Suppose that a genie gives every human on earth access to infinite power, with no externalities like CO2 or radioactive waste. Would it make the world a better place or would it turn into a dystopian nightmare?
I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.
This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
The natural resources of the earth are completely insignificant if you have access to infinite power. We could travel to and mine planets that are about to be consumed by blackholes or stars.
..and with infinite power, even that isn't necessary because we could simply create whatever matter we wanted directly from energy.
It's confusing because the drawing omits a pulley attached to shaft "a". Shaft "b" is hollow, shaft "a" turns inside shaft "b". As drawn, shaft "b" will rotate and turn bevel gear "B". If the belt were moved to the [undrawn] pulley on shaft "a", bevel gear "A" will rotate, causing "C" to turn in the opposite direction. The topmost pulley presumably slides left or right to engage the different bottom pulleys.
The energy release in neutron beta-decay is ~780 keV. This should be compared with the hydrogen binding energy of ~13 eV.
Hence, there is far too much energy released for the electron to stay bound in essentially any case. If the neutrino carries away all the energy (with momentum conservation soaked up mostly by the recoiling proton), it could re-bind, but that process should be exceedingly rare. In that case, the result would see an (excited, probably) hydrogen atom recoiling away from the invisible neutrino.
Conservation of momentum dictates that proton and electron will move away from each other. The decay energy might be absorbed by a nearby nucleus in an medium to a large part, leaving only a small momentum for both particles so they can form an atom, but usually it won't. In the average low-density case, the proton and electron will find other partners only after quite some cooldown.
In very rare cases most of the energy might also be carried away by the neutrino that is produced as well, so decay to hydrogen is not impossible in a vacuum.
>> I've always found it a little surprising that companies haven't built/funded a open-source organization for parametric mechanical CAD, similar to Blender for games or KiCad for electronics/PCB design.
Unigraphics was owned by McDonnell Douglas and then sold to EDS, which was a subsidiary of General Motors. As far as I know, GM still uses Unigraphics as their primary CAD system.
I tried this. I didn't get into medical school but it is doable.
I enrolled in a premedical postbaccalaureate program, and over the course of two years of night classes finished all of the prerequisites required by most allopathic medical schools. I worked by butt off to finish with a 4.0 GPA and place in the 96th percentile on the MCAT (good enough to not be ruled out because of my MCAT score). I also volunteered at a memory care hospice on weekends during this period and ended up with 100 hours of clinical experience. I had some additional clinical exposure working on medical device projects as an engineering student.
I applied to 27 schools and was invited for two interviews. Of those two, I was waitlisted by one and rejected by the other. I didn't end up clearing the waitlist. So what went wrong? I can't say for certain, but I suspect these were contributing factors:
* My undergraduate engineering school GPA was 3.3 and my graduate school engineering GPA was 3.4. These are reasonable by engineering school standards but borderline for medical school.
* I only had 100 clinical hours. Many applicants have hundreds or even thousands of hours of clinical experience when they apply. I was 31 when I started the postbac program and decided to keep my full time job in order to save up money. The opportunity cost of each hour of clinical experience was higher at this age compared to a typical undergrad. In hindsight I should have at least devoted my weekends to gaining clinical experience the moment I decided to go this route.
* One of my recommendation letter writers was late. My application wasn't processed until all recommendation letters were in. I wasn't eligible for consideration until later admissions rounds.
* I didn't stand out. To be clear this isn't a requirement, but schools like to build a diverse and interesting class, so standing out in some way can be helpful. I struggle to decide if this was something beyond my control or if it represents a personal failure.
To return to my initial point, it is doable. In an alternate universe in which my recommendation letters made it in earlier, or I slept better before the MCAT and got an extra point, perhaps I would have been invited for one or two more interviews. If the interview -> admission invite conversion rate is 20%, that boosts the odds of admission from 36% to 59%. (I haven't ruled out applying again, but I would need to enroll in classes for at least another year in order to get new faculty recommendation letters. Unfortunately it isn't safe to volunteer at the hospice right now due to COVID-19).
Can corroborate. Schools care about GPA too much even in the face of work experience (most doctors on admission committees have never had another job..) + MCAT score. Median GPA is 5% of the grading in the US News research rankings and that matters a ton to the schools. Went from software to med school, now in my second year (4 since software). 3.67 GPA (bioinformatics)/ 3.55 BioChemMathPhysics GPA with 100th percentile MCAT. ~140 hrs clinical experience when I applied. 20 applications, 6 interviews, 4 waitlists (to rejection), 1 immediate post-interview rejection (screw you too NYU), 1 acceptance.
If you read about this CEO and are thinking about making the switch be very realistic with your chances, particularly about your GPA like parent post said. Without a 3.7+ you're going to have a tough time, and there's no guarantee that you won't spend 2+ years and get rejected. You'll have to overperform on the MCAT. Expect bias against your work experience (only software really). Whenever I said I used to be a software engineer you could see the light leave some of the interviewers eyes... Though if you're FAANG or another name-brand company I wouldn't expect the same.
Have got to say though software/data skills have been super useful for research projects, which are the fun part of medical school vs the absolute grind of pounding facts in.
Wow. That story didn’t end like I thought it would. How depressing. I hope you get into med school because it really sounds like you deserve it. There is just so much unnecessary grind and friction in this country.
Your stats are pretty impressive. I'm surprised you didn't get into an MD program especially considering that you did the postbac. I'm sure you would've gotten into DO school though.
I've thought about doing this myself. I'm curious, what made you want to switch (from software engineering I'm assuming?) to medicine?
Thanks for sharing the story. I am curios if you applied both for MD and OD schools? Anecdotally, I heard opinion, that OD is more tolerant to people, who choose medical field as a second career or older applicants.
If you have a laptop with a trackpoint, become proficient with it. You can switch between mouse and keyboard without moving your fingers away from the home row.
The MacBook trackpads are definitely great. And the trackpoint looks like an anachronistic holdover from the early 90s next to a modern trackpad. However, it has survived because it's truly a useful productivity tool.
It's a nice middle ground between having to move your hand between the keyboard and trackpad, or embracing a keyboard-only Vim approach.
MacBooks were the first laptops I had where I actively liked the trackpad rather than grudgingly tolerated it. TBH, I've been pretty happy with the trackpads on my Chromebooks and Linux Thinkpads as well. It's mostly my one Windows laptop that I still feel I need to attach a mouse.
How is does this different from publishing the instruction set, which was presumably already available (if it weren't, how would one write an application for it)?
Right. For instance, the x86 architecture is published. If you try to build anything that can interpret it, you'll get sued by Intel or AMD (or both, if you really copied anything good).
What is less widely considered is that emulation is considered an implementation of a CPU. So e.g. research labs at universities have been told in no uncertain terms by CPU vendor legal notices to stop working on research that is emulating the x86 or ARM instruction sets. Now with the POWER ISA being open, everything about the ISA is fair game for research in emulation, soft cores, hardware, etc., which does put it in a space that only academic "toy" ISAs and RISC-V really sat in before.
But we have qemu [0] that emulates quite a lot of Instruction Sets. How comes that it is allowed to exist, qemu is emulating quite a lot of instruction sets [1] ?
The support is there, yes, but it's always been a grey / largely unenforced black area. As soon as the emulator cuts into chip sales in any significant way the tolerance for its use would stop.
IANAL, this is simply what legal folks are saying on this topic.
I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.
This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.