It is a testament to American tolerance and forbearance that this guy hasn't yet been stripped of his medical credentials and hung out to dry.
That guy is something else. Also, I think Randy Quaid may be having either a great time or some problems.
1: It's kind of alarming how badly you can fuck up and keep your medical credentials.
Anyway, my guess is that if the anti-vaccine issue does become partisan, it will be because of the HPV vaccine.
Or rather, over the issue of the HPV vaccine.
His follow-up response is even worse.
Say whatever else you may, you have to admit that "TSAIOKWC" is a great acronym.
Vaccination doesn't have the same game-theoretic qualities as other collective action problems. I'm still subject to climate change whether or not I drive an SUV, so why not drive an SUV?
The problems that accrue to my kids from non-vaccination, however, can be solved by vaccination. So even though (as a conservative) I regard herd immunity as somebody else's problem, my kids' immunity is something I can act on with vaccination.
All you care about is drinking your Starbuck's, your next plastic surgery, your next cocktail, your next affair, and your next sugar fix!
This post was created with love
So great.
4: I wish that they would expand coverag of that to HPV-negative women over the age of 26, but whatevs.
Technical Question: I know from a titre that I have plenty of antibodies to the measles. That video said that the father only had partial immunity (like many adults), but the mother had full immunity. In this age of reduced vaccination rates, should adults be getting booster shots?
"I'm a big fan of what's called paleo-nutrition, so our children eat foods that our ancestors have been eating for millions of years," he said.
I'm guessing he's for strict enforcement of intellectual property rights, too.
I had to get an measles booster before I was allowed to go to college. There was an outbreak on campus the year before I started. Apparently, the vaccination schedule used when I was a child wasn't as good as they thought.
6: "If those chicken pox people didn't eat cereal and donuts, they may still be alive." OMG -- Halfordismo!
From the link in 6:
Be angry at fast food restaurants. Tortured meat burgers, pesticide fries, and hormone milkshakes are the problem. The problem is not Hepatitis B which is a virus contracted by drug users and those who sleep with prostitutes. And you want to inject that vaccine into your newborn?
Holy Moly.
The bio on his practice website is pretty great too:
Brainwashed! That was how I spent the first 35 years of my life. Words like organic and natural were not in my vocabulary, certainly not relating to health. Nutrition was deemed worthless, vitamins were quackery, and drugs and surgery were healing. I actually believed (as many docs do) that statin drugs should be in the water supply. But as you will read below, I transformed from a doctor who follows mindless, cookbook medicine to one who will be amongst the leaders of the health revolution in this country.
"Be angry at your parents for not breastfeeding you, co-sleeping with you, and stuffing your face with Domino's so they can buy more Tide and finish the laundry." This is, among other things, a poorly constructed sentence!
14: For the record, he's also wrong about Hep A. It kills plenty of people.
Also:
Be angry at your parents for not breastfeeding you, co-sleeping with you, and stuffing your face with Domino's
The "not" clearly isn't supposed to extend to the Domino's, so it sounds like he's saying you should be angry for co-sleeping, but it seems from the rest of his schtick like something he'd be in favor of. I'm confused. Or he's terrible at writing.
10: Have you been been following the hockey/measles story? Lots of (presumably) immunized but not fully protected folks getting it. I had to get a titre before I started grad school (missing record for the final shot) that showed I'm fully immune. I sort of think the best would be for anyone to get a titre at college age, then again before any treatment that might affect their immune system, maybe a booster for seniors or something if it seems to be needed, although it's only now that we'd be able to get data on how long full immunity lasts. Immunity wanes as people age.
Sleeping with prostitutes causes poorly constructed sentences.
I'm confused. Or he's terrible at writing.
Or both!
Circling back to the thread we had on this topic a few days ago, I'd bet money that guy's also a libertarian. There's a huge overlap.
The idea that you can avoid infectious disease by personal virtue alone is an impressive innovation in the field of wackadoodledom.
Your infant is full of chemicals!! There's a battle in my heart for favorite wol/f/son.
"The flu kills just about no one. The vaccine never works."
TThe vaccine is not a very effective match this year, but umm. NO. Just NO.
Also, I hate to be a snob about osteopathic medicine, because my Dad had a great doctor in Maine who waas very thorough and trained at a good, mainstream hospital who was a D.O., but that guy reminds you of how much quackery was in the osteopathic movement historically.
22: Admit the post title made you think about The Good Wife.
I know the history, but we have D.O.s around here. They seem normal enough now.
I'm sure I've said this before but I sort of wanted to lord it over my mother that after her big production about not letting me get the hepatitis vaccine because it would encourage risky sexual behaviors that I got raped anyway and it would have been nice to have been protected, except in reality I don't want to have that conversation.
I mean, this dude makes me livid for many, many reasons, but stuff related to that is one.
This guy is 80% of the way to elected office in Arizona.
On Hep A, I once shared an office with a guy from Pakistan. He said everybody got Hep there. I don't know if the vaccines have gotten better and changed that, but I suspect not. That plus the fact that Iranian women are incredibly alluring to Pakistani men are all I recall about Pakistan.
21: I had to get a titre for measles and chicken pox before working in a Public Health Hospital. I had no VZV antibodies. Supposedly I got the vaccine when I was 28 at a student health clinic. I looked at the vaccination record, and I'm wondering if they gave me the shingles vaccine. But that should have worked too, right? It's a larger dose. I got the shots over 3 different dates and paid a lot of money for no response.
So, if I could drag my eyes through Midnight's Children, I think I'd know everything about Pakistan.
"newborns contain over 200 chemicals as detected by cord blood."
I'm guessing he's one of those premeds who didn't do so well in orgo.
All new parents are recommended to get whooping cough boosters.
BTW did anyone else get extra text added when copying from the site in 6? It added the URL and "see more at" even though I didn't copy it. I've been infected by their website.
If your browser was pure, you wouldn't have those kinds of problems.
I have a friend with a DO. From what I remember of what she said the school was basically the same as a regular medical school except with a very small contingent of wackos running around talking about manipulations (one or two professors maybe, and a small group of students) that everyone else ignored. So it's sort of like what might eventually happen with chiropractic, where the demented wacko contingent gets smaller and smaller and the actual medical training gets larger and larger and eventually you just have another way of saying 'physical therapist' or something.
I like to say "D.O." with a Homer Simpsonish "D'oh" when I introduce them to other people.
basically the same as a regular medical school except with a very small contingent of wackos running around talking about manipulations
In a regular medical school, those are psychiatric residents.
38: I got a TDap a while ago, because I was working with sick people. I asked my PCP about it and she thought it was a good idea, but I don't think that it was a general recommendation for human services workers working w/ people w serious co-morbid medical conditions.
38: Yes. As per Moby, I'm clearly impure.
40: I have a friend with a DO. Her canned response to "What's the difference between a DO and an MD?" is "Two extra years of school." But people with DOs these days seem to get regular residencies and become specialists etc. -- so it's definitely very different from what I used to think it was.
You know who else was obsessed with purity? Yep, that's right.
He said everybody got Hep there
Hep A (or E), yes, but not B or C.
45: Yeah, my Dad's doctor's residency was at Mt. Auburn. He was probably slightly more holistic than your typical Harvard-trained MD. Mt. Auburn is a bit less interventionist than, say, MGH or the Brigham. But you don't want a procedurally-oriented PCP
Dr Rand Paul objected to MDs needing to take a test in order to be certified to practice opthalmology. There are lots of MDs with cowboy thinking.
This is, among other things, a poorly constructed sentence!
Hanging is too good for him.
How does he explain the eradication of smallpox in a world where people still eat refined sugar?
That plus the fact that Iranian women are incredibly alluring to Pakistani men are all I recall about Pakistan.
The bars in Kashgar are full of Pakistani truckers getting their fill of drink and women. Witnessing that was my first indication that life in Pakistan is even less fun than reading Midnight's Children, and that's saying a lot.
35
Aren't Iranian women alluring to everyone?
In grad school I've gotten boosters for everything (Tdap, MMR), and I swear, every time I go in they give me a tetanus shot. I've also been vaccinated against Hep A, B, typhoid, meningitis, the latter required before university attendance.
If vaccination becomes a partisan issue, can we just quarantine all Republicans in Wyoming? It would be in the interest of public health.
51: Truck drivers probably aren't the best representative for any society. Ours are mostly serial killers.
Aren't Iranian women alluring to everyone?
Let's find out! Post a picture of your mom, ogged.
How does he explain the eradication of smallpox in a world where people still eat refined sugar?
Probably it was going to die out anyway, like the dinosaurs.
I'll grant that 53.1 is true, but Pakistan is still not about fun. Exhibit B: a lot of the drivers have a terrifyingly casual attitude toward passing on the highway with inches to spare. Insha'Allah, they seem to say, which is Arabic for "fuck it, whatever, Heaven has to be more fun than this."
I've never met a Pakistani trucker to speak to, but I can testify to their propensity for getting off their faces on hash or opium and then driving at 90 mph down the wrong side of some rather narrow roads. So a bit of drink and women could hardly make matters worse.
Aren't Iranian women alluring to everyone?
Judging from the trailer for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, I'm inclined to think so.
36: That's lousy. You're correct that the shingles vaccine is just a higher dose. Some people just don't respond to some vaccines, though. (Or the lab screwed up your titer.) The few non-responders are another reason it's good to keep vaccination rates as high as possible.
Haven't read the thread, but I'd love it so much if the otherwise-lefty dipshit-anti-vaxxers are suddenly forced to be aligned with the biggest assholes on the planet. That makes the point "you are being an asshole" a hundred times more clearly than all the well-designed studies and rational, calm articles in the world.
Anyhoo, to the OP, I keep thinking that nothing will surprise me anymore about the leaden stupidity of American politics, but the rapidity with which the vaccination issue became a talking point for presidential contenders boggles the mind. Do they all have committees to see who's best at ripping up the social fabric? (Yes, I know they do.)
There are lots of MDs with cowboy thinking.
IIRC Charlie Pierce frequently asks "WTF is wrong with doctors these days?" when discussing Ben Carson, that "lies from the pit of hell" dude in GA, or any number of other GOP nutcase doctors.
Part of me thinks that the Dems should press this issue, for a few reasons:
1. Pretty much all anti-vaxxers sound like some version of this guy (that is, entitled and clueless)
2. There's a perception that anti-vaxxers are mostly hippies, which isn't true (it's a rare bit of dubious belief that's truly nonpartisan), and making it a signature Dem/liberal issue would help counter that
3. The obvious analogy to climate change denialism is useful to highlight: "Hey, normal middle American who is inclined to listen to climate deniers because they also oppose Obamacare? Those assholes are just like these morons, who want your kid to die from measles."
4. Drum posted yesterday that Millennials are split 50/50 on whether vaccines should be mandatory or personal choice. IMO this is a situation where partisan identification can be used as a force for good. Just as affinity politics has turned lots of vaguely conservative voters into anti-evolution morons, I think that, if the party of gay marriage, diversity, and fixing college loans is also the party of mandatory vaccination, we can draw the Millennials into a better set of views on the issue.
The downside, of course, is that if it really does become a partisan issue, you'd have 1/3 the country stop vaccinating. But I'm not convinced the GOP would go all-in on anti-vaxx the way they have on climate change or evolution: the former has specific monied interests, and the latter has specific religious groups. I don't think there's an interest group that would push the entire party into such a stupid position. But I do think that their libertarian tendencies will keep them wrong-footed on the issue, which would help Dems.
66: Or, they'll decide the biggest assholes on the planet were misunderstood and join them.
I kinda want to ask paleo guy why there were so many more deaths from measles, etc., when people were living closer to a paleo lifestyle, pre-1950s. More walking, functional movement, whole foods.
Anyhow, I was musing that in all of the science fiction utopias where the advanced civilization has solved diseases and cancer and poverty you never get a group that's just going around trying to bring them back because they can't be that bad. Here on Ceti Alpha Six we have no poverty, crime, or cancer; except for the Hobbyist faction.
70: Yay! Except what's that nonsense about the sky being blue? Everyone here knows the sky is gray.
I'm rather pessimistic this morning because it turns out if you mention anything that requires taking into consideration the lives of other human beings (e.g., basic ethical obligations) half of your intro class will be convinced you're advocating Communism. Aristotle is Communist. So is Mill. So is thinking that I should consider the needs of other people when I make decisions. Because thinking about others is Communist.
71.2: There was Star Trek episode where the alien lady sexed-up Kirk so she could catch a disease* that she could introduce into her society to solve its overpopulation crisis.
* These are the condomless voyagers of the Starship Enterprise.
The crew of the DROU Xenophobe all decide to relax their immune systems and catch colds because it's such a nice feeling not to have a cold any more, in Iain Banks "Use of Weapons".
71.2: I think Ian Banks' Culture novels played around with this idea, but I don't recall that it was ever a central plot point.
If you want to know everything there is to know about India, read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy"
Yeah, someone on Twitter yesterday made the point that mass vaccination is one of the moral pinnacles of liberalism. Liberals might as well try doubling down on it, especially with the Republic primary heating up.
Just finished Under the Banner of Heaven (years late, I know), and it reminded me about the weird right-wing natural/organic movement. (The Laffertys and a surprising number of the other fundamentalist characters were really into chiropractic, against traditional medicine, etc.) I think it mostly happens when you have an overall conservative population, so the real conservatives can set themselves apart by getting into natural stuff. In a more normal population, most conservatives will associate natural/organic with hippies and other devils. Then of course there's the libertarian Whole Foods dude who recognized a good racket when he saw one.
The authorities said they had run tests on popular store brands of herbal supplements at the retailers -- Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC -- which showed that roughly four out of five of the products contained none of the herbs listed on their labels. In many cases, the authorities said, the supplements contained little more than cheap fillers like rice and house plants, or substances that could be hazardous to people with food allergies.
The best novel to read about India is The Great Indian Novel. It's right there in the title.
65: My PCP gave me the vaccine again last year. I was going to ask them to do a titre again to see if it stuck.
I did read a case report of somebody who had no measurable VZV antibodies using a commercial test, but nonetheless seemed not to be susceptible to chicken pox. They hypothesized an adequate cell-mediated response.
But Moby wants to learn about Pakistan.
Rushdie also wrote a novel about Pakistan -- Shame, but I didn't really like it.
Or rather, they found an adequate response when they did more sensitive tests.
80: Fish oil is okay, if you get IFOS-verified stuff. (out of Guelph, Ontario).
You can also buy USP-verified vitamins (maybe melatonin too?).
Natural Factors brand is Canadian and regulated by Health Canada. It's a caveat emptor sort of thing.
80: I feel as if I've heard/read roughly that result before, although perhaps less definitively.
Maybe they're just homeopathic supplements?
Supplements in general are barely regulated in the US. Whereas with prescription and over-the-counter meds, where you have specific procedures, however compromised, for the FDA to test and approve drugs before products go to market, with supplements the FDA generally can't step in until something is obviously already wrong (like if a bunch of people are already getting sick). There have been a couple attempts to beef up the FDA's regulatory powers to change this; they've all been shot down over the past couple decades.
IIRC Charlie Pierce frequently asks "WTF is wrong with doctors these days?" when discussing Ben Carson,
Ironically, Ben Carson himself says that he thinks vaccines ought to be mandatory.
That's probably less surprising though since he was actually a (real)* pediatric surgeon before becoming a lunatic. Still, it's interesting to see that the one person so far on the right sane enough to realize that this is a terrible argument to be having with the Democrats is also clearly batty. (You'd think they'd be overjoyed by the prominence of one of the very few crazy things in America that is identified with the left. I mean, not accurately, but...)
*Rand Paul: opthalmologist! I am looking at you.
If you can see a Libertarian candidate, thank an ophthalmologist.
I think the herbal and supplements loophole with the FDA is actually relatively recent isn't it? I thought it stemmed from around 1994 with the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. I'm not sure how much power they had before that point, though.
70: I think the #GrandmaKnowsBest hashtag is a good campaign line. It plays on competence as a function of age and gender in a non-threatening-feminist way.
All those Native Americans weren't living a healthy natural lifestyle, they died of European-imported smallpox because they got too much EM radiation from their iPads. Thanks Steve Jobs.
91 beat me to it, but I was going to point out that the supplement industry has been very aggressively anti-regulation (and very successfully too, largely thanks to their BFF Orrin Hatch). Dodging Whole Foods employees distributing ant-reg pamphlets in my local store's parking lot years ago was one of my first encounters with the libertarian streak running through my putatively liberal enclave.
One of the first replies to Hillary's tweet is a Gotcha that 7 years ago Obama said we needed more research:
"We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it," then Sen. Obama said.
The president's words contrast his current position that there is no reason not to get vaccinated. The president said over the weekend that the scientific evidence in support of vaccines is "overwhelming."
The rightwingers are so wedded to "We need more research!" as an excuse to oppose something that when someone changes their mind because of more research it means you're a flip-flopper. Science, how the fuck does it work?
Vaccination has been a partisan thing for some time. For several years now, someone I know has kept passing along Tea Party groups' rants about this and that, and they have had a very strong anti-vaxx streak all along. They also have a vision of child protective services to rival their vision of the UN: all-powerful institutions driven by a thorough hatred of everyone white and conservative/libertarian, chomping at the bit for opportunities to snatch children away and deliver them to socialist white people, or families of color, and any color other than white will do. When the ACA was being debated, they had long screeds about specific passages that would empower state CPS and/or establish a federal CPS that could take any child for any reason at any time.
I pissed off my source, and their sources, by repeatedly quoting the page numbers their canned rants cited and showing that nothing of the sort was in there.
I haven't yet seen rants that the current rising rate of outbreaks is a false-flag operation to justify the health gestapo, but I assume that they're already in circulation and I just haven't seen them.
I thought it stemmed from around 1994 with the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act
This was exactly the legislation addressed by the pamphlets I mentioned.
chomping at the bit for opportunities to snatch children away and deliver them to socialist white people, or families of color, and any color other than white will do
Damn, no wonder we got selected as foster family of the year!
91,94,97: I've talked about this when I lecture about drug-drug interactions. Different brands of the same herbal supplement can differ by up to a hundred fold in the amount of active ingredient.
This makes it really challenging to factor it into determining the best medication dosage.
It's not enough to know that someone drinks tea infused with St. John's Wort. Depending on the particular brand, that could mean nothing or it could mean that the standard dose of a medication will be useless. And knowing the brand won't help either since detailed information about the levels of particular components is not generally given (or even known by the makers). In the end I guess you need your own mass spectrometer.
98: I'm pretty sure Obama was talking about more research into autism rates there, not vaccines. ("This guy" doesn't necessarily mean in the "who has two thumbs and thinks we need more research into vaccines" sense.) I mean, not that any of that would stop them from running around yelling about the line or anything, but it's worth noting that that quote isn't necessarily what they're saying it is.
You just exclude everybody taking herbal supplements from your studies and that solves all problems.
In the end I guess you need your own mass spectrometer
A new market for prosumer mass spectrometers? Capitalism wins again!
94: I don't think that's right. Supplements, as far as I know, are not allowed to be marketed as therapeutic agents, which means thay're neither food nor drug. Supplement manufacturers have been fighting FDA for as long as they've existed. From the FDA website "1976. Amendments ("Proxmire Amendments") stop FDA from establishing standards limiting potency of vitamins and minerals in food supplements or regulating them as drugs based solely on potency."
The worst thing in the world for the supplement industry would be for them to be under FDA purview, as they would be required to meet labeling standards.
103.last Or just to live better through properly regulated chemistry.
I don't need government support, I pulled myself up by my own ion source.
107.1 maybe wasn't entitely clear. As far as I know, FDA has never been able to regulate supplements, and the 1994 law was just the latest exemption as FDA gained increasing authority over both food and drugs.
Hey, SP, you're in DC Friday, right? Want your own thread? I think we didn't pick a venue.
Yes, weather permitting, otherwise I'll have to take the train and won't get there until late night. Looks like it should be ok though, next snow is Wed-Thurs so should be clear by Friday. Flight arrives 5:15 DCA, should we say 7 or 8pm somewhere in the convention center area?
109: I think for a while at least they were just part of the "food" category and that that's what changed with the DSHEA. But it also tossed herbal stuff into the category, not just nutrients/vitamins/etc., which is the source of the genuinely crazy stuff that you see. (Because, obvious L-DOPA is a dietary supplement and not, you know, a drug. I can't imagine any down side to people taking L-DOPA to get pumped up for their workouts.)
Actually still looking around trying to find information on them a lot of the herbal stuff that is now covered under 'dietary supplement' might actually have been counted (more accurately) under 'drugs' and subject to more serious regulations (and, seriously, fucking L-DOPA?).
I thought the Proxmire amendments were to protect vitamin pills (by the way -- also mostly bullshit, though recommended by doctors) and the 1994 thing was IIRC Orin Hatch protecting the herbal "medicine" industry which he liked because Mormonism had some affinity for herbal medicine, or maybe because snake oil is an old-timey Old West kinda thing.
All of the anti-vaxxers I know are basically apolitical assholes but were enthusiastic Obama voters because cultural affiliation and it was a mark of virtue (which is really what this is all about) to vote for him. There are both liberalish and conservative-ish strands of virtue politics so I think this is one issue that cuts both ways on both sides of the political aisle. Personally I believe in maximum authoritarianism, so I'd like both a ban on donuts and mandatory vaccinations enforced by quarantines.
What is virtue politics, and if it's derogatory, how do I know I'm not doing it? The alternative seems to be embracing greed.
115: I believe it requires a lot of active looking down on those people, who deserve whatever horrible thing happens to them because they didn't make the virtuous choices that you made.
115 -- I basically meant what Dr No Tide is doing -- your politics are primarily based on a need to show others how particularly special and virtuous you are. There are both left-ish and right-ish flavors but it's a strain of politics as pure UMC cultural affiliation, in this case reinforcing your self-image as a particularly pristine and virtuous person, without much concern for policy or other people.
Ripper--I asked this before, but wasn't your ex kind of woo and didn't you have to fight to get your daughter vaccinated?
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The college algebra thread is off the front page, so I'll complain here:
If a vented range hood removes contaminants such as carbon monoxide from the air at a rate of F liters of air per second, then the percent P of contaminants that are also removed from the surrounding air can be modeled by the linear equation P=1.06F+7.18, where 10 <= F <= 75. What flow F must a range hood have to remove 50% of the contaminants from the air?
All they want is for the student to plug in P=50 and solve for F. Is this question as hopelessly confusing as I think it is?
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Yes, but I must have been drunk if I mentioned that here, since it violates my number one rule of commenting.
119: It is if it cuts off mid-sentence like that.
All they want is for the student to plug in P=50 and solve for F. Is this question as hopelessly confusing as I think it is?
That may be the point. If a student can't solve a mathematically simple problem that is made difficult because it is very confusingly posed, then the student won't be able to solve most of real-world mathematical problems he or she is likely to encounter, certainly not if the student will ever be solving mathematical problems that are posed to him or her by non-mathematical co-workers, etc.
That's "applied mathematics" for the real world.
124 aside, I actually don't think 119 is that bad. It's got irrelevant distracting details, but I'm sure that is part of the point.
I think 124 gets it right: it's confusing because applying simple math to the real world is often confusing.
FWIW, that does look like the sort of thing I would encounter IRL. I've often had to spend 5+ minutes rereading a chunk of Building Code in order to be sure that they're asking, in a convoluted way, for something fairly straightforward.
I suspected it would only be awful if you knew the inappropriateness to the quality of the student. It needs to be way gentler.
OTOH, I just made $65 on free sample textbooks that I had just taken out of my mailbox, when a peddler-dude came by. Yay.
Mormonism has an affinity for multi-level marketing schemes involving herbal medicine.
No, it's an awful sentence. The problem is "also removed from the surrounding air," which implies that the hood is primarily removing one class of contaminants from the air that flows through it, and incidentally removing a different class of contaminants from the air 'surrounding' it. I had to read through twice to be sure that there was just one class of contaminants/rate of removal.
(I mean, yes, in the real world you're going to deal with people who can't successfully say what they mean, but dealing with that isn't really a math problem.)
the 1994 thing was IIRC Orin Hatch protecting the herbal "medicine" industry which he liked because Mormonism had some affinity for herbal medicine, or maybe because snake oil is an old-timey Old West kinda thing.
It's charitable of you to allow that Hatch might have fought for the industry out of some religious purpose or misplaced nostalgia, but the reality is that supplements manufacturers (most notably one from his home state) were major campaign contributors.
Oh right. I think there was even a story arc on Big Love that involved them, though maybe I'm imagining things.
the inappropriateness to the quality of the student
Do you mean inappropriateness for any college algebra students or inappropriateness for your particular class? Because the latter doesn't necessarily seem like a problem with the textbook.
I recall that my college linear algebra textbook was written by an MIT professor and used in (at least his) linear algebra courses at MIT, which meant that my (not MIT) professor had to dumb down the problem sets for our (not MIT-caliber) class.
but dealing with that isn't really a math problem
Not a pure math problem, no. But it is an applied math problem.
Do you mean inappropriateness for any college algebra students or inappropriateness for your particular class? Because the latter doesn't necessarily seem like a problem with the textbook.
Great schools don't offer college algebra, or barely do. Any school that has a large population taking college algebra is dealing with kids that struggle mightily with it. They've all seen it before in high school.
Allow me to revise and extend: confusing/complex word problems are not inherently problematic, because the real world will not always present simple and straightforward word problems, even when they take the form of a word problem*.
However, LB is right that this one seems to be poorly written in a way that's above and beyond any pedagogical benefit to students.
*that is, word problems in school are a way of thinking through a putative IRL situation and figuring out how to apply math, but the real world sometimes presents one with things that are, basically, word problems. Comparing prices for 2 different sizes of food package is effectively a word problem, but nobody is phrasing it that way to you. The Int'l Building Code really does, in parts, look like 119.
A great class would be to spend a semester looking at terribly written, real world things, and having students re-write them coherently. But that needs a tremendous amount of time, which this word problem in the first month of class is not intended to do.
And then, you can have them plow the sea.
I tried to use memes in this CLE presentation I did recently and it just seemed to confuse and annoy people. Who wouldn't want a little Sudden Clarity Clarence to liven up this boring shit, I thought. But the reaction was kind of wtf are you doing.
A great class would be to spend a semester looking at terribly written, real world things, and having students re-write them coherently.
That sounds like a writing class.
The Int'l Building Code really does, in parts, look like 119.
You already said I was right, but let me elaborate on how completely right I am (and then I will go back to my brief). You're right about things like the Building Code -- I spend a fair amount of time reading badly written statutes, and I know what you mean about this being a recognizable style.
But this problem is teaching exactly the wrong lesson. In real world bad writing, you think you know what's going on, except there are a couple of weird words in the sentence that don't really fit. And then you stare at it enough, and you realize that what looks like incomprehensible extraneous verbiage actually refers to something that meaningfully changes the nature of the situation. The screwy writing is a flag that the situation is more complicated than it initially looks.
In this, you're got the inexplicable extra stuff (also, surrounding), but it genuinely doesn't mean anything, and so the message is to ignore the bits that don't immediately make sense to you. Bad lesson to learn.
Also, the IBC doesn't have much to say about cob. This is a problem for some people.
That sounds like a writing class.
Actually, it's both a writing and a math class. Brilliant idea, heebs.
145: it seems like that would be pretty tough to balance. Do students have to solve the problems after they re-write them coherently? If the problems are mathematically difficult enough to make this challenging, then they would likely be too difficult to sort through if poorly posed. And if, by contrast, the problems are easy to solve once correctly posed, then it wouldn't be much of a math class.
It would be a good writing class, though, especially for students in mathematical disciplines.
146: Dealing with my daughters' homework has definitely been an exercise in anger management. The materials have mostly been cheaply-assembled makework (let's have a thread about the textbook/educational materials industry while I'm on a BP monitor!), and I have yet to discern any consistent pedagogy. It's not so much an issue for one, who can see through it and get straight As with her eyes closed, but it's immensely frustrating for her sister, who could easily enjoy playing around with numbers if the subject were presented in a better way.
139: They were irritated because it got their attention -- which interrupted their planned naps.
And if, by contrast, the problems are easy to solve once correctly posed, then it wouldn't be much of a math class.
It would be a great math class! There's nothing wrong with easy problems if students can understand the conceptual basis, and once they get that they can move on to harder ones. As an added benefit, by critiquing materials sold to school systems by for-profit companies, they can critique capitalism itself!
which means thay're neither food nor drug.
How about good red herring?
by critiquing materials sold to school systems by for-profit companies, they can critique capitalism itself!
This is sounding ever more like something best left to the English department.
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Feeling low right now because a very close relative is splitting up with his spouse. Apparently the spouse's decision. Kind of shocking because they were together for many years before marrying, had been pretty closely bonded in general, and there was no inkling of problems over Christmas.
He called me to relate the basics of what was happening; I tried to be an ear but he wasn't ready for that, which is fine of course. I made myself available whenever he needs and offered my couch when he's in the area in a few months.
I'm not in such a place as to need expressions of sympathy, but wouldn't mind some feedback on whether I'm doing all I can to support him. Our call was fairly short so I'm worried I neglected something. Our family is close and nonconflictual but we all have trouble talking about extremely personal stuff.
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And then you stare at it enough, and you realize that what looks like incomprehensible extraneous verbiage actually refers to something that meaningfully changes the nature of the situation.
You may be giving too much credit to the code officials who write the IBC, LB. I'm only being semi-facetious; there have definitely been cases where the language is needlessly convoluted, whether because it's an update of an old section* that nobody thought to rewrite, or because they can't decide whether they want to use words or a printed formula (I was looking at a section a month ago where I couldn't make heads nor tails of the text, but then it just gives you a simple formula, and there's no real need for the text at all).
Anyway, the overall point stands: the form of the problem is reasonable, but the language is needlessly opaque/imprecise/wrong.
*a new code comes out every 3 years, but change is mostly gradual/sporadic; for 95% of cases, a given bit of code won't change from one edition to the next
Our family is close and nonconflictual but we all have trouble talking about extremely personal stuff.
In that case it sounds as if you did fine. There will probably be many such calls. Reiterate your willingness to be an ear or a boarding house each time. He'll tell you what he wants to tell you when he wants to.
Check in with him over email if you want to increase the chance that you have an actual discussion about whatever is hard for him right now. Sometimes it's easier for people to share how they're feeling over email. Especially if you write a non-perfunctory email of inquiry. Not too long, that could be a burden, but something like:
"Hey, I just wanted to check in with you, since the split. Aside from the emotional stuff, is the legal stuff causing you any headaches? How are the kids handling things? And finally, are you hanging in there okay with the emotional side of things? Talk to you soon, Levi"
(See, you slow pitch the first two questions because those are easy to get real answers. And then he can choose or choose not to answer the real question, which is the third.)
If puzzling through weird statutory writing = math, I'm like fucking Grothendieck.
Set him up on a date using your binders full of women.
The joke in 158 is so bad that I'm wondering if that was actually really Mitt Romney.
Sock puppets ARE people, my friend.
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But for fun family updates sake: if you'll remember, WCB only would travel across the country if it were Saturday to Saturday. ECB would only travel Friday to Sunday, regardless of location. My mom, whose 70th birthday this is all ostensibly about, only wanted somewhere not-hot, since it will be June, where the cousins could get to know each other.
So we're doing a theme park in Orlando.
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Over at LGM this morning there was a thread speculating on whether this recent bout of anti-vax posturing from the GOP is part of some plan, or they just sort of stumbled into it.
My guess is they stumbled into it initially by blindly following their "whatever Obama says, say the opposite" dictum, and then noticed "Hey, there's a whole untapped vain of toxic craziness here. Hooray!"
That seems like a Fuck It, Nobody Gets What They Want sort of solution. Which I understand for the brothers, but--what did mom do wrong?
Toilet training, probably.
what did mom do wrong?
If I only knew........
21: Have you been been following the hockey/measles story?
It was actually mumps that was going around in the NHL.
My joke from over there, given today's report of another Free-Market Jesus saying that we also don't need regulations requiring hand washing by food service employees, is that the new Republican platform plank is, "You know nothing, John Snow."
Thanks. Fortunately no kids involved.
164: They believe a majority of their base is dumber than a sack of wrenches (a proposition with no shortage of supporting evidence), which is also how you get a stage full of college-educated candidates disavowing climate change and evolution.
165: It's only "Mom doesn't get what she wants", really. Because we're shitheads.
Will there at least be water to swim in?
|| Very odd to have someone who was purely a facebook friend die. "But he was on facebook just yesterday" is a strange thing to think. No need for condolences, not someone I knew well at all, but I find I'm having some reaction to it I felt like typing somewhere.
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Yep, the hotel has a pool. The problem with Colorado - I shit you not - is that it didn't have beaches and a pool. I bet ten million dollars we do not spend any of the 36 hours at the beach.
To be fair, Florida doesn't have mountains and a pool.
Which asshole[s] demanded there be a beach knowing your mother didn't want someplace hot?
The same one that felt that the Great Lakes beaches were insufficiently fun enough to justify an entire vacation.
I hate your brothers so very much, Ladybird.
It's admittedly been a while since I've been to Orlando, but the last time I was there, they did not have a beach.
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So in national reports, I've seen this story reported as "Uber cleans out CMU Robotics Dept.", but the local story (linked) describes it as "Uber, CMU collaborating on robotics." I don't really care what the truth is, but I think it's funny as hell whichever one is more wrong.
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I am now for the first time in my life working underneath (not directly underneath, but tangentially underneath) someone who is an aggressive practitioner of the kiss up, kick down style of management. It's amazing to watch in practice, especially how brazen it is. I always imagined it being something of a subtle art. I'm actually doubtful it's going to work out well for him just because he's kicking so many people so aggressively, many of whom (like me) are not direct reports to him and many of whom (unlike me) are not themselves powerless within the organization. Although this is an extremely successful executive, who makes about 20x what I do, so he probably knows better than I do what works and what doesn't. Which is a depressing thought.
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A while back I was assigned to work for a boss who would praise us to our face, then undermine us behind our backs. I was dumbfounded. Why are you slyly manipulating me, lady? You are my boss. Tell me what you want and I will disagree internally but produce what you want. There is no reason to be roundabout with me.
I googled "does Orlando have a beach" and it looks like, although many people ask the question, the answer is still "no."
163 WCB only would travel across the country if it were Saturday to Saturday. ECB would only travel Friday to Sunday, regardless of location. My mom, whose 70th birthday this is all ostensibly about, only wanted somewhere not-hot, since it will be June, where the cousins could get to know each other.
This is starting to sound like a good setup for a logic problem for college math students.
I once went to a conference where the big wrap-up event took place at a theme park in Orlando (not Disney World, I forget where exactly it was.) It was kind of awful. The theory seemed to be that if you have enough noise blaring at you from enough different directions then you must be having fun.
Some of the manmade lakes at Disney must have beach-like settings. And Sea World definitely does.
I think they get pissed if you try to swim with the seals.
Apologies if this has already been linked/discussed/whatever, but it seemed very like an Unfogged thing.
I'm sure Halford will insist that this is totally distorting the true message of the Busytown books.
Could go to that place where you can pay to swim with dolphins.
177: still possible. I spent many childhood holidays on beaches that weren't hot. Sometimes we built driftwood fires to keep warm.
196: They exist, but they aren't the kind of place most people would travel thousands of miles for, presumably.
Got the worst flu I've ever had in Orlando. Wife and daughter too. Great vacation.
198 -- Tofino refutes you.
Indeed. I remember going to Tofino for Christmas Vacation a few years and it was lovely.
In fact, I was at a campfire on a beach on Saturday night where the air temperature was exactly 0F. Apparently just like heat, there's such a thing as a dry cold, where drier air doesn't feel as cold. I would have expected the opposite given experience with heat, where more humidity = feels warmer.
I would have expected the opposite given experience with heat, where more humidity = feels warmer.
More moisture in the air speeds heat transfer -- in either direction (though, I believe, the main reason why hot humid weather is unpleasant is because it makes sweating ineffective).
Also exposed skin goes numb almost immediately and your body starts withdrawing blood from your extremities really quickly, which helps slow heat loss (if you're dressed warmly around your torso at least).
If you want to know everything there is to know about India, read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy"
Sometimes I wonder if I should give him another shot. I have read The Golden Gate probably a dozen times but after that I read An Equal Music which was sort of fine and twenty pages of A Suitable Boy before remembering that there is basically no book in the world that I am more than 500 pages interested in.
I have wondered if I should give Rushdie another shot. I got about 5 pages into Midnight's Children before I couldn't stomach the self-indulgent logorrhea anymore. If you want me to read 500 pages, you have to be Russian or Cervantes or Proust.
Actually, I quite liked the longer Harry Potter books.
He has a book of animal fables in rhyme that I liked (can't remember the title).
I loved Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy (there are no books that are too long if I'm enjoying them). Equal Music left me kind of cold -- I think partially because I'm not enough of a music person to know if the frankly absurd sounding central conceit was supposed to be plausible, or if I was supposed to take it as magic realism or something.
Beastly Tales From Here And There.
Oh, that looks good—I may pick it up for our next bedtime book. We just went through Wildwood and Watership Down, so something in discrete bits (and verse) might be nice for a change.
207: No. Your judgment is excellent, apart from the implication that you would read between 5 and 500 pages of Rushdie. 5 is enough. (Unless you're 17 and don't know anything. 17-year-olds can read whatever "required serious literature" they please, no matter how bad, and think for as long as 48 hours about how they don't really understand why people think so highly of, say, William Gass.*)
*I like Gass. But I don't believe in required reading.
98: Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included.
The Obama 2008 remarks were not just taken out of context but basically completely misreported*--when he said "this person" he was pointing to someone in the crowd. Charles Johnson at LGF (hard for me to countenance his trajectory) with the full context and video.
*For instance by the usually better Sarah Kliff at Vox, who has a mealymouthed** correction, but still under the utterly misleading headline of "Obama supports vaccines now -- but pandered to anti-vaxxers in 2008".
**"This suggests Obama wasn't referring to himself when he made the remark." she writes when if you watch the video you clearly see that he pauses and point to someone and is not referring to himself.
NMM to not having a batshit insane the President of Argentina murders a prosecutor looking into a synagogue bombing possibly to protect oil concessions news story.
Just need some hinted involvement of the current pope in the original incident and it could be a Dan Brown blockbuster.
if the frankly absurd sounding central conceit was supposed to be plausible
Um, it made such a huge impression on me that I don't remember what this was. I remember one scene I found very vivid and basically nothing else. Wikipedia thinks he was very thorough in his writing about music or anyway quotes people who did.
Wikipedia thinks I'm not notable, the fuckers.
Professional musician loses her hearing, keeps it a secret and continues to perform. I mean, maybe that's possible? But it sounds really unlikely, and I didn't have the knowledge to evaluate it one way or the other, so it nagged at me through the whole book.
And the narrator was kind of pointlessly whiny.
Ben Carson was apparently worried that he was sounding entirely too rational on the vaccination thing for the base so he threw some immigration chum into the water.
"These are things that we had under control. We have to account for the fact that we now have people coming into the country sometimes undocumented people who perhaps have diseases that we had under control," he said. "So now we need to be doubly vigilant about making sure that we immunize them to keep them from getting diseases that once were under control."
Professional musician loses her hearing, keeps it a secret and continues to perform. I mean, maybe that's possible?
Yes, if her spirit animal is Evelyn Glennie.
Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines.
Thanks Obama RFK Jr.
JP@168: Thanks for the correction. Measles at Disney, mumps in hockey. Hard to keep straight all the newly circulating infectious diseases.
217 -- You too? There's always WikiAlpha.
Until yesterday, I'd only written one fewer book than Harper Lee and she's notable.
Math problem (tangentially) involving a vacationy beach destination! Decades ago, my family was on a flight to Hawaii. Somehow there was a bottle of champagne to be given away, to whomever could get the closest answer to a problem that went something like, here's our scheduled arrival time, and the headwind, and the distance, so what is our cruising airspeed? My brother, about 12 years old with good math aptitude, diligently tried to set up his equation on a napkin. My dad, reasonable math aptitude (but generally not confident of it), decided to just take a guess. Dad won the champagne.
These days you just have to look at the display that always tells you your speed and outside air temperature. I was on a flight not long ago where someone nearby kept up a running monologue on the outside air temperature for a solid hour. Did you know it's really cold up there? Amazing!
Essear, if you'll take a tip from someone who's no longer notable, I have three words for you: noise cancelling headphones.
These days you just have to look at the display that always tells you your speed and outside air temperature.
Maybe you do on your fancy intercontinental flights, but some of us still have to rely on algebra.
Algebra? What, dead reckoning not flashy enough for ya?
Apparently just like heat, there's such a thing as a dry cold, where drier air doesn't feel as cold.
It makes a huge difference. We have really dry air so even though we have hot summers and cold winters the comfort level is much better than other places farther east.
230: No, too flashy.
231: Yeah, this is why the insanely low winter temperatures in Interior Alaska aren't quite as bad in practice as they sound. Just mostly.
I feel like if I were ever to get back on a plane I would want to know as little as possible about what was going on because the basic fact of what is going on is cuckoo nonsense.
Wow I really did not remember a damn thing about Equal Music. Golden Gate I truly adore and maybe should re-read now that I live in it, or near it.
I had to sleep with a wet towel over my nose in New Mexico & in the Mojave had a permanent nosebleed trickling down the back of my throat. I wonder how you've adapted. (Also still better than muggy.)
I can't really tell a difference between 25 degrees and -5 degrees. Wind is the real problem. The constant nosebleeds of "dry cold" may offset whatever increased "comfort" you get outside.
I used to get nosebleeds as a kid; for a while I slept with a humidifier in my room. Since then I can't say I've had much trouble adapting to either humid or arid conditions when I've moved between them.
Wind is the real problem.
Yeah, definitely.
234: Ugh, I've never reacted to it with anything like that. I throw on a bit of Aveeno here and there which is a small price to pay for not having Chicago's climate.
The worst is when you get low absolute temperatures, high humidity, and strong winds in the same place. Western Alaska is brutal this way in the winter.
240: Have you bought some bunny boots yet?
No, but I really should. I'm woefully underequipped for really hardcore winter and lucky that the winters since I've been here have generally been notably mild.
I live in a humid mountainous climate, and it sucks. Well, spring and autumn are glorious, but winter is a damp cold that really chills your bones, and sumer is just hot and humid. We had a month of consecutive days over 40 degrees the summer before last (according to everyone I talked to, the govt reported it as "39.9" because they have to give employees the day off if it hits forty). Winter is harder because there's no indoor heating. The two winters I've spent here haven't been too bad (no snow), but when it's 40 F degrees inside as well as out it's really miserable, and showering is a pain. I can keep my core warm with lots of layers, but my hands are almost always permanently frozen.
I was in a dry windy valley for part of my time in Colorado (ranching land), and it was 40-50 degrees. Drive 30 min into the mountains and it dropped to 20 right quick. My skin is dry everywhere out there, but my face was hurting--with moisturizers--because of the lack of humidity.
I like the cloudy air. My office window looks east and if it isn't cloudy I have to shut the blinds in the morning.
But on a cloudy day, I can see to Penn Hills or Larimer or whatever the high ground is.
there's no indoor heating
It seems like this might be the bigger issue than the humidity. Even in dry if the air were dry, showering would still be a pain and your hands would still always be frozen.
Heated three-season patios are less great, but still better than nothing.
231: It's a great climate, at least until the wildfires start.
214: Her most recent stunt: tweeting the Spanish equivalent of "They are only here for the lice and petloleum" about a Chinese delegation. So "alloz y petlóleo" I guess? (I could not find the actual tweet.)
I came here to kick ass and eat banana bread and we're all out of ...
Never mind. There's some on the counter. Thanks.
What's funny is that, once my sister moved to CO, she'd come back east and complain about the raw humidity of perfectly fine, crisp fall days. I absolutely get that really raw days are colder than the thermometer suggests, but that's not how I'd describe 40° and 40% humidity.
As I've noted before, I appreciate the fact that sweating is more effective, and less sticky, in desert climes, but I'd really rather have humid 80° than arid 95°. Sacramento, Boulder, Arizona - all pretty close to unbearable.
Penn Hills or Larimer or whatever the high ground is.
Almost certainly East Hills and/or Lincoln/Lemington. I did a project in East Hills 10 years ago, and looking west I could see the heart of East Liberty in a way that made me realize, "Oh! This is what I can see in the distance from there."
You must be right. If I move to the side, I can see the water tower by the old VA campus in Highland Park.
there's such a thing as a dry cold, where drier air doesn't feel as cold
It's actually a quite minor direct effect because there is so little water by volume in cold air* that the variation in thermal capacity is negligible nor does the water in vapor form does not increase the thermal conductivity of the air. There are however several associated phenomena that enhance the effect--there is more likely to be condensed water in clothing** (or, of course, in some form in the air which then gets on you and your clothing) which significantly increases cooling, and also much more likely during the day*** to have increased solar radiation.
*Between 0°F and 80°F water vapor capacity increases on the order of 25x. In fact in most places the relative humidity increases in winter compared to summer. But when it gets heated in places like your lungs or your house (even with radiator heat) it is dry indeed.
**I'm not sure how it actually works out on bare skin--just like at higher temperatures there is more rapid evaporation with drier air.
*** So yes, cold nights feel colder than cold days at an equal temperature. Relatedly, sitting near a cold wall makes you feel colder on that side than you would otherwise even absent a "draft****", the difference in thermal radiation is noticeable.
****In fact, I suspect many "drafty" houses are less drafty than folks presume.
To pick up on the antivax subthread, here's a German language report on their problem - pretty much, the more bourgeois and the further south the district, the fewer kids get immunised.
There's a pretty good correlation between the missing shots (first map) and outbreaks of measles (third chart)
I haven't looked at the snowpack figures, but my guess is that we're heading for real trouble. It's early yet, but this pattern isn't sustainable.
259: Whoa there Mr. Doom and Gloom. It was just a drier than usual Jan. It's still early and the Rockies snowpack isn't in dire shape.
My link is prettier and also gives the boost of "holy shit it's way worse farther west".
Yeah, I assumed CCarp was talking specifically about his relatively close area--overall western mountain situation is much less cheery.
Yeah, we're pretty fucked. Precipitation about average, snowpack at about 15 percent of normal.
254: My aunt, on the other hand, came out to visit last December and loved the humidity. It was a mild, rainy December with some misty days. She said, "It's like a spa for my skin!
Relatedly, sitting near a cold wall makes you feel colder on that side than you would otherwise even absent a "draft****", the difference in thermal radiation is noticeable.
This is precisely the reason that radiant heat (mostly in heated floor form; radiators function primarily as convectors, not radiators) is so much better than forced air. I'm failing to remember the number, but we learned in school that there's some ratio between air and surface temperature wrt perceived comfort. That is, a room with 70° surfaces and 60° air is far more comfortable than the reverse, and in fact more comfortable than a room that is uniformly 65°. The ratio of course would vary depending on the baseline temp, but we're talking about normal conditioned air temps, so 65°-75°.
I wish we could convert our heating to hydronic, even hydronic radiators, but it would be silly expensive even though it was originally parlor stoves (gas or coal, can't tell).
There's a PG book _The Labor-Saving House_ that I enjoyed a lot. Vastly in favor of gas stoves over (nicer but dirty) open fires, but reminds you that every room's stove should have a little cooking ring for all the things one used to do on the fire. Thirty years before _Cooking in a Bedsit_, same cheerful practicality.
I wish we could convert our heating to hydronic
I might be able to get on board with the electric underfloor but running a maze of water pipes throughout the house gives me the willies.
It's certainly more convenient than the well in the yard.
That's better than I thought it would be. I'm in the Lower Clark Fork, but even so.
268: A wall radiator in each room would be fine, where the originals were, so it would be a fairly simple tree from the chimney chase. And the forced air is a retrofit so it's not a good instance.
Maybe electric floor heating would be efficient enough since our electric is mostly hydropower in the winter.
266: Interesting... and that would help (a little bit) with the drying out of the air (~50% change in vapor capacity in that 10°). Like having a low-power sun completely surround you on an otherwise cool day--sounds pleasant!
For the most part underfloor electric doesn't get you enough heat: it's a nice supplement in a bathroom, but it's not often used for a whole house.
gswift, would it relax you any to realize that it's a seamless system? Each loop is a single length of cross-linked polyethylene ("PEX") tubing, very thick-walled, that goes out from the boiler manifold and returns. They're effectively leak-proof, as long as you don't start shooting long nails through the floor.
It seems like any drilling through the floors would be pretty risky, unless there's an easy way to determine the exact location of the tubing.
To be fair, I've never drilled through a floor except right along the edge of the wall.
I've never drilled through the floor in the middle of a room either, but wouldn't there potentially be tubing near the walls?
Other major problem with forced air, noise! So unpleasant. Almost no system is installed properly enough to minimize nise and many many exacerbate it beyond endurance.
I wonder (and just can't be bothered to look into it today because by the way have I mentioned work has been hell lately?) what's going on with dry cold weather in DC. It definitely gets cold here, judging by the fact that my knuckles bleed just from chapping if I don't moisturize. The confusing thing is, why should DC be dry in the winter when it's so wet in the summer?
Also, I find the recent news about measles outbreaks and people doubling down on opposition to vaccination a lot more depressing and worrying than the usual wingnuttery. Maybe it's because it seems somewhat more likely than usual to affect me personally, but also it just seems significantly more crazy and anti-science than usual. I mean, evolution and global warming are very well understood by now, but, fine, admittedly you can't see abiogenesis (or whatever actual scientists call "chemical evolution") with your naked eye and there are several links of logic between "the earth is warming" and "gas-guzzling cars are bad."
But vaccinations? They work 99 percent of the time, some diseases that there are vaccines have been eradicated and a lot more are very close to it (or were until now), and they've been around for a hundred years! How complicated is that? How much more does it take to convince these people? And where did they come from? Did anyone suspect vaccines of being bad for you 20 years ago, before that one single fraudulent study? Just generally... what the hell?
279: Duh. "It definitely gets cold here" should be "It definitely gets dry and cold here" or words to that effect.
From what I know there have been periodic "VACCINES WILL KILL US ALL!!" panics in the past too, though the current one seems especially prominent/nasty.
279: The latest surge of antivax sentiment on the right seems to be driven largely by the usual adolescent "You can't tell me what to do, man!" sentiment.
There's the old joke that conservatives would chug liquid Drano if some one told them that the nanny state liberals wanted to prevent them. I guess that's closer to the truth than we thought.
279.1: If you scroll down to the Humidity graph at this great site (Weatherspark... did ogged link that here?) gets a bit dryer (more late winter early spring) but nothing that exceptional. Are you comparing to some baseline you experienced somewhere else? It may just be the outside/inside thing in cold climate.
279.3 -- The COFC has been hearing vaccine cases for 30 years now, and, for the non-autism claims, it looks like dismissals are running a bit (but not a huge bit) ahead of awards on post 1987 claims. Pre-1988 claims paid at maybe 25%, which isn't nothing either.
Compared to the numbers of people taking the vaccines, of course, the numbers are meaninglessly small. In 30 years, fewer people have proven vaccine injury than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, just to pick an easy target.
Are you comparing to some baseline you experienced somewhere else?
Just memory. I spent 24 of the first 25 winters of my life in Vermont and upstate New York and don't remember dry skin like this. Either dry skin has nothing to do with humidity or the Northeast is actually a lot more humid than DC or I was surrounded by humidifiers a lot more than I remember. (None of which would surprise me. Like I said, haven't looked into it.)
DC high/low humidity range Dec -> Mar: 87/49 -> 83/40
Burlington VT high/low humidity range Dec -> Mar: 87/56 -> 86/46
So it is a bit drier (particularly during the day).
For comparison Denver 77/40 -> 77/30
and Phoenix 71/29->53/17