulin is a part of the signal for this process. Another option is to convert the sugar to fat for storage, again using insulin as a signal. In the first case you have a fairly low limit (about 500g in muscle, another 100g in the liver, for an adult male of average size) and once this is full you can't use this pathway to store any more glucose. You then have to shunt all the remaining glucose into your fat cells by converting it into fats.
So if you have someone who has a chronically high intake of sugars, complex or simple, they will eventually fill their muscle reserves and be storing further sugar as fat. This will always require insulin to activate the glucose storage pathways and this will escalate over time if the level is high enough. Adding more insulin is a solution in the very acute timeframe, but chronically it is just escalating the problem.
The better solution is to reduce the intake of sugars. This means that you need less insulin to manage it, you don't increase resistance to insulin over time, and you don't progress diabetes. You can add fats in place of the sugar for energy and they burn and store without using huge amounts of insulin, so you keep the overall insulin load low and reduce the need for supplemental insulin.
Someone who is a type 2 diabetic may be able to reduce to zero supplemental insulin with a low enough sugar diet. They may also over time reduce their insulin resistance to the point where there is no diagnostic marker of diabetes at all, such as hba1c, fasting insulin/glucose, etc. Along with the markers much of the secondary harm is able to halt or reverse depending on the damage. You won't undo blindness but joint pain, neuropathy, excessive urination, fatigue, muscle wastage, and so on are all modifiable by ongoing diet. Making their insulin level higher to compensate for the diet is a temporary solution but if you don't deal with the diet it is just putting off the solution to the problem.
If you want to have a range of brightness you have a couple of options. One option is to vary the voltage you supply to the led, leading to a reduced brightness at lower voltages. The alternative is to use pulse width modulation, basically turning the led on and off fast so that it is on for a percentage of the time at full power.
Going with lower voltage is less efficient as the LED will output less light per voltage but not linearly, it will still use most of the power of full brightness at half.
Choosing PWM allows you to skip this problem by keeping the voltage identical but by using human persistence of vision to get the ideal number of photons to your eyes per your perception frame. The problem comes from making a slow PWM signal, say 60Hz, or having two similar but not identical PWM signals near each other, such as two different TV screens with a different backlight PWM frequency. That can make you see flashing because of the out of phase brightness peaks and troughs lining up.
I've noticed a couple of LED bulbs (one with warnings that it's non-dimmable) where the PWM (presumably) means that even when I'm not looking for it, I'll move my hand quickly to grab something and it looks like I'm in a 20fps computer game, fun novelty but it wears off. Fortunately there are plenty where I don't see this.
The most jarring thing is seeing the flicker when you move your eyes. If you scan your vision past a flickering light, you'll have multiple discrete images of that light left on your retina.
Strobing can also be dangerous around rotating machinery, like a lathe, because at certain RPM the machine will appear to not be spinning.
I believe the solution is to use a buck converter with enough inductance to ensure that the current to the LED is not interrupted.
I've definitely noticed that with my bike light. You don't notice the flickering normally, but rain makes it looks like you're playing a video game at 3fps. (I think I measured the flicker and the PWM frequency was like 400Hz, which is not quite as bad as 3fps.)
> Going with lower voltage is less efficient as the LED will output less light per voltage but not linearly, it will still use most of the power of full brightness at half.
I don't think this is true? Aren't LEDs more efficient at lower voltages/currents?
You're right -- look at any LED datasheet and you'll see the efficiency get lower at higher currents.
The real reason for PWM dimming is simplicity, expanse and size.
Turning an LED on and off is a lot simpler than a real constant-current LED driver: indicator LEDs can be driven directly from a digital output on a microcontroller, or switched with just a mosfet. Constant current is always going to be more components.
In AC-powered applications, making an LED not flicker at 100/120Hz requires capacitance for energy storage, which are bulky and unreliable.
Constant current LED drivers usually use PWM for brightness control. They still have a low value shunt resistor to set the fixed current limit. Making a system with variable current adds much more complexity.
True, some do, though some don't (and some have both). Even dedicated LED drivers using PWM can be better than simple PWM by using smarter modulation to get high resolution without reducing the frequency to something noticeable.
I don't think this is the flickering the original poster is referring to. Dimmers are a bit of a nightmare with LEDs, however. I usually buy high quality (pricey) dimmer switches and good quality LEDs that are listed by the dimmer as compatible.
The flicker that bothers me, and maybe the GP, is likely due to cost cutting in the LED power supply. Not enough filtering or ability to handle the normal voltage dips in a home electrical system. As above, the solution is usually to spend more $ on bulbs, but not a guarantee.
Triac based dimmers + LEDs are quite a dumb combo, effectively the dimmer cuts the sine wave and the LED driver tries to determine how much it was cut.
I wonder if a good solution would be to have a fairly hefty capacitor taking charge from the supply side and then have the system measure the capacitance to determine how it will light the bulb from there. It could check for a capacitance drop to know it is using too much power and drop the output brightness using voltage or PWM, then bring it back up as the capacitor fills more. You would definitely get fluctuations, but increasing the capacitor size would absorb most types of fluctuation and also allow a system agnositc approach, able to ignore whether it is a PWM, sine cutting, or other method of dimming on the power supply. A nice benefit would be the very slight curve in the light output when you turn it off, just extending the lighting a few parts of a second as the capacitor drains.
You need to be discharging the capacitor somehow; I suppose it was meant to measure the charge, even then measuring the cut off of the sine is not hard. It's just all retrofitting design - led into incandescent bulbs, LED drivers into sine cutters - all to preserve the existing lighting fixture.
I have some near ceiling lights that allow dimming via a remote control (infra red or 433MHz) or fast switching on/off (remembering their state afterwards).
There are other ways to communicate, e.g. using the zero cross - the dimmer can send whatever signal to the lights downstream - the latter would read it and set the brightness.
The white ones are actually 'blue' - but all that is not needed, the LEDs are current driven devices and even if they get a bit more relative output flux with higher currents, it's close to negligible. Overall phosphorus is 'bad' for the LEDs, reducing luminosity, increasing temperature.
Also the PWM can be in the high 30KHz w/o much of switching sacrifice loses, not even dogs would react on it.
In a lot of cases as your planet size goes up the gravity doesn't go up as fast at the surface as you would expect. First off, sometimes the density is different, so you would have a similar sized but lighter planet. Other times it would just be the distance from the mass meaning that the mass on the opposite side of the planet has less effect than you would expect at the surface. If you add extra mass you also increase the radioactive decay potential which is part of our core being warm. More radioactive material, a longer time with a stronger magnetic field, less damage from solar radiation. And yes, the surface fluid being denser would provide more boyancy, so an aquatic species would have less of an issue from multiple times Earth gravity.
This is a meta analysis. Meta analyses are done by collecting other studies and trying to pull the results out of each to apply to the main question of the study. The problem is of you have bad studies to start with you end up with a bad meta analysis, or garbage in, garbage out
Nutrition studies are very frequently awful. The use of questionaires to find out what someone eats is inherently flawed (do you remember how many times you ate brocoli this year?) and leads to biased results. People who care about their health will tend towards vegetarian and vegan diets because they are claimed to be healthy, but they will also be more likely to exercise, not smoke, be wary of alcohol, and so on, reducing the likelihood of cancer through those other mechanisms. Unless you actually randomly assign a diet for a long period of time and control for all of those factors your study is worthless, completely swamped in noise and misattribution. Let's also bot forget that people who are richer and more educated are more likely to be lower in stress and have more resources while also being more likely to go to a plant based diet.
Now take a bung of studies that are too short to see the effect, rely on bad data collection, stratify people by diet while also happening to get richer and more health conscious people in one group, and then bring them all together in one big study. You will find an effect. Is the effect because of the plant based diet or is it because that group is richer, less stressed, drinks and smokes less, works a better job, has a better education, and visits their doctor more frequently? I would expect and effect from the latter half, but the former in not shown by this or any other study thus far.
In the introduction to the study they include this statement, which I think agrees with your comment:
"This study systematically searched two databases and included six cohort studies included with limited types of digestive system cancers. Therefore, the evidence is not sufficiently strong to evaluate the relationship between digestive system cancers and plant-based diets. Comprehensive evaluations are scarce, especially for various digestive system cancers and multiple dietary patterns."
I had Streptococcus Sanguinus, a typical oral bacteria, in my Aortic valve. It has eaten the valve until it was back flowing by 75%, so I needed four pumps to match one normal pump.
They said the source was probably biting my cheek, ADHD comes with lots of benefits, so yeah, not a virulent or particularly dangerous bacteria, just in the wrong place. Got the valve replaced, now I am on Warfarin for the rest of my life, but wow, I am glad to be in Australia, the only money I spent was on snacks. I was flown to and from hospital, 6 weeks in hospital, surgery with 11 staff, and not a single solitary cent spent.