pgreenwood

I too went from a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis to Crohns to Ulcerative Colitis and now Indeterminate Colitis. Actually first it was colitis and The specialist didn't explain what that was or that it was at all serious. Took me a while to work it all out. I researched the hell out it and pretty quickly felt like I knew more about IBD than the specialists, especially how the disease manifested in me.

I fired the first specialist after I realised he was not prescribing mt the right treatment - he was in fact a colorectal surgeon not a gastrointestinal specialist so he was also the wrong type of specialist.

Then a few months later I got sick. Really sick. I remembered a great GP; he took me seriously and referred me to an old friend who a really good gastro intestinal doc, who was ex head of the best GI ward in the state. But he was actually crap at first. He treated me like a hypochondriac (like most doctors). He organised a colonoscopy for a few months - despite saying I didn't know if I would last that long. Four days later I admitted myself to emergency unable to walk stand or sit up in bed, with a letter from the GP backing me up.

Things went from bad to worse and by this time I had blown through at least four worst case scenarios. The rest of the details are not so important - I nearly lost my colon and went onto massive doses of hydrocortisone then pred for months. Withdrawal was hell. Then a long hard recovery lots of meds. Now I am now doing great, amazingly, and am med free and mostly complete remission for 4 years.

Although my treatment was spectacularly successful in the end, I had to cut through a load of bullshit and find some good doctors. Since my private specialist was the ex head of the ward I could use that fact to intimidate (subtly) the other doctors somewhat which was very helpful in obtaining the tests I needed. Sad but true. A timely CT and then insisting on a second reader after they deemed it clear (WTF I am a grey rake that can't even sit up) is what saved my colon I believe. Second reading came back with severe inflammation in ascending transverse colon. You see, most doctors I have come across I find treat you like a hypochondriac at first and you have to subtly nudge them into taking you seriously. It's like fucking chess game sometimes and you have to be really careful what you say. Stroking their ego while actually being their director and treating them as contractors. Playing dumb, while researching the hell out of your condition so know at least what tests are required and what all the treatments are available. Mention that you read medical journals is absolutely out.

I was a lucky - I had a career as biostatstican and data scientist for 7 years in a hospital before this happened, so I was wise to just how appalling the medical profession can be when it comes to solving open problems, and gave me confidence to tackle it myself. It just should not be that way. Most doctors are not stupid though, but I believe most have their powers of creative problem solving beaten out them at med school.

My heart goes out to all IBD sufferers. If you've experienced it you wouldn't even wish it on Adolf Hitler's evil twin.

- if the thief is inside he will remain locked inside until police can arrest them.

Right, they'll just sit there patiently instead of kicking out the window at the next set of lights.

I am strongly in favour of the argument that nuclear power is cleaner, and safer per unit watt-hour. However, what about nuclear weapons proliferation?

The popular light water reactor nuclear power stations use enriched uranium fuel, and these processes can be used to make nuclear weapons. Now it's certainly far from the truth all nations who have nuclear power will decide to build nuclear weapons, but I would think that most nations would have the potential of weapons at least partly in mind.

S&B Golden Curry

Commodore International

>The gains from automation have generally been enjoyed not by those who operate the machines, but those who own them. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the share of income going to wages in OECD nations has been decreasing since the 1970s, while the share being funneled into capital—into things like cash reserves and machinery—has been increasing.

In Australia these benefits have largely gone to land owners, as opposed to capital. See this chart:

http://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/unearne...

Even a scheme such as universal basic income would not help much as the benefits would end up being captured by land owners, via inflation of rents and land prices; unless this was addressed another way, for example with a land value tax.

The Nissan 126x from 1970 is one of my favourites. It was also a popular Matchbox car in the 70s (As Datsun 126x)

http://oldconceptcars.com/1930-2004/nissan-126x-concept-1970...

The Globus IMP mechanical navigation computer was used in every manned Russian space mission from 1961 to 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voskhod_Spacecraft_%22Globus%2...

A critical characteristc of Penrose tiles is that they are aperiodic. These space filling prisms do not have that property. Look up the Schmitt-Conway-Danzer tile for an example of one that does.

1. Describe the problem you're trying to solve.

2. Describe your approach to solving it.

In general, have something to say, know your stuff, and the rest will flow naturally.

It's an open problem to find a single aperiodic tile. It's called the Einstein Problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_problem

A similar idea appeared over 20 years ago as joke. More specifically as a Chindogu, the comical Japanese artform of creating almost but not quite useful inventions to solve everyday problems.

http://www.asiaone.com/static/multimedia/gallery/120706_japi...

If this drivetrain achieves its claims I will be very impressed. Shaft drive designs have been around for as long as chain drives; and they have never been as efficient. So mush is lost in the torsion of the shaft. A 2% increase in efficiency is an absolutely massive gain. The cycling industry is littered with flashy looking innovations that don't live up to the hype. The basic design of a diamond frame and chain drive has not been improved upon for over 100 years.

But every now and then there are innovations that acually take hold. For example, the slant parallelogram derailleur, hydraulic disk brakes, suspension (for mountain bikes), and recently narrow-wide front chain rings. We shall see how well this drivetrain goes.

That's a Bill Hicks quote.

No cross-caps here. The first puzzle is a torus, the second a Klein bottle. Informally: the Klein bottle has on pair of edges is glued with a twist and one without; with the cross-cap, both pairs of edges are twisted then glued.

Ok I re-ran setting T properly for both cases. The results were similar:

> poisson.test(c(1, 11800), c(3, 1000000), alternative = c("two.sided"),conf.level = .93)

Comparison of Poisson rates

  data:  c(1, 11800) time base: c(3, 1e+06)
  count1 = 1, expected count1 = 0.035403, p-value = 0.03478
  alternative hypothesis: true rate ratio is not equal to 1
  93 percent confidence interval:
     1.006334 146.142032
  sample estimates:
  rate ratio 
    28.24859

The lower bound of the CI approaches a rate ratio = 1 for a 93% confidence interval.

Interestingly, if you multiply the CI I claimed before by the rate ratio instead of the expected rate, you get almost exactly the same CI as here.

  > ci <- c(0.03562718, 5.17251332)
  > 28.24859 * ci
  [1]   1.006418 146.116208
 

* Note 11800 is about two years of pedestrian deaths and time units are in millions of miles. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Facinating, thank you. Particularly the part about multiplying the CI. I wonder if the analysis could be resuced to some extent? I feel there must be a way to use the information we have do draw some conclusions, at least relative to some explicit assumptions.

Hello! I'd be interested to hear what you think the correct interpretation of these CIs are in this case. Failing that can you explain what is wrong with saying something like "with xx% confidence we can conclude that the rate is within these bounds" is?

The assumption of using Poisson seems pretty solid to me, given we are talking about x events in some continuum (miles traveled in this case), but always happy to hear any cogent objections.

I'll have a go at seeing what we can conclude from the data. Others, check my thinking please. Now we have 1 death in 3m miles for Uber, versus 1.18 deaths in 100m miles for sober drivers.

The expected rate for 100m miles for Uber is 33.333...

But how confident can we be? To answer that let's compute a poisson confidence interval around that rate, as in https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10926/how-to-calcu....

Let's see what a 95% confidence interval for 1 death in 3m miles looks like:

  > poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.95)$conf.int
  [1] 0.02531781 5.57164339
  attr(,"conf.level")
  [1] 0.95

Multiply that by 33.333 to convert to deaths per 100m miles:

  > 33.333333*0.02531781
  [1] 0.843927
  > 33.333333*5.57164339
  [1] 185.7214
  

So 95% confidence that the rate per 100m miles is from 0.84 to 185.72. That's pretty wide! And since the lower bound crosses 1.18, the difference is not significant at the .05 level (if we must make that particular comparison). However, let's look at 90% CI:

  > poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.9)$conf.int
  [1] 0.05129329 4.74386452
  attr(,"conf.level")
  [1] 0.9
  

Which gives a CI of 1.71 to 158.13. So with 90% confidence we can say Uber is less safe than sober drivers. Ok.

Now let's look at 93% CI:

  > poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.93)$conf.int
 [1] 0.03562718 5.17251332
 attr(,"conf.level")
 [1] 0.93
 

That gives a CI of 1.188 to 172.417. The lower bound being just a bit worse than sober drivers.

So we can conclude with 93% certainty from this data that Uber is less safe than sober drivers. Probably a LOT less safe. Although the CI is really wide, this is shocking data for Uber, in my opinion.

The ring system of Saturn (and others) aren't a bad start.

Check out the Apollo 11 landing site:

https://www.google.com/maps/space/moon/@0.6813909,23.4602739...

Almost every bicycle. Our noblest invention.

You can configure Gimp so that UI is very similar to Photoshop. For example, check out these options:

http://doctormo.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-2-8-Photoshop-Tweaks...

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-the-gimp-work-more-like-ph...

I agree that monetary subsidies tend to simply get capitalized into higher prices, but if you read the article the proposal is to actually build 2,000 units.

We could do a lot better than planting 1 per second. How about planting 900,000 trees per day via aerial bombardment?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown

Last night I had dinner with my parents. They lamented that they could not find a phone for my elderly grandmother. They just need something that just makes and receives calls, is dead simple, has (very) large buttons, and is loud. Where is this phone?

We have an ageing population.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance increases with exposure to the antibiotic. With targeted treatment there is less exposure for a given clinical effect. Therefore lower resistance.

There's considerable promise in phage therapies as an alternative to antibiotics. And they may well not suffer the same problems of resistance since phages are targeted to specific bacteria.

Some say the downvoters all died under mysterious circumstances.

Perelman as an example not famous and non-notable? Wow, I am stuggling to think of a more famous or notable mathematician alive on the planet today.