I decided, circa 2012, that healthcare was a make-work program for us taxi drivers. Sometimes transportation providers would make vastly more taking people to their appointments than the provider would receive for the checkup or the group counseling session. A good voucher fare for us was $50+ ($100+ round trip). I couldn't imagine AHCCCS (Arizona Medicaid) paying more than $40 for a group counseling session. Medicaid probably paid $40-50 for a medical followup appointment.
My theory behind this observation was that as the U.S. gradually de-industrialized post-NAFTA and post-WTO, our politicians leaders used healthcare as a source of jobs that couldn't be outsourced to Mexico or Asia.
'Make work' because in a country without a well developed transportation system healthcare decides you shouldn't just 'not get treatment' when you can't drive? Kind of a heartless take. Especially considering those in treatment are the most likely people to not be able to drive outside of minors.
If anythings sounds like you should direct condemnation at our lack of functional community transportation systems not the limited tools the medical system has to account for it.
I am so grateful that there are programs in the USA that can get people to treatments. When my mother was dying of cancer and could no longer drive it wasn't always possible to get her to appointments. Luckily she was able to utilize community transportation. I think without it she might have given up on going to the support group she loved so much just because she wouldn't have wanted to burden others to drive her that often.
My quip is supposed to be lighthearted, as the medical industry is obviously not a wealth-transfer scheme to transportation providers. The medical system gets paid regardless of whether their treatments actually help their patients. I don't think doctors are in charge anymore.
This article is preaching to the faithful. I recognize the techniques because I myself have, in the past, amused myself by becoming a false profit.
If the Science wants vaccines to be accepted whole-heartedly by the public it has to figure out why children become autistic and how to prevent this class of developmental deterioration.
As it is, the anti-vaxxers are doing Science by themselves, and elect themselves to be the control group. They’re using the prescientific observations that Measles and all the other vaccine-preventable illnesses are entirely survivable for mostly-healthy children, and the scientific fine print that suggests natural immunity is always better than vaccine-derived immunity (percentage of every outbreaks consists of people who didn’t get their measles booster, etc).
> […] the COVID-19 pandemic has only stoked vaccine misinformation and more anti-vaccine rhetoric.
My mom just had another case of the COVID-19, according to the probably-expired home COVID test. I don’t know how many times she’s been boosted. She said there’s no booster for the latest variant. Luckily she’s pulled through her latest SARS-CoV-2 infection. I’m sure as soon as the next booster is made available she’ll let her doctor administer it.
> Virtually every force we experience in everyday life (with the exception of gravity) is electromagnetic in origin. [...] It wasn’t until the arrival of Oliver Heaviside, who reformulated and simplified the equations [...]
Maxwell's original equations connected light and electricity. Maxwell's original 20 equations had 20 unknowns, using 'quaternion-based notation', which no one understood.
Heaviside restated Maxwell's 20 equations into 4 equations using vector calculus. The restatements helped with simplification, but I believe it wasn't without cost.
There's a lot that's still unexplained in our modern world, especially with regards to individual humans' experiences. I got a window on these as a taxi driver, where I was sent people who helped me figure out things I'd been wondering about.
There ought to be a link between electromagnetism and gravity, we just haven't figured it out yet. This wikipedia article was cited by Bing CoPilot in response to my query. It's above my pay grade, maybe one of you can translate it for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitoelectromagnetism
Here is a set of lecture slides on the changing form of Maxwell's equations including the component form (which was apparently Maxwell's very first version), the quaternion form which came second and then Heaviside's version[1]
Fun fact about Heaviside (that noone asked for) - he's also the guy who invented the "cover up" method of doing partial fraction decomposition quickly.[2]
I've been trying to find these 4 equations in Heaviside's writing but so far have not been successful. He certainly got rid of the quaternions but that seems like a minor difference because Maxwell was also not really taking advantage of them much and always split them up into scalar and vector part.
The major difference I found was that Maxwell was expressing things in terms of the scalar and vector potential (which is what you have to do in QED) whereas Heaviside got rid of that and just had an electric and magnetic field instead. I found that you need 7 of Maxwell's equations to derive the 4 Heaviside(?) equations.
If you actually wanted to embrace quaternions you could write the famous 4 equations as just two (using natural units):
> Maxwell was also not really taking advantage of them much and always split them up into scalar and vector part.
Did Maxwell actually use quaternions? If I recall correctly, at least in A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, quaternions were not actually used. Instead, he did most things in Cartesian coordinates, and all equations were applied to a vector's x, y, z components tediously. But many sources claimed Maxwell used quaternions, including quotes from Lord Kelvin. My reading on this part of history is limited, so my guess is that he did use them in personal research or in later papers. On the other hand, some other physicists of the same era used quaternions extensively, including applying them to Maxwell's electromagnetism, that is a sure fact...
Coincidentally, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was written as an overview all electromagnetic phenomena as a whole, so it paid very little special attention to the generation and transmission of electromagnetic waves. Combining that with its difficult math, the book would puzzle physicists for another decade before they see the light from the book, and made it a rather curious period of history in electromagnetism.
> I've been trying to find these 4 equations in Heaviside's writing but so far have not been successful.
In 1885, Heaviside published Electromagnetic Induction and Its Propagation in The Electrician, and formulated what he called the "Duplex Form" of Maxwell's equation. This was a long series of papers published in several months, and later republished in Electric Papers, Volume I. Basically, following his physical intuition, he felt that electric and magnetic fields should be symmetric and generate each other, and that should be directly highlighted in equations.
The logic of the paper went like the following.
First, he started with a definition of electric current [1]:
C = kE
D = cE / 4π
Γ = C + D
in which, E denotes electric force, C denotes conduction current, k denotes specific conductivity constant, D denotes displacement current, and c denotes dielectric constant. Finally, Γ denotes true electric current, which is the sum of the conduction and displacement terms.
Next, a definition of magnetic current [2]:
B = µH
G = Ḃ / 4π = µḢ / 4π
G' = gH + µḢ / 4π
H denotes magnetic force, B denotes magnetic induction, µ denotes permeability, G denotes magnetic current, Ḃ and Ḣ are derivatives of B and H (Newton's notation). Hypothetically, suppose that magnetic monopoles exist (Heaviside did so), G' would denote the "true magnetic current", with an extra conduction term gH, where g is a constant similar to k.
Then, he introduced the concepts of divergence and curl, and their physical significance [3]. After more discussion and derivation, he finally wrote [4]:
in which, e and H denote impressed electric and magnetic forces to take static fields into account. Finally, since magnetic monopoles don't exist, he made g = 0, but kept this term in the equations for symmetry and elegance. [0]
This is the core of Heaviside's Duplex Form of Maxwell's equations. one can clearly see the co-evolution of electric and magnetic fields, and is the precursor of the modern Maxwell's equations as we know today in its vector calculus formulation. As far as I know, his treatment of "physical" vectors as first-class objects is his original invention (independently invented by Gibbs as well), although the concepts themselves came from quaternions.
This is not a complete summary, as he continued his analysis in a series of publications.
A good book on this part of history is Oliver Heaviside: the life, work, and times of an electrical genius of the Victorian age, by Paul J. Nahin.
[0] So the claim "Maxwell's equations need modifications if magnetic monopole has been discovered" is historically inaccurate, it should rather be, "be restored to Heaviside's original form."
If you replace S.∇ with ∇· and V.∇ with ∇× you essentially get the vector calculus version of the equations.
Thank you for extracting the core ideas out of this lengthy text. But I'm still wondering where this very concise present-day formulation with just 4 equations was first written down, even if you can somehow find them scattered around in the book. I found something about Hertz but didn't try to follow up on it, i think he may have only considered a vacuum.
I remember reading a great answer [1] from Stack Exchange, that claims:
> the 1873 treatise used a pre-Heavisde form of vector calculus cannnibalized from Hamilton's quaternions ... only sparingly, to present the equations in capsule summary form.
Thanks for the reply. From your link, I now understand what does "vector calculus cannnibalized from Hamilton's quaternions ... only sparingly" means.
Gravitoelectromagnetism doesn't actually have anything to do with electromagnetism except that certain formal features of the theory of general relativity correspond roughly to the mathematical structures we talk about in electromagnetism, albeit with the proviso that the symmetries underlying the two theories are different.
Quaternion was crucial and instrumental tool in Maxwell discovery and the formulation of the electromagnetics (EM) equations. When Terence Tao was asked how come nobody has proof of the Riemann hypothesis, arguably the hardest of the Math problems, and according to him this is because there is no appropriate tools available at the moment to proof it. I'm not a mathematician but I've got a strong feeling that quaternion will be one of the potent tools to proof Riemann hypothesis.
Unlike other waves for example sound waves, EM has a unique polarization property. In order to completely and correctly model EM based phenomena quaternion based formulation and representation is necessary. One of the reasons that almost all existing wireless modulation are not utilizing polarization is due to most of the microwave and wireless engineers are not familiar with quaternion. Ironically their biased attitude is not unlike early mathematicians and scientists that were very much opposed to complex number, and it turn out that almost all of the modern wireless modulation for example OFDM are utilizing complex number.
For the derivation of the Maxwell’s equations using geometric algebra involving quaternion please check these articles and they can be summarized the into one elegant equation [1][2].
[1] Maxwell’s eight equations as one quaternion equation:
Lay people seem to have this weird obsession with Quaternions and love to suggest that somehow theoretical physicists are missing something because they don't use them. But physicists are almost disgustingly familiar with SU(2) which is isomorphic to the quaternions and easier to work with and understand (quite obviously, in my opinion). It is hard to imagine, from my point of view, that a mere isomorphism stands between physicists and progress, especially given that physicists have long generalized _beyond_ SU(2) and the quaternions in their understanding of fundamental fields. Formulating an SU(3) gauge theory in terms of quaternions would at least be difficult and almost certainly be goofy, if not impossible.
As for "I'm not a mathematician but I've got a strong feeling that quaternion will be one of the potent tools to proof Riemann hypothesis" I'd love to understand your intuition here, because I just don't see it.
Please read my comments properly, I'm saying that currently engineers are not familiar with quaternion because they have been exposed to vector calculus in their formal education not physicists. About thirty years ago in my EM class we have had a combined class of engineers and physicists, for some unknown reasons the lecturer was a microwave engineer. Thanks to physicists like David Hestenes that are more physicists now who are familiar with quaternion but for engineers it's still very much a minority thanks to Oliver Heaviside who really hated quaternions and popularized the inferior vector notations rather than superior quaternion versor notations.
As I've also mentioned in my comments the quaternion is necessary in order to fully describe polarization in EM, and there other comments in this post that upholds Heaviside vector can provide the exact representation of EM that is not correct. Heaviside vector representation is the simplication of the more comprehensive quaternion representation but do not mislead to say otherwise i.e the same thing.
For Riemann hypothesis, I just providing my intuition that whoever want to proof it need to have quaternion in their toolbox while Terence commented that whoever want to proof it needs a proper set of tools but he did not mention the exact tool just merely saying that current tools are inadequate. For me whatever the set of tools that will be used to proof Riemann hypothesis, one of them will be most probably quaternion.
Some people are of the philosophical bent that our world is entirely random. But this doesn't commonly match our experience. For example, I often asked people how they met their significant other. Sometimes it was nothing special, some couples had quite a story.
I had the sense that I got certain passengers for more than just transportation. Some people were having a rotten day, and I was able to cheer them up. One lady had some time to kill before her bus' departure time, so we went to the 24 hour diner, ordered our own pies and compared notes. When we got to the bus station she said it was the best birthday she'd had in quite a long time.
The most important thing I learned in my taxi was about substance abuse. This HN poll didn't get any upvotes, but it references some of the diaries I never finished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39071316
I am the founder of randonautica, so in short yes I have found that our universe is more than random. Thanks for the answer, sometimes I wish a little more intuition was allowed here rather than only analytics.
This part of Arizona is just north of Lake Havasu (a reservoir on the Colorado River). Summer highs average 109 degrees (hottest days are 120+), nighttime lows average 85 degrees - so people need to run their air conditioning units after the sun goes down. Adding to the duck curve with more solar panels won't provide power for overnight use of AC systems.
The proposed gas plant is a 98MW gas peaker turbine. The alternative to gas peaker plants for this part of Arizona are pumped hydro and 'cold storage', where AC systems are run during off-peak hours to build up a reservoir of cold.
Surely there's an opportunity for pumped storage somewhere on the Central Arizona Project, which starts at Lake Havasu (738' elevation) and deposits its water at Lake Pleasant (1700' elevation): https://www.cap-az.com/
This is about Shaken Baby Syndrome, which I learned from one of your comments is a fraudulent diagnosis: only a fraction of the "shaken babies" are actually abused. The Ask HN was about 'useless projects'. From /u/rossant's conclusion to his comment:
> [...] But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
oh, the submission was yours too, didn't notice until just now. Hah! I'd added the comment linked above to my favorites, which helped me track it down. Thanks for the links.
Edit:
> The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism. [0]
ECMO is also a cause of death, when the patient's lung problems are worsened by hyperoxia [0].
[0] "Supplementary oxygen administration is widely used in emergency and intensive care medicine and can be life-saving in critical conditions, but too much can be harmful and affects a variety of pathophysiological processes. Reactive oxygen species are known problematic by-products of hyperoxia which have an important role in cell signaling pathways. There are a wide range of effects, but when the homeostatic balance is disturbed, reactive oxygen species tend to cause a cycle of tissue injury, with inflammation, cell damage, and cell death.[2]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperoxia
The Boeing whistleblower just got finished off with ECMO, according to the recent submission [1]. I think the progression of his illness must have been "poor oxygen saturation treated with O2" -> intubation -> ECMO -> death.
I took a lot of seniors to and from their health care appointments when I was taxi driving. After a while I started to try to get them to chuckle about their predicament of being tossed from specialist to specialist. The system I observed made no effort to put people's health problems into context.
Last year I went on a few doctors visits with two seniors. The one lady to her visit with the substitute PA. All she got was a referral to an endocrinologist, which went nowhere, as there is no endocrinologist in our rural community. The next visit was to the practice's new MD. After a few minutes of watching the doctor's efforts to pull something meaningful out of the woman's EHR, I informed the doctor that the woman had gotten 'sad' after her partner died about a year before (stopped eating well, etc). The whole visit changed - the MD was able to acknowledge the person in front of him. Then he went back to thinking about a drug to treat the woman's complaint about anxiety, when it was perfectly obvious to me that exhaustion was her actual problem. At least he didn't put her on benzodiazepines.
The other senior's appointment was a surgery consult. The doctor considered the X-rays, said "this is exactly why you're hurting" and "surgery is the only way you'll have any quality of life". Perfectly reasonable, from his limited perspective. At the end the surgeon asked the patient if he had any other health problems. "No." I knew better, but didn't say anything.
Prasad's law [0] describes the how our health care system is incentivized to provide expensive medicine instead of interventions patients actually need.
I've been thinking about 'the predicaments of old people' for 10 years, since one of passenger delivered a lesson to me about his neighbors. The essence of seniors' predicaments is that they can't be honest with their doctors because they'll be shamed, and their doctors wouldn't know how to help them anyways.
The tragedy of #OxygenToxicity is that the antidote was known, and was becoming normal medicine, but got forgotten around 1950/1960.
The tragedy of 2020 is how the doctors tried to help their patients with toxic amounts of oxygen. I referred to that episode as the tragedy of #MedicalHyperventilation.
I’m optimistic that regeneration will be the next breakthrough in medicine.
> EITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0]
Hah, that makes a lot of sense. The Social Security tax is suffocating for self-employed people at the bottom of the economic dogpile. 12.4% of your already-spent income is an impossible bill for low-income people to pay.
I, of course, diligently tracked my income and paid all taxes due. But... if your income is 'off the books', it's easier to just not pay Uncle Sam than to put a target on your back by filing possibly-indefensible returns.
My theory behind this observation was that as the U.S. gradually de-industrialized post-NAFTA and post-WTO, our politicians leaders used healthcare as a source of jobs that couldn't be outsourced to Mexico or Asia.
From my on-the-ground perspective, an important consideration in the US' poor health outcomes is addiction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39071316