Flying Kites with Simone de Beauvoir

Flying Kites with Simone de Beauvoir
By Corey Mohler





May 9, 2022 at 11:00AM
via Existential Comics https://ift.tt/mR3M0S8

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Pathways to Practicing Medicine in Canada: UMHS Alumni Share Their Experiences

Pathways to Practicing Medicine in Canada: UMHS Alumni Share Their Experiences
By

Join us for a special livestream event, “Pathways to Practicing Medicine in Canada: UMHS Alumni Share Their Experiences” on Monday, May 9 at 7 pm EDT. UMHS alumni Rebecca Bremner, MD, a hospitalist at Lakeview Family Health in Trenton, Ontario and Shamim Shakeel Khan, MD, a family medicine physician at Dayspring Medical Centre in Bolton, Ontario, will discuss their individual journeys to medical school, describe their pathways to practicing medicine in Canada, review key differences between practicing medicine in the United States and Canada, and provide tips for students hoping to establish a medical practice in Canada. Following the presentation, Drs. Bremner and Khan will answer audience questions during a live Q & A session.

via UMHS YouTube Channel

May 10, 2022 at 03:14AM
via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRCJqB9PTzo

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Deep End

Deep End
By





May 6, 2022 at 08:00AM
via xkcd.com https://xkcd.com/2616/

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Letter of Recommendation: Get a Vasectomy

Letter of Recommendation: Get a Vasectomy
By Jason Kottke

Men in the US typically do not talk about or worry about birth control that much, to the detriment of the health and safety of women. In the spirit of trying to change that a little, I’m going to talk to you about my experience. About a decade ago, knowing that I did not want to have any more children, I had a vasectomy. And let me tell you, it’s been great. Quickly, here’s what a vasectomy is, via the Mayo Clinic:

Vasectomy is a form of male birth control that cuts the supply of sperm to your semen. It’s done by cutting and sealing the tubes that carry sperm. Vasectomy has a low risk of problems and can usually be performed in an outpatient setting under local anesthesia.

Whether you’re in a committed relationship or a more casual one, knowing that you’re rolling up to sexual encounters with the birth control handled is a really good feeling for everyone concerned.¹ Women have typically (and unfairly) had to be the responsible ones about birth control, in large part because it’s ultimately their body, health, and well-being that’s on the line if a sexual act results in pregnancy, but there are benefits of birth control that accrue to both parties (and to society) and taking over that important responsibility from your sexual partner is way more than equitable.

(Here’s the part where I need to come clean: getting a vasectomy was not my idea. I had to be talked into it. It seemed scary and birth control was not something I thought about as much as I should have. I’m ashamed of this; I wish I’d been more proactive and taken more responsibility about it. Guys, we should be talking about and thinking about this shit just as much as women do! I hope you’ve figured this out earlier than I did. Ok, back to the matter at hand.)

Vasectomies are often covered by health insurance and are (somewhat) reversible. These issues can be legitimate dealbreakers for some people. Some folks cannot afford the cost of the procedure or can’t take the necessary time off of work to recover (heavy lifting is verboten for a few days afterwards). And if you get a vasectomy in your 20s for the purpose of 10-15 years of birth control before deciding to start a family, the lack of guarantee around reversal might be unappealing. Talk to your doctor, insurance company, and place of employment about these concerns!

Does the procedure hurt? This is a concern that many men have and the answer is yes: it hurts a little bit during and for a few days afterwards. For most people, you’re in and out in an hour or two, you ice your crotch, pop some Advil, take it easy for a few days, and you’re good to go.¹ It’s a small price to pay and honestly if you don’t want to get a vasectomy because you’re worried about your balls aching for 48 hours, I’m going to suggest that you are a whiny little baby — and I’m telling you this as someone who is quite uncomfortable and sometimes faints during even routine medical procedures.

So, if you’re a sperm-producing person who has sex with people who can get pregnant and do not wish for pregnancy to occur, you should consider getting a vasectomy. It’s a minor procedure with few side effects that results in an almost iron-clad guarantee against unwanted pregnancy. At the very least, know that this is an option you have and that you can talk to your partner and doctor about it. Good luck!

1. Just to be clear, you still have to worry about sexually transmitted infections — a vasectomy obviously does not provide any protection against that.↩

2. There also is a follow-up about 6-12 weeks later to make sure the procedure worked. You masturbate into a cup and they check to see that there’s no sperm in the sample. Part of this follow-up, if my experience is any guide, includes checking that the doctor’s office bathroom door is locked about 50 times while watching very outdated porn on a small TV mounted up in the corner of the tiny room. It’s fine though! And you have a fun story to tell later.↩

Tags: medicine



May 6, 2022 at 06:24PM
via kottke.org https://ift.tt/mA8GBLs

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Hot Banana

Hot Banana
By xkcd (whatif@xkcd.com)

I heard that bananas are radioactive. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. How many bananas would you need to power a house?

Kang JI

Bananas are radioactive. But don't worry, it's fine.

Bananas are radioactive because they contain potassium, some of which is the radioactive isotope potassium-40. The factoid about banana radioactivity was popularized by nuclear engineers trying to reassure people[1] that small doses of radiation are normal and not necessarily dangerous. Of course, this kind of thing can backfire.

Thanks to their use as a radiation dose comparison, bananas now have a reputation as an especially radioactive food, but they're really not. The CRC Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection, the source of the original data behind the banana factoid, lists lots of other foods with more potassium-40 than bananas, including coconuts, peanuts, and sweet potatoes. A large cheese pizza might be three times more radioactive than a banana,[2] and your own body emits a lot more radiation than either.

Potassium-40 decays slowly, with individual atoms sitting around for millions or billions of years before quantum randomness finally triggers their decay. Imagine you're an atom of potassium; every second you roll 21 dice. If they all come up 6s, you decay.

There are gazillions[3] of atoms of potassium-40 in a banana. In any given second, 10 or 15 of them make that all-sixes roll, spit out a high-energy particle, and become stable calcium or argon.

That high-energy particle released by the expiring potassium atom[4] will promptly bonk[5] into other atoms, leaving everything vibrating with extra heat energy. In theory, you could use this heat energy to do work—that's how the Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity are powered.

The Mars rovers use plutonium, which decays millions of times per second, releasing a lot of power. By comparison, the 15 decays per second from one banana work out to a couple of picowatts of power, roughly the power consumption of a single human cell. Even if you captured that decay energy with perfect efficiency, powering a house would require about 300 quadrillion[6] bananas, which would form a heap large enough to bury most of the skyscrapers in the NYC metro area.[7]

The potassium-40 in bananas is a terrible source of energy. But that's okay, because you know what's a great energy source? The banana itself! A banana contains about 100 calories of food energy, and if you incinerate whole bananas as fuel, it would only take about 10 bunches per day to keep your house running.

Unfortunately for New York City, which we buried in bananas a moment ago while trying to make the radiation idea work (sorry!), radioactivity vs chemical energy isn't an either/or thing. If you piled up a lot of bananas, they would start to release that chemical energy, one way or another. The sun-baked banana pile would start to rot. The heat from the bananas decomposing in the atmosphere would immediately swamp the heat from radioactivity. The sun-dried bananas would dry, crack, and eventually burn.

Decomposition by anaerobic bacteria deep in the pile would produce various gases, including highly flammable methane. As they bubbled up to the surface of the burning banana swamp, they could ignite; gas buildup from food waste is a major industrial explosion hazard.

So don't worry about the radioactivity in bananas. It's the rest of the banana that's the real threat. But if you're willing to risk the danger, you could power a lot more than just your house. With just a modest weekly supply of bananas—enough to cover Liberty Island in NYC...

...you could power the entire city.

[1] After nuclear engineering, this is the main pastime of nuclear engineers.

[2] Google has a handy tool for looking up the amount of potassium in foods, which even lets you select specific pizza brands. But for some reason, if you select Pizza Hut Pepperoni Pizza, your only serving size options are either "1 slice" or "40 pizzas." Nothing in between.

[3] There are about 800,000,000,000,000,000 of them, which is probably quadrillions or quintillions or something, but life is too short to sit around counting zeros and then looking up the Latin prefixes for big numbers.

[4] RIP

[5] The technical term is THUNK.

[6] Fine, I looked it up this time.

[7] It's 300 quadrillion bananas, Michael—what can it cost, 3 quintillion dollars?

May 4, 2022 at 04:00AM
via what if? https://ift.tt/g9LFVxD

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Assigning Numbers

Assigning Numbers
By





April 22, 2022 at 08:00AM
via xkcd.com https://xkcd.com/2610/

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Liberal Education

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Liberal Education
By tech@thehiveworks.com



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Thank you to patreon typo squad for finding the one typo amongst 8 trillion words.

Today's News:

Remember when people used to read the little blog posts under comics? They don't now, so I can write whole lines of gibberish, squinkle dabyougargh nunglepeep.

April 11, 2022 at 06:59PM
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