Dr. Bob Fu of ChinaAid called it what it is. State-sponsored religious persecution. When a government mobilizes riot police and heavy equipment against a peaceful congregation, it is not enforcing laws. It is enforcing ideology.

And that ideology has a name.

President Xi Jinping calls it Sinicisation. It sounds academic. It sounds harmless. In practice, it means every expression of faith must bow to the Chinese Communist Party. Sermons must align with party doctrine. Churches must register under state control. Pastors must preach only through government-approved platforms. Scripture itself must be filtered, reframed, and neutered.

There are two kinds of churches in China. The Three Self churches, which operate with government permission and government supervision, and the underground or house churches, which operate under the conviction that Christ, not the Party, is Lord. The latter have been targeted for decades, but the crackdown has intensified. The internet is now tightly regulated. Clergy are warned not to attract attention. Evangelism is treated like a contagion. //

What stands out in this latest wave of arrests is not just the brutality, but the clarity. The CCP is no longer pretending to tolerate independent faith. It is openly moving to crush it.

And where is the international outcry?

Muted. Careful. Managed.

We issue statements. We express concern. We keep trade flowing. We schedule summits. We talk about cooperation. Meanwhile, Chinese believers are dragged from their homes, churches are dismantled piece by piece, and crosses are wrapped in scaffolding like crime scenes. //

The question is not whether Chinese Christians will endure. They will.

The question is whether the free world will have the courage to stand with them, or whether we will keep pretending that bulldozers and prison cells are just part of doing business with Beijing.

FranzJoseph Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11m
1,581

DavidEmami said:
Hope the everything turns out well for the crew member. It does make me wonder, though -- how would they deal with something life threatening? And have any medical procedures been done in space before? Did some searching and the closest I can find is a post-splashdown injury on Apollo 12 that the crew treated before egress, but that wasn't in free-fall. In particular, I assume the medical concept of the "golden hour" has to be abandoned.

First, obviously IANAD, so take it with a big grain of salt.

"Golden hour" is usually talked in the context of massive traumatic injuries and/or massive haemorrhaging. Even there it's a bit controversial, as it might be more useful only in the context of triage of massively multiple casualties with limited medevac resources down here.

IOTW, if any massive traumatic injury happens on the ISS (say a micrometeorite going through an astronaut or a pressurised cylinder failure resulting in an open fracture and haemorrhaging), the casualty is likely to be fucked anyway.

For things that develop over a longer time (appendicitis ‑‑> septicaemia), the astronauts are hopefully so well monitored that it would be caught early on.

You can find a full equipment list in the CHeCS onboard here (PDF, 2011 link). https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110022379/downloads/20110022379.pdf

Includes BP/ECG, AED, basic dental & surgery stuff (nothing quite major, scalpel and forceps etc), detox kit, airways kit, ambu bag and low‑flow mask and endotracheal oxygen supply, IV with pump and IV solutions, chest drain valve for pneumothorax, dressings, sutures and splints. Plus medicines, obviously.

Not really sure what the survival rate of somebody with a tension pneumothorax would be, even if quickly drained with the drain valve and intubated. I presume NASA has some procedures for getting an intubated or IV'd astronaut back home, even if it might mean not wearing their suit?

What's the max acceleration experienced during re‑entry and chute deployment? Not Soyuz, hopefully something gentler like CrewDragon (I assume Soyuz's retrorockets are less gentle here)?

henryhbk Ars Tribunus Militum
12y
1,891
Subscriptor++
FranzJoseph said:
First, obviously IANAD, so take it with a big grain of salt.

"Golden hour" is usually talked in the context of massive traumatic injuries and/or massive haemorrhaging. Even there it's a bit controversial, as it might be more useful only in the context of triage of massively multiple casualties with limited medevac resources down here.

IOTW, if any massive traumatic injury happens on the ISS (say a micrometeorite going through an astronaut or a pressurised cylinder failure resulting in an open fracture and haemorrhaging), the casualty is likely to be fucked anyway.

For things that develop over a longer time (appendicitis ‑‑> septicaemia), the astronauts are hopefully so well monitored that it would be caught early on.

You can find a full equipment list in the CHeCS onboard here (PDF, 2011 link).

Includes BP/ECG, AED, basic dental & surgery stuff (nothing quite major, scalpel and forceps etc), detox kit, airways kit, ambu bag and low‑flow mask and endotracheal oxygen supply, IV with pump and IV solutions, chest drain valve for pneumothorax, dressings, sutures and splints. Plus medicines, obviously.

Not really sure what the survival rate of somebody with a tension pneumothorax would be, even if quickly drained with the drain valve and intubated. I presume NASA has some procedures for getting an intubated or IV'd astronaut back home, even if it might mean not wearing their suit?

What's the max acceleration experienced during re‑entry and chute deployment? Not Soyuz, hopefully something gentler like CrewDragon (I assume Soyuz's retrorockets are less gentle here)?
Click to expand...

IAAD, most of the survivable emergencies require only a critical but generally simple procedure to buy time. Often I am faced with surgical emergencies in the hospital overnight, and while on paper we have at least one trauma and one cardiac OR on hot standby, it's not like surgeons are standing there in stasis waiting to operate, and often will be several hours until they can formally operate on someone (or we need some test to complete). So for instance for the appendicitis above we use broad spectrum IV antibiotics, then figure it out later, Broken bones easy - splint and transport, pneumothorax (particularly tension) you can do a needle decompression (all it takes is a 20ga IV catheter and a stopcock) and again you've bought plenty of time for surgeons to get ready to do a definitive thoracostomy (chest) tube, most bleeding can be stopped with pressure.

Things where this isn't true would be a stroke or intracranial bleeding. Not 100% sure if the aircraft carriers that picked up Apollo astronauts even have the ability to treat that onboard. depending where the bleed is. If it is an epidural (in the skull, outside the brain but hydraulically crushing the brain) then the answer is simply we drill a hole and relieve the pressure (trepanning) and then some actual neurosurgeon can fix the issue, and when I was the intern, that's who did the burr hole, a 4 minute procedure that bought you hours to the OR. But if the bleed is deeper (such as a sub-arachnoid bleed or interparenchymal bleed) well not much you are doing outside an interventional neuroradiology suite, and those patients often have a poor prognosis on land. Not sure if they screen for berry aneurysms in the astronaut core with a head angiogram? Penetrating trauma management is battlefield medic level care to buy time to get to surgery, and a lot can be done to stall exsanguination within reason without much clinical skill or equipment. There are military medic deployed pro-coagulants that can be put into a wound to form instant clot, and of course the tried and true tampon in the hole. In a penetrating wound something like a tampon works by absorbing blood and expanding to put pressure on the bleeding vessels, which works surprisingly well in the absence of definitive medical care.

As for g-forces anyone who has ridden in an ambulance on our pothole strewn streets in the northeast knows you subject you patient to a surprising number of shock loads, but I worry more about needing to put a critically ill patient into a chair for the descent when bleeding has stopped while lying prone or on their back. Does crew dragon have a stretcher capability?

The data=writeback mount option deserves to be tried, in order to prevent journaling of the file system. This should be done only during the deletion time, there is a risk however if the server is being shutdown or rebooted during the delete operation.

According to this page,

Some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen (...) when applications create and delete large volumes of small files.

The option is set either in fstab or during the mount operation, replacing data=ordered with data=writeback. The file system containing the files to be deleted has to be remounted. //

He could also increase the time from the commit option: "This default value (or any low value) will hurt performance, but it's good for data-safety. Setting it to 0 will have the same effect as leaving it at the default (5 seconds). Setting it to very large values will improve performance". –
Cristian Ciupitu Commented Sep 26, 2010 at 19:14

Lastly, FYI, not mentioned in that link is that fact that data=writeback can be a huge security hole, since data pointed to by a given entry may not have the data that was written there by the app, meaning that a crash could result in the old, possibly-sensitive/private data being exposed. Not a concern here, since we're only turning it on temporarily, but I wanted to alert everyone to that caveat in case either you or others who run across that suggestion weren't aware. –
BMDan Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 1:23

Welcome to the family! This course shows you how to use your Bitwarden account, access items shared by your Family Admin, and keep your personal passwords organized and secure.

wallabag is a self hostable application for saving web pages: Save and classify articles. Read them later. Freely.

Calibre-Web but Automated and with tons of New Features! Fully automate and simplify your eBook set up!

cat is surely the best way to do this. Why use python when there is a program already written in C for this purpose? However, you might want to consider using xargs in case the command line length exceeds ARG_MAX and you need more than one cat. Using GNU tools, this is equivalent to what you already have:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'input_file*' -print0 |
  sort -z |
  xargs -0 cat -- >>out

what is the fastest method to CREATE a thousands of files? Also, does it really matter if there is data in them, if they are just being deleted?

Using rsync is surprising fast and simple.

mkdir empty_dir
rsync -rd --delete empty_dir/    yourdirectory/

I’ve started only buying smart devices if there’s already an active community project to provide firmware and such should the company disappear or give up. If you want the convenience of “smart” devices, you have to compromise somewhere.

You can also buy devices that use open protocols like zwave, zigbee, or thread/matter. zwave is by far the best of the 3 because the certification requires that the devices properly implement the standard so any controller can manage any device, however that also makes it the most expensive and least flexible of the 3. For me stuff I care about long-term support for is zwave (thermostat, living room lights including wall controller), stuff that I'm less worried about having to possibly replace some day like motion detection or smart outlets can be zigbee, or Matter. Thread/Matter is starting to get to the point where the standard and interoperability testing is robust enough that I might consider it for my mission critical stuff in the near future.

As far as music, I've got 20 year old speakers hooked up to a 10 year old receiver that gets fed by the TV or anything plugged into it, thanks to HDMI ARC I don't have to worry about what TV I use or what device is plugged into it, downside of course is that the TV has to be turned on and tuned to the music source (not a big deal for my personal situation, others may not like the compromise).

When every email is in its place, that doesn’t mean you find stuff. At least not reliably, let alone fast. This is a scientifically proven fact (see this research paper or its summary).

Note that this is about folders that sort emails by content in some sort of hierarchy. There are folks who prefer action based “folders”, say a “Read later” or “urgent”, but those are essentially just labels meant to help with productivity, not real folders that are about filing and finding emails. //

1. Sorting mails into folders doesn’t feel like a good use of my time. I should be doing something that carries more value, like actually acting on my email

2. Of all the emails I receive (and that I want to keep), it’s my wild guess that I will need to find – at most – 10% ever again. The problem is: I don’t know which 10% of the 100% of received emails my future self will need. Moving an email to a folder takes time, and I can’t do it on autopilot.

3. The filing system I set up will need to anticipate my future self’s search logic. Highly non-scientific empirical behavioral research on a sample of 1 (me) clearly shows that the brain functions governing filing things and finding things differ. If you are a folder person, I bet that you too have experienced going from folder to folder to folder, trying to figure out where the heck that email that you just know you diligently filed exactly where it belongs actually is.

4. Some email I want to sort away may fit the topic of folder A just as well as folder B. Does it go in A? or in B? Put a copy in both? Decisions! More thought processes! //

Setting up a new rule, your email client usually allows you to apply the rule to existing emails. So it’s going through your emails and filters away according to the rule you just set up. You know what that is? This is, in fact, a search operation on your email database.

So what is the difference between an automated filtering rule and a search? A rule is a search that you set up without having a need yet. You may never need the rule you set up. You may be setting up the wrong rule/search.
(You may want to set up rules that filter away emails automatically so you don’t even see those emails – you can’t unsubscribe everything, this kind of rule is not really for filing, it’s like a spam filter. Ask yourself if you are actually looking at those emails ever, and be bold to unsubscribe.)

So if rules are the answer to the issues with folders, and search is kind of equivalent to rules, then the answer actually is to scrap all those folders! Ok. Most folders. //

If your preferred email program has a good search function, you may consider stopping to file stuff.

After writing/co-authoring/translating three very highly regarded history books, and selling them in three languages all over the world in five figure numbers, I was dissapointed how the entry barrier to history writing did not always appear to be orientated towards writing facts, and sometimes more about pretending how complicated the whole process was.

It IS extremely difficult, but, it is NOT complicated.

If you REALLY do want to write a history book, and its keeping you awake at night, here is one method which works.

How to Write a History Book_V1-0Download

While Rocketdyne’s ownership merry-go-round kept spinning, the company’s competitors pushed forward. SpaceX and Blue Origin, backed by wealthy owners, took a fresh approach to designing rockets. Apart from the technical innovations that led to reusable rockets, these newer companies emphasized vertical integration to cut costs and minimize reliance on outside supply chains. They wanted to design and build their own rocket engines and were not interested in outsourcing propulsion. Rocketdyne’s business was—and still is—entirely focused on selling ready-made engines to customers.

The launch startups that followed in the footsteps of SpaceX and Blue Origin have largely imitated their approach to insourcing. There are at least nine medium to large liquid-fueled rocket engines in production or in advanced development in the United States today, and just one of them is from the enterprise once known as Rocketdyne: the RS-25 engine used to power the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. //

The RS-25 engine, by far the largest in L3Harris’ portfolio and a former Rocketdyne product, is not part of the sale. The RS-25 was initially known as the Space Shuttle Main Engine and was designed for reusability. The expendable heavy-lift SLS rocket uses four of the engines, and NASA is burning through the 16 leftover shuttle-era RS-25 engines on the first four SLS flights for the agency’s Artemis Moon program. The second SLS flight is set to launch in the coming months on a mission carrying four astronauts beyond the Moon.

L3Harris will retain total ownership of the RS-25 program. The company has a contract with NASA to build new RS-25 engines for SLS flights beyond Artemis IV. But the new RS-25s will come at an expense of about $100 million per engine, significantly more than SpaceX sells an entire launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. The engine contract is structured as a cost-plus contract, with award and incentive fees paid by the government to L3Harris.

Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3.

The company hasn't exactly gone out of its way to call attention to this – like actually telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note with a sign on the door saying "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail." The article itself is less euphemistic than its title: //

7 hrs
MaFt
Still working for me?
Importing from POP is still working for me. It did, however, stop just before Christmas and I had to change the settings on gMail to use TLS.

So it seems like they're stopping plain text authorisation for POP rather than ALL POP mail retrieval.

Desflurane is a common anesthetic used in hospital operating rooms worldwide. It’s also a climate super pollutant. Now, several decades after the drug was first introduced, a growing number of US hospitals have stopped using the anesthetic because of its outsized environmental impact. On January 1, the European Union went a step further, prohibiting its use in all but medically necessary cases.

Desflurane is more than 7,000 times more effective at warming the planet over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis. However, curbing its use alone won’t solve climate change. The anesthetic contributes only a small fraction of total global warming, which is driven by far larger volumes of carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

Still, emissions from the drug add up. Approximately 1,000 tons of the gas are vented from hospitals and other health care facilities worldwide each year. The emissions have a near-term climate impact equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from approximately 1.6 million automobiles. //

Instead of desflurane, the Yale New Haven Health System now relies primarily on sevoflurane, an anesthetic that is 10 times less potent as a greenhouse gas and approximately half as expensive. The health care system saved $1.2 million annually on anesthesia medications after making the switch, Sherman said. //

USAP physicians and others are also using less nitrous oxide or “laughing gas,” a mild anesthetic and potent greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide is commonly distributed throughout hospitals via a centralized, leak-prone pipe network. Pipe networks in US hospitals can leak up to 99.8 percent of the gas before it reaches patients, according to a study published in 2024 in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. Using small, portable tanks can reduce losses by 98 percent. //

A paper published in the academic journal Anesthesia & Analgesia in July argued that the climate impact of desflurane emissions was not significant and suggested that more harm may come from withholding the drug from patients. //

j5i7 Seniorius Lurkius
5y
2
As a anesthesiologist, a few points:

• Desflurane does have distinct advantages compared to sevoflurane or isoflurane. It's is faster acting, and faster to wear off. However, clinically, this doesn't matter too much if you adapt to the anesthetic you are using. But it could get a patient out of an operating room a minute or two faster. The more obese a patient, the larger a difference it could make.
• Due to its vapor pressure, Desflurane requires a powered vaporizer that uses electricity on top of its significantly higher CO2 equivilent.
• Anesthesia machines use a circle breathing system. There is no way to strictly deliver anesthetic gases only when a patient is breathing in, but you can get very close.
  Anesthetic waste gases are generally vented through a roof vent in the hospital. There are technologies out there to recapture the anesthetics, but I don't believe any are commercially common.
• A lot of nitrous is lost due to leaks in the pipes. Generally nitrous isn't that useful in anesthesia for adults, but it does have its place in pediatrics.
• You can do anesthesia without any gases and just using medications that go through an IV. These are slightly more expensive, but better from a climate perspective. However, there are medical reasons to choose inhaled gases verses IV anesthetics.
• Finally, commonly used anesthetic gases are NOT flammable. However, oxygen is a great oxidizing agent...

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced Monday that it would be shaking up the recommended childhood vaccine schedule in order to bring it into alignment with those of other developed nations. As a result, the CDC will now be recommending 10 vaccines for all children, reducing by seven its prior recommendation of 17 vaccinations. //

Watt
4 hours ago edited
I ran this thru chatgpt because even the multiple links already provided by commenters don't clearly lay out the old vs the new. For children, the first 11 are still recommended. The remainder were recommended until yesterday but are now subject to "shared clinical decision making" and no longer outright recommended.

Still recommended (11)
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Polio
Pertussis (whooping cough)
Tetanus
Diphtheria
Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
Pneumococcal disease
Human papillomavirus (HPV)
Varicella (chickenpox)

Removed from universal recommendation (6)
Influenza
COVID-19
Rotavirus
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Meningococcal disease

The 7th one no longer recommended is RSV. For some reason, it is sometimes counted, sometimes not (at least from what I could figure out).

Usual AI caveats... But this looks right based on the information at the other commenters' links.

Ten years after the end of ground combat in Vietnam, the US returned to military intervention, instigating the invasion of Grenada to restore order.

Snapshots are one of the most powerful features of ZFS. A snapshot provides a read-only, point-in-time copy of the dataset. With Copy-On-Write (COW), ZFS creates snapshots fast by preserving older versions of the data on disk… Snapshots preserve disk space by recording just the differences between the current dataset and a previous version… [and] use no extra space when first created, but consume space as the blocks they reference change.

Re: The amount of times...
Hmmm, 100C is where the vapor pressure of pure water is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. At 1 to 1.5km of elevation, the drop in temperature at where the vapor pressure of water is equal to the ambient pressure is enough to require adjustments to recipes when baking. The more natural point for 0C would be the triple point in water. Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature. A real SI scale fr temperature would be eV...

For doing thermodynamic calculations, the appropriate scales are Kelvin and Rankine, and there really isn't much difference in usability between K and R as all sorts of conversions need to be done to get answers in Joules or MWHr. Another "fun" problem is dealing with speed involves Joules being watt-seconds, while vehicle speeds are usually given in statute miles, nautical miles or kilometers per hour. A fun factoid is that 1 pound of force at one statute mile per hour is equal to 2.0W (1.99W is a closer approximation).

As for feet, a fair approximation is that light travels 1 ft/nsec, too bad the foot wasn't ~1.6% shorter as a light nano-second would be the ultimate SI unit of length. The current definition of an inch, 25.4mm, was chosen in the 1920's to allow machine tools to handle inches by having a 127 tooth gear instead of a 100 tooth gear.

FWIW, Jefferson wanted to base his unit of length on a "second's" rod, i.e. e pendulum whose length would have exactly one second period when measured at seal level and 45º latitude.

Don't get me started on kilograms of thrust.

Friday 27th January 2023 06:22 GMT
IvyKing
Reply Icon
Re: The amount of times...
From somewhere in the later half of the 19th century to ~1920, the US inch was defined as 39.37 inches equals 1m. According a ca 1920 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer, the machine tool industry was making a push to defining the inch 25.4mm so that by using a 127 tooth gear to replace a 100 tooth gear a lathe could be set up to produce metric and imperial threads.

One problem with converting the US to pure metric is that almost all land titles use feet, not meters. The US legal definition of a foot was 1/66 of a chain, a mile was 80 chains (66x80=5280), a section of land under the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation, NOT the Constitution), which was 6400 square chains and the acre being 10 square chains (640 acres per square mile). The surveys for the Townships (36 sections) didn't really start until ca 1796, so if the arrival of the metric standards had not been delayed by the storm and the English, the US might have re-written the 1787 law to use metric measurements.

Another problem with the US converting to metric was Herbert Hoover's success as Secretary of Commerce in setting national standards for pipes and other hardware.

One final note about metric versus imperial is that a nautical mile is defined as 1 minute of longitude at the equator, so works well with the degrees, minutes and seconds customarily used for angles. Metric navigation would favor a decimal system for expressing angles, i.e. the gradians.

doublelayerSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: The amount of times...
"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."

Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.

Wednesday 25th January 2023 01:55 GMT
-tim
Reply Icon
Coat
Re: The amount of times...
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.

Monday 23rd January 2023 15:59 GMT
Michael Wojcik
Reply Icon
Re: The amount of times...
More importantly, for Fahrenheit the reference temperatures aren't 0 and 212; they're 32 and 96. 96 minus 32 is 64. And 32 and 64 are ... stay with me here ... powers of 2.

Fahrenheit based his scale on powers of 2 so that thermometers could be graduated by successive bisection (and then reflected to extrapolate outside that range, on the assumption that the mechanism was sufficiently linear within the desired range). That's an actual engineering reason, unlike "duh humans like powers of 10". There really isn't much reason to favor Celsius.

Kelvin, of course, is the one that matters. (Yes, Rankine works too, but for some SI operations Kelvin is more convenient.)

Celsius is today as much flavor-of-the-month as Fahrenheit is. The original justifications for them are no longer relevant; they're just a matter of taste.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence
Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.