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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • This was almost certainly an older style of MRI that didn’t use superconductors. You could turn these off and on, but the strength of the magnetic field was much lower that what can be achieved with superconductors.

    I also looked up the wind down time and I was mistaken. It’s a day long process to wind down and wind back up and MRI and do all of the testing and adjustments, but the loss of the magnetic field happens in a few hours. I edited my post.


  • Radiologist here. There are multiple safety zones (four to be precise) around the machine and extensive screening procedures are required to access the inner zones. The magnet of an MRI is always on and extremely strong. However, you need to be pretty close for it to pull a gun from your hands. Like, less than a few meters. That would be zone 4. He should never have been that close.

    The button he pressed is called a quench. It’s for life threatening emergencies only. Think “patient trapped between the machine and a metal object.” It vents the liquid helium used to keep it superconductive and basically destroys the machine, but the magnetic field dissipates in minutes. There is a way to wind the machine down without destroying it in situations that aren’t life threatening or for servicing, but it takes hours for the magnetic field to dissipate and even longer to bring it back.


  • I would modify the electoral college rather than get rid of it. Make it so that states are obligated to assign their electoral votes to candidates in proportion to the number of votes received. For example, Maryland might go 60% blue and 40% red, so they would give 6 of their 10 votes to blue and 4 to red.

    This would de-emphasize the importance of swing states, not completely disenfranchise rural voters, and would return a result that more closely mirrored the popular vote. It might also pave the way for a 3rd party to be relevant if the stars aligned elsewhere.


  • I have room in my life for exactly one gacha game, which I don’t spend money on. Sometimes this is a fun little distraction, even though progress is slow without buying currency. This is how I felt about Record Keeper before they shut down the global version. I love FF7 so I’m giving this a shot, but it’s been a week and I’m struggling. There are so many superimposed mechanics that it feels like a new player starting a free to play game at year 5 or 6 of its life, after they’ve steadily added new mechanics, currencies, and other powercreep for years. But it hasn’t been out for years, it’s been out for a week and there are already so many things to keep track of. It feels like work.

    Also, the “automatic” battle AI is VERY good. Better than I am. And you can double the speed so the battles go quicker. At first I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to pay attention while grinding, but why am I doing this at all if I’m not even playing it?




  • Federation is a fresh idea in the social media realm. Not chronologically, obviously (sorry mastodon), but fresh in the sense that it has buzz and momentum now that it hasn’t really had before as a direct result of the “staleness” associated with data collection, advertising, and corporate greed by the big players. There are no fresh ideas from meta, Twitter, and tiktok because their goals are stale. Bluesky is very buzzworthy, and if they can build out and scale up fast enough they have a chance.