Teach Me Something About Your Area Of Expertise

Teach me your talent!!

I work for a company that develops large scale utility solar projects.

Business is booming, thanks mostly to Obama-era regulations, as well as the price of doing business becoming less expensive than other energy providers. Trump has slowed down coal plant retirement, nixed Obama's Clean Power Plan before it was able to be passed, and agreed to the tariff pressure from a Federal lawsuit made by an American panel manufacturer.

But while Trump can slow down our industry, he cannot stop it. There are too many things working in our favor. My company alone has installed 30 solar projects already, and is putting in four new solar projects just this Spring. Our competitors are also doing well.

I get to work with people in the South quite a bit - many of them have soured on Trump, and regret their voting for him, simply because the solar business they have invested in could be even more robust and profitable without his attempts to keep Big Coal alive. They won't be voting for him this year...

Always swallow.

Nice to see that Jerri Hall, er, R3, has joined us...

If you know how to say 'cash only; anal extra' in eight different languages you will never be poor.

I’m an optical engineer in the semiconductor industry, working on Extreme UV inspection equipment.

Like many of the wafers and photomasks that my optics have to inspect, you all are full of defects, not to mention the defocus, which makes you all look fat. ❤️

I’m a university English Language prof and an academic copy editor and I want to marry r2 for his use of the possessive personal pronoun before a gerund:

[quote] and regret their voting for him

Doing nothing. I spent a working lifetime perfecting this skill, one which is finally finding its fullest expression in retirement and now, lockdown.

I'm a college professor. I will teach you nothing unless you pay me.

Senior Linux Engineer here. Plus a good chunk of InfoSec in there too.

[quote]I’m a university English Language prof and an academic copy editor and I want to marry [R2] for his use of the possessive personal pronoun before a gerund:

Of all the grammar errors I see and hear, this one irritates me most when made.

I was a prosecutor and investigator in white-collar matters. Possibly the most effective tool in questioning suspects is silence. When someone gives a half answer or a ridiculous lie, just look at them and say nothing.

The most satisfying time for a nap is after lunch.

Oh yeah and I can tell you about IP networks. For example IPv4 is only a 32 bit address. Four octets that go from xc00 oxFF. Whereas IPv6 is 128 bits. Or approximately 4 times the address space as IPv4.

I’m an infectious disease epidemiologist and I watch the case fatality rate rather than the number of new cases of coronavirus. It’s increasing daily which means that the denominator (new cases) isn’t increasing as quickly and that could mean one of three things: 1. We don’t have enough testing, which is possible, but the testing is increasing everyday, 2. Hospitals have reached capacity and people are dying in excess because of that, which doesn’t seem to be the case yet, or 3. We’re actually seeing a slowing down of cases, which to me seems the most likely.

So congrats on all your social distancing! It’s working!!

I am a book editor at a major publishing company and would be happy to take questions on the publishing process. Because I know just about all of you want to write a book.

If mom or grandma suddenly loses her mind check for a UTI.

Never frame a picture in what is considered "complimentary" colors, don't use color at all, it ruins appreciation of the art. It's like humming along loudly while Monserrat Caballe is singing. You might think you are adding to the performance, but you're not.

What is “no color at all” then ?

I have a PhD and teach in a subject that if I say anything about it a bunch of crazies will spew nonsense over the entire thread.

50% of a lawyer's job is just copying someone else's work and plugging in your client's info.

Re: framing a picture. Also, don't pick a frame color that "echos" the color of the focal point. Takes away from the focal point.

Yet, somehow, gold (frame) works on almost everything.

[quote] What is “no color at all” then ?

Not R18 , but I think it means neutrals and muted colors.

Finally, the matting under the art should be wider / thicker than the matting above the art, due to visual parallax.

Damn. I just bought a lovely green frame. I’ll never be able to host a Datalounge gathering!

R16 I have my manuscript, and I think it's good. Where do I start?

I'm a classical musician with an international career as a soloist, symphony and opera orchestra musician, chamber musician, and university professor. I also own a music conservatory.

I should be practicing...

R15 the Epidemiologist:

I think your point #1 may be more true in some areas. My sister lives in Manhattan and has had a fever of 101.5 or higher for four days, along with cough and lethargy. She's tried to get a test for several days, but no luck. Because of the lack of PPE, Manhattan hospitals are ONLY testing those who are so sick they need to be admitted immediately. The testing thus determines whether to house them on a COVID or non-COVID floor. The only exception is testing reserved for first-responders and healthcare workers. My sister is in touch with her PCP daily; the PCP admits that she is likely positive but needs to remain quarantined at home.

With 2700+ new cases/day in NYC, this suggests that nearly 2000 people a day need to be admitted to hospitals. In addition, the number of 36K current cases in NYC grossly undercounts the actual situation. The curve is not flattening - the Department of Public Health has just narrowed the segment of the population eligible to be tested.

I've read and re-read R15's post and can't understand it. I'd like to understand it.

Is this the boasting thread? Because I think only a handful of people replied to OPs request.

Oh yeah, dl.

R26 and R27. I’m not suggesting it’s flattening yet, just that the trajectory isn’t increasing. I’m looking at case fatality as a better proxy for actual cases than testing (because we assume we’re counting 100% of the deaths correctly attributed to coronavirus). I’d guess that the true number of cases is on an order of 10-100 times what we’re seeing already. But there’s a lag between getting infected, getting diagnosed, and dying. So I see the case fatality rate going up and that means the number of cases Isn’t going up as quickly. It could be due to lack of testing, but if that were the case, we’d probably see a higher case fatality rate because we so underestimated the denominator. It could also be that people aren’t getting good care, but again, I think we’d see deaths like Italy (around 10%) instead. So we’re seeing some progress. Not great, but in the right direction.

I am an infectious disease surveillance epidemiologist and a former EIS officer. I suspect that the Chinese government might have spiked the Covid-19 epidemic here in the United States in late February/early March. Some of the early epi curves in sociologically similar cities are wildly different, which is hard to explain.

It’s unfortunate that we’ll never have the early case number data because of the testing issues. Very unfortunate. Because now we’ll never know either way.

I completely disagree with r30. We’re seeing different curves in different cities because they were seeded at different times. The same way different countries have different epidemics. I don’t think there’s anything to suggest the Chinese “spiked” cases here.

[quote] So I see the case fatality rate going up and that means the number of cases Isn’t going up as quickly.

R29, thank you for elaborating. You're using the death # as the nominator (top number on the fraction) and the diagnosed with Covid # as the denominator (bottom number on the fraction). Fatality "rate" meaning death # divided by diagnosed # (percentage).

[quote] I don’t think there’s anything to suggest the Chinese “spiked” cases here.

What does it mean to say the Chinese "spiked" cases?

Jerry Hall is married to a billionaire R4. She must have a magic vajayjay!

Ok, enough COVID discussion.

R16 I’ll be finishing my comedy memoir soon. Any literary agents you can recommend? Thanks

R34 Jerry Hall on How To Keep A Man: ‘Even if you have only two seconds, drop everything and give him a blow job. That way he won’t really want sex with anyone else.’”

R7, thank you for that--"the possessive personal pronoun before a gerund." Every time I write something like, "his ignoring the problem isn't helping," or, "her running of the corporation is effective," I think, That construction must have a name. Now I know!

R16, is it true that the publishing industry is full of people who want to be writers but don't have any talent?

[quote] This was from a casting agent:

OP, Just FYI, I am not a casting agent. I am an actors agent. "Casting agent" is a big no no in the business. We have casting directors who are not agents but hired by producers to create lists, hold sessions and arrange meetings for the purpose of casting a project.

Bankruptcy - the CEO often walks away with a big bonus just for staying to help for a few weeks, private equity shops usually have senior debt which means they just take over the company and wipe out the shareholders and generally corporate bankruptcy absolves all individuals of responsibility and prevents payment of any severance to employees withered they were there for 5 weeks or 30 years. Personal bankruptcy generally does none of those things - you are still responsible for all your obligations. Corporations just walk away from any debt in excess of their value.

[quote]This was from a casting agent: "under 5" was/is a category for daytime soap operas only.

THEY'RE CALLED CASTING DIRECTORS!!!!

There is NO SUCH THING as a "casting agent" ! They are casting directors, they don't "agent" or represent ANYONE, yet every third person, including some in the biz keep saying "casting agent" year after year!

Love this thread

I’m a TV / Film editor. When I get a gig on an hour long docu or reality show and mention to non-industry friends that I’m working on “X“ for eight weeks. They invariably ask “Oh, how many episodes will you be editing?” They are always surprised when I reply “One.”

Since that’s not really inside craft info here you go. If you are cheating sync - using an actor’s vocal take of a line with a different picture take of the same line (because you prefer the inflection of one take but the look of another) - you “massage” it to make it fit by trimming or lengthening between words by a frame here and there; things actually are usually pretty close to begin with. As you adjust, sound that is a frame early is less noticeable than sound that is a frame late. If you see a mouth form a sound before you hear it your brain picks up on that more than the reverse.

On “Reality” shows very often you need someone to say something that they never actually did — so you construct the line, or “bite” from phrases and individual words that they did say on camera. It’s called a Franken-Bite and it happens ALL the time.

On a non-scripted show is if the shot cuts while a person is speaking then what they are saying has most likely been manipulated in some way - from pauses, “ummms” and redundant phrases being removed to completely altering what they actually said.

I also have a fair bit of experience with telecom too. And the SS7 in the linked article SS stands for Signalling System. It's the 7th generation of what started as modems between central offices to send call setup information.

R2 I own 100 acres in Georgia. How do I go about leasing my land for solar panels?

If you deal with a lot of document creation, get in the habit of using templates to save time. I always save files in a folder and when I have to save a new similar file, I do File, Save As, and click an existing file once with the same name and just edit the date of the document in the file name instead of having to write out the long file name each time.

Also, learning to copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+P) saves a lot of time for re-using text in similar emails/documents. Ctrl+X is cut. Learn to use right-click options also.

Include "Thanks" at the top of your Outlook email signature to be polite each time and save you from having to type it.

R38 -- That might have been true once, to some degree. Now publishing is filled with 28 year olds named Megan from Clemson University or the University of Oklahoma who couldn't get a job at Google or Facebook. They're not very smart, they don't know how to edit, but often they end up acquiring a very commercial book from an agent pal and their jobs are secure for years. I hear from writers about editors who don't know "your" from "you're", who confuse words like "pique" and "peak," and can't line edit to save their lives. There are a number of very good older editors left, but most of them will be gone within a decade.

It's a sorry industry filled with miserably unhappy elders and clueless youngers. I am getting out soon.

True, r47. I really, REALLY enjoy doing all sorts of editing from copy to line to substantive for academic journals. But the work is moving overseas for machine editing and non-English speaking editors. And the results are shit.

"There are a number of very good older editors left, but most of them will be gone within a decade."

Typical datalounge post - young people are EVIL, but elderly people like me are perfect! It's old people who voted for Trump.

R49 I didn't say young people were evil. I said that, in the book publishing business, there are a lot of young editors who aren't very good. Kind of a difference there. Perhaps you need to edit the voices in your head a little bit.

r50, you went out of your way to attack "young" editors, while saying the good ones left are "older"

Same difference

r48 please describe the different kinds of editing.

To prevent a Charley Horse, keep the muscles stretched and stay hydrated.

We work really hard to make people feel things that have nothing to do with the product we’re slinging at a given moment. I.E. The smell of tide is safety and comfort...when it’s really the smell of clothes that have been washed.

Never let the sun set on a small bowel obstruction.

The four F's of gallbladder disease: forties, fat, fertile, female

-Surgeon

R52 -- Okay. Line editing is what your basic editor does. This means going over the manuscript and making it read better -- from ideas as major as suggesting a different chapter order or rewriting large chunks of prose to changes as small as rewriting a sentence or querying a source. A good line editor makes all the difference.

Copy editing is what, well, the copy editor does. This process comes after the book has gone back to the author after line editing and the author has gone over all the changes and turned the ms. back in to the house. A good copy editor looks for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, inconsistencies, and if she/he is good, can really make a book read more smoothly. The copy editor also creates the style sheet for the ms. so that both he/she and the author can check to make sure, say, that if numbers up to ten are Arabic numerals, and afterward spelled out, everyone knows.

Proofreading is the most straightforward job: making sure there are no errors left. Proofreaders rarely check for content as much as mistakes. But sometimes they can catch serious errors.

Any author who ends up with three good people doing these jobs is a lucky author.

I also have an epi background and I completely disagree with r30. The Chinese govt didn't need to spike anything; the ongoing open travel lanes between the US/Europe and China, well into the Wuhan outbreak, took care of the seeding all by themselves.

Contrast the US with Taiwan, right off the shores of China: they cut off all travel to/from mainland China very early on, and made Chinese tourists leave. They also strictly quarantined those returning from overseas with monitored, 14-day isolation. As a result, their infection and death rates have been much lower that elsewhere.

When all is said and done, global travel and the ease with which its been used, will be seen as a major factor in this pandemic.

When you get just past the first hole, let him get accustomed to the girth with smaller movements before broaching the second hole. If you succeed in moving beyond the second hole, allow for a second wave of adjustment to your heft before insertion of the entire length.

The DDC or Dewey Decimal Classification system is what most school and public libraries use to organize their collections. Book are usually divided by Fiction and Non-Fiction, with Non-Fiction seen as the informational books and organized by numbers ranging from 001.000 to 999.999. Each 100s section is an content area such as 500s are Science and Math and the 900s are History and Geography. Fiction is organized instead by author’s last name alphabetically.

But while we see these at yet another dichotomy, in actuality Fiction was included under what we consider Non-Fiction and was located in the 800s under Literature, which still holds poetry, speeches and classics like the Odyssey. When it was created in the 19th Century, novels weren’t that abundant and not always collected in libraries as they were seen as common. But of course with the explosion of the novel and popular literature that abundance could no longer fit easily in the 800s and was pulled out and became its own separate section of the DDC.

By the way, Melvil Dewey whose name is associated with the DDC and was foundational in establishing the field of Librarianship was a misogynist , racist and antisemite. The field prior to him had been dominated by male librarians, but because women could easily be paid less they were hired and part of his legacy is shaping the field into a pink collared career.

R47, what is "line editing"?

Do you choose the content you'll be editing? There must be times where you end up editing a topic that doesn't interest you at all.

^ oops, I see you've already answered my question at R60!

[quote] Never let the sun set on a small bowel obstruction.

[quote] The four F's of gallbladder disease: forties, fat, fertile, female

R55, what does your tip # 1 mean? Don't allow yourself to be constipated?

Also, by the time a female is in her 40s, how is she "fertile" any more?

TIA!

I would imaging "fertile" would refer to being pre-menopausal which many women in their forties are.

R20 Gender studies? African-american studies?

Social studies?

Why women and gallbladder disease? My sister had hers removed in her 30s.

Be genuinely nice to people and sincerely care about them and they'll never want to hurt you. Except 2% of the population but they are crazy and would fight with anyone.

You need to toss lettuce with a little salt and pepper before adding dressing.

R16 I want to write, but I'm too lazy. One day I have an idea for a cozy, the next day for a thriller, then it's a non-fiction book, then a collection of stories... On and on. As a child I wrote a lot and was convinced this was what I would be doing with my life. Maybe I just had a powerful imagination and wanted to try out things. It's possible I prefer living and daydreaming to actual writing.

Also, I suspect people don't read, or don't read much.

It always seemed easier to join a stable of writers that are already writing for a show that exists. Although my understanding is that never happens.

Anyway, writing on spec seems pointless! Why would I do that?

Editor, please come back! I live in France and Grasset has the best general lit editors in the business, IMO. Their books just read flawlessly, and each author still has their own personal voice.

r55 I can amend your F's to 9: Fair, fat, forties, fecund female with flatulent, frothing, floating feces.

R68 Are you familiar with the idea there's some sort of Animus entity out there in space the, prodding along trying to give receptive people ideas to write down to further along the evolution of our existence?

The good spirits solicit their ideas to the authors who will take them, in dreams, daydreams, whatever. This is why it's possible for people to have the same idea. The bad spirits troll and send ruminating thoughts into writers heads, or block all access to the good spirit Animus. Sometimes the writers who succumb to this are found dead, hunched over a typewriter, brains blown out.

Heard it on NPR.

Thanks for the inspiring thoughts, R72.

That, and to “solicit” is to seek to take, not to give.

R62 Constipation is an issue of the large intestine and fecal disimpaction can be easily carried out with anoscope and suction.

A small bowel obstruction occurs in the small intestine. A complete obstruction can lead to bowel ischemia, infarction, and perforation, all conditions that can lead to very poor outcomes.

Symptoms include abdominal pain which can become severe, abd bloating, nausea/vomiting, abd swelling, diarrhea/constipation and severe abd cramping.

When you receive an incoming phone call, the network's towers don't actually broadcast an announcement. What REALLY happens is, every ~3 seconds, your phone connects to a tower and metaphorically asks, "is there anything you want to tell me?". The response has a ~160 byte payload. If you have an incoming phone call, the response includes the caller ID info and furnishes info the phone will need to directly establish a connection and accept the incoming phone call. If you have a SMS text message, the payload includes the message itself (with later extensions for things like longer messages, multimedia, etc).

When you send and receive multimedia messages (including services like Google Hangouts), the bulk of your content actually gets uploaded to a web server, and SMS is only used to deliver a notification that the message exists so the recipient's phone then knows to go and fetch the REST of the message via https.

It's ABSOLUTELY possible to end up in a situation where there are no voice circuits available for a tower site, or a situation where internet connectivity is basically nonexistent. Nevertheless, a true plain-text SMS message will still get through... both sending and receiving... because almost by definition, it piggybacks along with the request when the phone is polling the tower and the response when it gets the answer.

Moral of the story: if you have to get a message through and the cellular network appears to be near collapse, figure out how to configure your phone to send a pure, plain-text SMS message. 99.9% of the time, it'll get through, even when nothing else will.

Tip #2: if you're someplace where there's a strong signal, but seemingly no data connectivity, go into your phone's settings and try to force it to use either non-LTE 4G (eg, HSPA+), 3G (WCDMA/UMTS), 2.5G (EDGE), or 2G (GPRS/CDMA2000-1xRTT). Some towers (esp. Sprint) are configured with dedicated backhaul bandwidth for older services that isn't shared with newer ones. The old services are slow as hell, but nowadays, are almost completely unused, so if YOU forcibly switch to one, you might very well have that service on the tower all to yourself, even when LTE is melting down.

Tip #3: after a disaster, it's entirely possible that your phone will connect to a tower site that has a strong signal, but no actual internet connectivity. Basically, the equivalent of a wifi access point that's plugged in to the wall outlet, but either disconnected from the cable/dsl modem, or the modem itself is unplugged/broken/dysfunctional. It's one of the serious design fuckups of LTE... it fails to account for this exact scenario. Another quirk of LTE, compared to 3G: 3G does "soft" tower handoffs... as you move around, your phone automatically connects to the tower with the best available signal. LTE does "hard" hand-offs... your phone connects to the best-available tower... but then STAYS connected to that tower as you continue to move until it can no longer maintain the connection, even if a better tower is nearby. If you find yourself connected to a dysfunctional LTE tower, toggle your phone's radio (the easiest way is usually by entering and exiting airplane mode), which will force disconnection, then connection to a potentially better tower if one is nearby.

1. A modern Intel CPU is actually capable of using its own onboard cache as fake system RAM when running in "bootstrap" mode.

2. CRTC "Character mode" doesn't really exist anymore on modern PCs as an actual hardware mode... and actually, hasn't really existed in almost 20 years. Even when you're running in what APPEARS to be full-screen "DOS mode". When you see something that appears to use it on a modern PC, it's REALLY just a dumb bitmapped framebuffer PRETENDING to be a legacy character-mode on a VGA/EGA/CGA/MDA video card. What killed it? Unicode. There was just no viable way to shoehorn support for even 16-bit Unicode into the original CRTC-based character mode design, because it was hardwired to 8-bit characters.

3. The Commodore 64 had 16 colors. If you viewed them on a monochrome monitor, they were 16 neatly-spaced intensities of gray ranging from pure black to pure white, in order.

4. The Atari ST was actually capable of doing 640x480 with ANY two colors in its palette. The rule that 640x480 only worked with monochrome monitors, and color could only do 640x200, had nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying video chipset, and everything to do with the fact that multisync monitors as we know them today just didn't exist in 1986... it was actually Atari's MONITORS, and lack of support for doing it by the operating system, that imposed the original limit.

5. With some lightweight firmware hacking, a late-90s HP Enterprise 8mm DAT backup tape drive could be used to read, write, and copy audio DAT tapes without any of the restrictions imposed by consumer DAT recorders... or professional ones, for that matter.

6. An electric fan is basically an inefficient windmill, and vice-versa. Prove it to yourself... set a multimeter to "AC", connect the probes to the prongs on the fan's plug, and put the fan someplace where a stiff breeze will cause it to spin. Electricity comes out!

7. A speaker is basically an inefficient microphone, and vice-versa. There's now an entire category of hardware security exploits that takes advantage of the versatile i/o on most modern microcontrollers (where any given i/o pin can be used for input OR output) to use the device's speaker(s) as microphones, even if you have the official microphone physically disconnected. Ouch.

8. A peltier thermoelectric device works two ways as well... apply power, and one side gets hot, and one side gets cold. Physically make one side cold and one side hot, and it GENERATES power.

9. Continuing the theme... a LED can also be an extremely inefficient light SENSOR. Sounds impossible? What do you think a solar cell is? Pump voltage into a photovoltaic cell, and it'll weakly emit infrared light. Photovoltaic cells and LEDs are basically the same technology, optimized for the power moving in opposite directions :-)

In "the old" (pre-semiconductor) days circa 1920, if you needed to convert AC to DC, you basically connected an AC electric motor to a DC-generating dynamo back to back, so the electric motor caused the dynamo's rotor to spin. Mind-blowingly inefficient, but it's actually how the New York subway used to be powered. They got AC power from the power plant at Niagra Falls, and converted it to DC at "powerhouse" buildings that were basically row after row of electric motors spinning dynamos providing DC power to the subway.

Likewise, if you had DC, but needed AC, you connected your battery to a DC motor, and used it to rotate the shaft of an alternator to generate AC at the other end.

To get flies out of your kitchen, take a shit in the living room.

To change an unwanted or destructive habit, eg overeating, gambling, drinking, etc, the fastest and best results are obtained with behavioural methods that address the behaviour and controlling its' context. Searching for and analysing the origin of the behaviour may be interesting and valuable but it will not lead to any behavioural change in itself.

What r80 is trying to say is, "Just snap out of it!"

No, no, no, R81!

Exceptional advice, thank you R76.

So, basically, if you have drinking buddies and what to quit drinking, stop seeing your buddies for example? I did that. It worked. I was very bored for a few years, until I had the luminous idea to take up hobbies like old people do. Never looked back.

*want, sorry - not what

Yes, exactly, R84; you have to eliminate anything that supports the habit you want to change.

As in...if you don't buy it, you can't eat (smoke, drink) it.

I work in PR in entertainment. It is such an esoteric business it is hard to teach. The one thing I tell anyone who asks for advice in working with entertainment folks is - they are not your friends and never will be. Any client will stab you in the back, throw you under the bus, without hesitation if they need to. The other thing is with social media - it is much hard to control press about your client when they are fucking stupid. I guarantee you, Vanessa Hudgens, PR person or team probably shot themselves in the head after her Instagram post. Luckily I no longer have individual clients like that but even now when I talk to younger actors I tell them - do you want to be a youtube/Instagram/ticktock star or an actor? If you want to talk to your fans or create a social media following never EVER go live, never talk unscripted and have an editor look at that shit.

R87 has summed up the Harkles' problems in a nutshell.

You can't fix stupid. Especially when it thinks it's so smart.

r88 Yup r87 here - Social media is a nightmare for Publicists. It is a great tool to get a buzz going but omg you basically give real-time access to millions of people in the hands of the most narcissistic and forgive me, stupid people in the world. Look at savvy social media influencers - they fuck up all the time and they are pros at using social media. Can you imagine being Tom Hanks publicist and having to have a call about Chet. daily?

Entertainment PR would be the job from hell. Hollywood in general contains some of the sleaziest, most ethically repulsive behavior of any industry I have seen.

r90 it is not like that 90 percent of the time. Most actors are just working actors. They understand and listen to what you tell them. It is when you get someone who hit is big first time out. Their egos are way out of control. They know best and you can't tell them shit. I ran into a client once in a gay bar. He looked terrified when he saw me. He said "you are not going to tell people are you?" I was dumbfounded. I told him look I am the one person who will not say a fucking word if you don't want me to, but you do realize you are in Mickey's right? There are about 100 gay men who know who you are here. Do you think they won't be telling everyone they know they saw you here? He just looked at me and said "but I am wearing a hat." ......really.

R91, what would you advise the Sussexes to do to rehabilitate their tattered image? It seems they can't do right for doing wrong; every time they try to demonstrate solidarity with the masses, they are rightly pilloried for their hypocrisy.

By that logic, every US city with an international airport should have had the same rate of new cases early on. But that’s not what we’re seeing – doesn’t Las Vegas get a lot of traffic from Asia? Yet there’s been almost no Covid-19 cases in Las Vegas.

Something is hinky with the epi data; maybe it’s just testing artifacts. Or maybe the Chinese government sent over some very sick people to wander around grocery stores in various East Coast cities at the end of February?

r91, who was it? Can you at least drop some hints?

R89 But they are, and despite the disclaimers have long been repped by Sunshine Sachs, allegedly masters of the art (or arts, however dark) of burnishing tattered reputations.

Judging by what we read here and elsewhere, they aren't doing a great job controlling the messaging much less convincing their clients to shut it.

r93, or... New York is just an order of magnitude more crowded overall than any other American city. Other cities have skyscraper residential areas (Miami, Chicago, LA, SF, etc), but those areas are the exception within vast, sprawling metro areas, and even the people who LIVE in those dense areas are more likely to drive to a suburban super Walmart to shop than crowd into a subway & shop in crowded (and expensive) urban stores. In NY, even the areas a mile or two from Manhattan itself are dense & inescapable due to traffic, expensive tolls, & lower car ownership.

It's not like Miami, where someone who lives downtown just grabs their car from the 16-story parking garage (where their condo has two deeded spaces) & casually drives 8 miles down the freeway to Dolphin Mall (or 4-6 miles to Sam's Club, or 2-6 miles to Walmart or Target, depending upon their willingness to spend 10-20minutes driving a few miles further to get free parking instead of paying $2/hour) to go shopping. In Miami, even people who live in skyscrapers tend to live a relatively suburban lifestyle.

[quote] Be genuinely nice to people and sincerely care about them and they'll never want to hurt you. Except 2% of the population but they are crazy and would fight with anyone.

You don't have to be genuinely nice and you don't have to sincerely care about (certain) people. Just stay off of their radars and they hopefully won't even think about you. (Be polite enough and unobjectionable.)

[quote] its'

This is not a word. Never.

r92 - honestly If I were working with them. Charity charity charity. Lend their name, lend their time. It takes very little effort for people of their level of fame to lend that cachet to a charity or work. r94 I can't say because they never came out as far as I know.

About publishing:

A friend of a friend wrote and published 3 novels. She was in her twenties. First book she was about 22, and the last one around when she hit 30.

She comes from a wealthy family, went to all the right schools and studied Law. She hated it. She also spent one year in Amsterdam. Pretty/beautiful as a young woman, she was kind of an ugly duckling as a kid. Very talented when it came to stringing two sentences together, she also tried her hand at stand-up comedy.

Anyway. The thing is, she used to write a blog and her blog was very good. Her talent was she was more of a columnist. I tried to read her second or third novel (can't remember which), as she begged her friends not to read the first because it was no good. The fact is, this wasn't good either. So she really tried, got a 3-book deal because she did have some writing talent/connections, but it went nowhere. After that experience I really wondered what it takes to succeed in publishing. She ended up teaching creative writing (really!) and I don't think she published another novel when her 3-book deal ran out, as none of her 3 books met with any success. Her publisher placed a bet on her and it didn't work out. This happens quite a lot. My guess is she didn't pursue the avenue she was most talented at (jokes? observational comedy?) because it's clear she did have some form of talent yet something was missing. Maybe a good editor.

R15 I can only speak for my city, but we are still failing miserably on testing. The criteria we are following for testing in the hospitals basically requires that a patient has evidence of respiratory failure. My fear is that this leads to patients being vented too late, and sadly I’ve already seen that happen.

The problem is there aren't enough ventilators, worldwide. Still this only speaks to this particular crisis, which was poorly handled from the beginning. If the disease were something else, we'd probably be missing - whatever it would take to treat it. The fact is we're running on tight supplies for everything that isn't MAKING MONEY.

Capitalism can't be fixed.

Anesthesiologists have the highest rated of suicide, R80.

It's thought their knowledge and access to lethal dosages of medicine is the reason why.

It's like all those gas oven suicides in England. They replaced those and the suicide rate dropped.

It should be the same way for gun violence too.

It's well known that in the case of suicide, if a practical element prevents the individual from committing suicide the way they had intended, usually they postpone their plans, often not to carry them out at all. So easy access to lethal drugs, guns, etc will bring in a higher rate of suicide.

Please stop turning this into a coronavirus debate. Teach us something.

R103: Seriously? I was told (and by MDs) that dentists offed themselves more than any other medical profession. Why, I have no idea: looking at the inside of people's mouths all day?

Our company fridge was cleaned out every Friday at 3:00. If you kept track of what was not moving or touched since Wednesday, chances are they owners of forgotten lunches wouldn't claim by Friday. Free food, ya'll!

[quote] Please stop turning this into a coronavirus debate. Teach us something.

Bitch, it’s my AREA. Don’t stand in my spotlight.

[quote]I was a prosecutor and investigator in white-collar matters. Possibly the most effective tool in questioning suspects is silence. When someone gives a half answer or a ridiculous lie, just look at them and say nothing.

This reminds me of when I was working in a law office, and had to help with depositions.

Remember that you don’t have to go with the words someone deposing you wants you to say.

If they say, “So were you angry, OR were you irritated?” you can give your own answer. (“I was concerned.”) You don’t need to be boxed into the word choices they try to put in your mouth.

Actually, we could use a thread dedicated to the epidemiology of CoronaVirus.

R110 Here’s a good place to start, it’s amazing how much they know about the origin, down to the facts of which wet market it was and that the bat cages were stacked on top of other live animal cages causing the virus to contaminate the them, which helped disperse it further then it would have been if it was just been the bats.

Even with low/inadequate testing, the case numbers are extremely weird. Despite having their first confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis in January, California has relatively few cases compared to Washington state - so is Seattle really that much more densely populated than San Francisco?

San Francisco has the nation’s largest Chinatown, presumably there’s a lot of travel between SF and China. Yet not many cases there.

And what’s going on with all the cases in Georgia? Where did that outbreak come from? Is Atlanta suddenly a densely packed city now??

Brain surgery is referred to as “cabinet work” and the transsphenoidal approach is referred to as “being nosey. “

Entertainment PR expert, R99, you said the Sussexes could rehabilitate their image with charitable efforts, but they have introduced their new charitable enterprise Archewell, and so far, all it has achieved is to expose them to condemnation for the timing, and now ridicule, when the domain name was hijacked. What do you make of that?

R114 Either they didn’t hire the right entertainment PR people.

Or they’re not listening to them. Still.

Oh yeah - and that's the other thing I know. Different number systems. Of course Base 10 but also Base 8, Base 16, Base 2- otherwise those last two are known as Hexadecimal and comprise 0 through 9 plus A through F for sixteens symbols. Binary of course is only 2 symbols, 0 and 1.

And i still remember my first computer a Radio Shack TRS-80 Mode 1 Level II. It's how I knew the video was in the range 3C00 to 3FFF or in decimal 15360 to 16383. Btw, you can see the value of Hexadecimal in that.

Can you explain why Octal was ever a big deal? I mean, I *totally* 'get' hexadecimal (compact representation of 8-bit values using 2 digits), and even base36/base32 (compact, semi-human-readable representation of 5-5.25 bit values, possibly treating the letter 'o' as synonymous with 0, the letters 'i' and 'l' as synonymous with '1', and omitting the letter 'u' to avoid 99% of accidental obscenities), but 3 bits just seems silly, other than maybe for 6-bit or 9-bit values.

Especially since 8-bit bytes were pretty much nailed down as the de-facto natural binary word length by the late 1960s... Intel 4004 notwithstanding. And using octal for 4 bit values seems even sillier.

Octal came about because early computers were 8 bit machines. Hence octal. 0-7

R11, such a wise observation. Silence unnerves people, especially in yakkety yack USA. A handy tool to have in one's personal arsenal.

R16, who is the most underrated writer? Overrated?