conditional_soup

The city of Merced is having a series of town halls over these next two weeks. The first of which was last night, 1/28, at the Civic center. There's another planned for 1/30 at Merced High cafeteria, and a last one on 2/6 at Stowell Elementary. These town halls are an opportunity for you to tell the city what you think their priorities for the next year should be. If you're in the area, please go! It's a wonderful chance to meet up with other activist groups in the area and grow your network.

Does anyone have any experience home brewing a radio telescope? I'd really like to make one myself, both because it seems fun and challenging, and because it would probably be cheaper than buying one of there are any consumer grade radio scopes. I'm aware of some tutorials online, and one concern that I have is that many of them are intended to output data to software. I'd like to convert the signal into something audible, so that people can actually hear the emissions. The three targets I have in mind are: the sun, Jupiter (like the JOVE project), and hydrogen emission frequencies from nebulae. Ultimately, my goal is public outreach and education rather than amateur research.

I have next to no experience working with radio anything except old AM/FM receivers and walkies. I also know next to nothing about how radio telescopes work, so if you have a particularly good resource besides googling it, I'd be greatly obliged. My questions are: did you find building/using the telescope difficult or expensive? Did you find that it was worthwhile / would you do it again? And what advice do you have for someone looking at it for public outreach?

Hey everyone! I'm putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last night, and I found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the class was a bit on the smaller side and not asking too many questions (I think because it was cold AF for California), and I found the energy kind of flagging halfway through. My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc. and follow the Astronomical League's Urban Stargazing program (I want to help folks get certified if they're interested). I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope. In case you might be wondering, it's not a GOTO or PUSH TO scope, I personally find that there's a bit of magic in manually slewing the scope, but it does unfortunately mean that I spend extra time bringing the scope back on target between students using it.

We ended up with probably a dozen participants, with most coming and going within about 20 mins out of the hour. Again, I think the weather was a big part of it, but I was really hoping they would find it worth it to stay. We started the night off viewing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, (not part of the urban stargazing program, but I wanted to include them), and moved on to showing the Pleiades and Hyades through low mag binoculars, and then on to the Orion Nebula and Theta Orionis, and finally Gamma Andromedae. Then, most people started to dip and we just kind of did requests until the end of class. Maybe I'm just enough of a dork that it would have kept me around in spite of the weather, but I worry that it wasn't interesting enough. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hello, fellow dogs. I need some advice. Every time I play fetch with my human, they keep trying to take the b*ll from me. This is causing me a lot of stress, because I want them to throw the ball for me, not take it away. Sometimes, I'll run away with the b*ll to keep them from taking it, but then they won't throw it. I mean, what's with that behavior? It's so frustrating, and it happens every time we play. I didn't ask, but the c*t said I'm in the wrong here. What do you guys think?

Anybody here experience any extraordinary dreams? I'll start.

One that has haunted me for years is a dream that I don't clearly remember, I just remember facts about the dream. I remember that I was a whole other person with a whole other life. I had a family, a spouse with kids, and this entirely different identity. I was still a man, idk if same culture or ethnicity, but I remember I was about 15 or 20 years older in the dream than I was IRL. At some point, in the dream, I realized that I had to go away, and everyone else knew I had to go away too. I was sad, and everyone else was too. The only thing I (vaguely) directly recall about the dream was being huddled with my family and friends as I slowly faded out of the dream and into reality. I woke up with tears running down my face, not knowing who I was IRL and wanting urgently to go back. It took a solid ten minutes of laying in bed for this version of me to wind up and regain my memories. I've never experienced anything like it before or since, and it's a constant, very low level memory for me. This life feels as real as the dream did, it feels as though there is literally no reason it can't happen again to this reality and I'll lose this set of family and friends and start over in some new reality again. I don't think it was seeing the future or a past life (besides, I don't remember the setting being meaningfully distinct a la futuristic tech or medieval living conditions) or anything like that, it was just a dream that felt so real that I'm not sure I'll ever lose the 0.1% of doubt that I have for this reality.

I'm a little worried about my human. Like the title says, they'll only throw the b*ll for me for about three hours (throwing is such a neat trick, btw, I love that about them). After that, they'll usually just, like, stop throwing it or even put the b*ll away. It just seems like such a small amount of fetch, it's got me worried; is there something wrong with my human?

As long as I've lived in my house, random humans keep coming up and leaving boxes by the front door. I've tried to tell my human that they need to go yell at them or it's going to keep happening, but they never do and, surprise surprise, it keeps happening. In fact, it seems like it's only getting worse. I've tried taking matters into my own paws by barking at them through the window, but they don't seem to care (like, wtf???). I don't know what to do at this point, I feel like I'm at the end of my leash.

Every time I get in the trash, my human finds me, tells me to leave it, and puts the trash back in the garbage can. It's really bizarre, I don't understand why they insist on throwing all this stuff out that they can just have for a little snack. Can someone explain this behavior?

My local EMSA has approved IV Tylenol for pre hospital pain management in trauma patients. Supposedly, studies show that there's little clinical difference in the efficacy of acetaminophen and opioids in acute pain management. I've attempted to find this alleged research, and the link above is what I found. I can't quote it exactly because I'm on mobile and it's being weird, but the relevant section is towards the end and compares the efficacy of IV Tylenol to IV opiates. It leads with saying that the relevant evidence is considered low quality before indicating that (this is a VERY rough summary) IV tylenol seems to have a very similar though slightly less effective/durable analgesic effect. I recommend you read it for yourself. The study also doesn't seem to be limited to trauma patients, and seems to make no distinction between visceral and somatic pain, both things I was hoping to see.

Overall, I can see the benefits: it's cheaper, not addictive, less strictly regulated, doesn't alter consciousness or respiratory drive, and doesn't induce a bunch of histamine to tank a patient's blood pressure. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with it, and if it works as well as advertised.

If you're like me, you've probably been bombarded with ads about how awful AB 886 is. You should know that AB 886 is an attempt to support local journalism by forcing large, for-profit platforms that share links to online local news articles, like Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, and Google, to pay money to those local news agencies for access to their work. The group behind the ads against AB886 is the CCIA, or the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which is a lobbying group whose membership includes such small, local journalism organizations as:

• Google
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Twitter
• And many more

Here's their Wikipedia page if you're interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_%26_Communications_Industry_Association

So, predictably, this is down to huge for profit companies wanting to continue getting access to other people's work for free. If you're feeling like taking memes seriously and getting into fights with strangers, you might think about calling your assembly member and letting them know that the CCIA can go fuck themselves and to support AB886.

Thought I'd get a near death experience thread going. Doesn't have to be crazy to share.

I had mine when I was about seven. I was living with my mom at a big house that the owner was letting rooms out in, and they had a pool without a fence around it. You probably already guessed by now, but I couldn't swim yet. I was in the back yard playing with the boy who lived down the hall when the frisbee we were playing with landed in the pool. I thought I could reach it, and the other kid encouraged me, so I knelt down and reached out as far as I could for the frisbee. It didn't happen immediately, I was reaching for a bit before the landlord's big dog came by and bumped into me. I fell in, struggled a bit, and ultimately went under. I remember looking up at the surface, seeing my dog, a black lab, swimming circles over me, and then just going to sleep. My life didn't flash, I didn't have a realization that I was going to die, no lights in tunnels, no voices, no being dragged through deep water or any of that. It was really just like "I'm tired now" and I went to sleep.

Somewhere in all this, someone told my mom I was in the pool. She ran out, jumped in, and dragged me out. My next conscious memory is her pumping on my chest and me throwing up and coughing up water (kinda felt like both anyway). We never went to the hospital, in hindsight I was damn lucky not to have died of dry drowning later. In fact, I've been a paramedic for 14 years, and I've seen my share of drownings in home pools, and it only reinforces for me how lucky I got. It's such a narrow window of survivability, and my mom threaded it. Pools are no joke, don't leave your kids unsupervised around pools, and never ever trust an unfenced pool.

This is a smaller note, but it happened to one of my patients, not me. I was treating a man having a massive STEMI, and when we were just thirty seconds from parking the ambulance, he coded on us. We'd seen it coming, though, and already had the defibrillator pads on him, so I had the firefighter start compressions while I charged up the monitor. Once it was charged, I cleared him and fired the shock, and we actually got Hollywood resuscitation, like his eyes popped open, he gasped, started looking around, the whole nine yards. Only time in my whole 14 years I ever saw that. But the guy looked terrified, way more than he had been before. I'm talking a real, fundamental lizard-brain terror in his eyes; it's possible you've never seen that look, but if you know, you know. I've always wondered if his experience was like mine, had he just gone to sleep and then been jolted awake when the monitor hit him like a freight train? Or did he experience something else?