KingPrad

I've handled 2 calls (and missed a few others).

1. Woman asking what color a sweater was, to confirm its color. Was maybe a 30 second call.

2. Teenager with a box of paint supplies wondering if the box has an expiration date, since the paint felt weirdly thick. 2 minute call, then we chatted a few minutes.

In the US, asbestos litigation has a special system where lots of companies are named in each suit, then they compete to eliminate themselves as the main contributors to the person's ailments.

For example, if a person did a brake job in the 50s once, Napa Auto Parts is in the lawsuit because they made brake pads with asbestos. But oh, they were boilermaker for decades, working around asbestos-lined systems? Well, Napa is probably off the hook or they'll chuck a few thousand at the person to settle, leaving the larger source more on the hook.

It's a game of subtraction and divvying up cost by contributing exposure mostly.

Source: spouse worked on these cases.

Lucerna Health | Senior Python engineers | ONSITE | Salt Lake City, UT | https://lucernahealth.com

Help us build and scale our healthcare data pipeline and build analytical tooling. We provide software that helps healthcare organizations close care gaps while moving to Value-Based Care.

We are self-funded so far and ready to grow big next year. The team is small and you'll be part of building a great engineering culture and product. We need people who can handle responsibility and want to contribute across the full product suite.

It's mostly serverless AWS systems built in Python (Lambda, Glue, Redshift, SQS, etc) with a React frontend. Experience building production APIs is great (Django, FastAPI, or similar) as is Pandas familiarity. Healthcare industry experience preferred.

Email me at carl.kibler@lucernahealth.com to talk.

No recruiters or agencies please - we have several working with us already.

Yes. Napa and other brake manufacturers are called into lots of mesothelioma trials. Brake pad exposure is usually smaller contributors to such cases. That is, the victim often had much worse exposure other places, but they still look at how much brake pad exposure the person had too.

A podcast, think it was Stuff to Blow Your Mind, did a podcast on the Guinea Worm and talked about this at length. The worm is wildly infectious. Every incident requires immediate deployment of teams of people to control it or it explodes with re-infections. There are wild populations of the worm still, which are the main source of ongoing infections.

The 28 cases doesn't indicate low importance, it indicates those are enough to re-seed the worm if huge areas if not vigorously acted on, every time they see a new case.

I'm surely getting some details wrong, but it sounds like zero for several years has to be the goal, or it'll rebound swiftly.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind - nice depth of dive into many topics with some humor, not taking itself too seriously. And the hosts have pleasant voices.

Indeed! This was mentioned in David Brin's book "Earth". It discussed tracking mosquitoes with vision or radar or something and using lasers to zap them. The interesting bit was only zapping dangerous types of mosquitoes, based on wing-beating speed of different species. And that book was from 1990 I think.

This type of "low tech" idea seems like the kind of thing Google, Yelp, and all the other big companies should be doing a better job with.

I have celiac and presumably Google has figured that out by now (or could, if they spent some time determining allergies for accounts). Yet in Google Maps I have to type "restaurant gluten free" when looking for food options. Then I have to poke around to see which might be legitimately gluten free. I've been typing this in for a decade, and never has Maps learned this basic time-saving assumption it should make.

Same with Yelp. It hasn't figured out that I always filter by gluten free and search reviews for that. It never just makes gluten free restaurants prominent, nor follows up with me the next day on whether it made me ill or things like that.

As you say, it's baffling the simple filtering that could be done based on known user information. Note that my story is about gluten free, but would apply to any number of food allergies or dietary preferences, yet the "market leaders" seem unable to innovate on this specificity.

Geez, they identified the company I work for as well. It's unsettling.

Same here - my insurance stayed exactly the same going from a 2010 Nissan Altima to a new Tesla Model 3.

I'm American and have mixed feelings on this. National Parks can definitely be massive operations during the summer months so I understand charging a fee. But it also removes this public good from the poor and I think that's wrong. Maybe the park system provides free/cheap passes via welfare programs.

I'm more concerned that many state parks charge up to $15/day usage fee. A fee just to enter and hike or play around a lake. I think that's very wrong. Simple fun in the outdoors ought to cheap recreation option - the cost to get there and whatever food you want to bring. It is gross that we fund these great places through taxes, then only those you can easily pay again can use them.

My first encounter with a "just 10 more years" projection was while writing a paper on zinc in middle school. My reference book about mining and metallurgy discussed declining reserves and that the world would be entirely out of zinc by 1985 without careful conservation. Except I was reading the book in 1995, and it was published in 1975. It became an interesting point in my paper.

If this writer didn't work for a company that will make money off his ridiculous assertions, I would be baffled how an educated adult could write such an article.

I also think our hands could do more in keyboard position. Lift off slightly and gestures could be recognized by a camera, even things like 2-finger scrolling could be done by lifting the fingers slightly and doing it.

Same with pinch-zoom or scroll. Or when working with a 3D model, making a hand shape as if you were gripping a globe, you should be able to twist and rotate objects on screen.

I remember posting excitedly about this on Slashdot 15 years ago and am just remembering it now. This should be easily achievable with modern libraries to get basic detection working.

Although some abhor the idea and want more complex keystrokes chords, for myself I think there are specific gestures I consider intuitive and wouldn't have to particularly learn anything new.

From Chrome (and maybe Firefox) you can export an extension to a local folder and view the source. Also, many are on github that you can check out and play with. Find one that does something very simple and tinker, first just changing some text in it, then making bigger changes to get a feel for it.

The tricks discussed in CERT classes (which are well worth taking - very interesting material) is to go to back of store because few people think to. Same with concerts and other events - people instinctively run to the entrance in which they entered, rather than the nearest.

Secondly, if you're in the midst of huge shelves with no escape (like a home depot) get under the first shelf. the shelving won't collapse downwards, but if a neighboring shelf falls sideways you'll be protected.

Harder to do in a real emergency, but good ideas, and thinking them through can be enough to execute them when needed.

Anyway - I highly encourage taking a local CERT class if you're in the US, or finding the equivalent wherever you live.

Have you read "The Rosie Project"? It explored some similar ideas as a fun novel.

That's a good point about long past experience shading future interactions, but I don't feel it exempts from harsh judgment. The ability to consider individuals separately from some of their membership groups is a core skill of being a mature adult.

If Doctorow doesn't have the mental "executive control" we expect of adults, we need to be aware of it. This includes being ready to defend people he insults and to give him less opportunity for it.

The grandparent poster might actually be doing the hard labor of doing good within Disney, as are thousands of others. I contrast that with how easy it is to stand outside the castle (almost literally in Disney's sense) and throw stones at the walls. If GP is someone working for good within a bad organization (aren't a lot of us?) then I have respect for them. That is really hard, wearing work.

Anyway, on the sliding scale of judgement and forgiveness, just stating that I judge Doctorow more harshly than you and am less forgiving of his attacking a person for the behavior of one group they happen to be a member of.

Most clinical documentation in EHRs is template based with lots of boilerplate into which key words and phrases are dropped. And some template sections are free text, enabling highly customizable final documentation.

I disagree that version control is inappropriate. I worked for a company whose primary product was tracking government legislation through a database built on Subversion. (acted as a DB but used Subversion for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds strange).

It seemed to work fine to record incremental changes, tag specific revisions as being checkpoints for various stages of review and approvals. And anyone could search current and historical versions.

The overall legislation system needs flexibility to deal with complex and changing workflows, but storing documents (with change over time) and the links between them can be encoded just fine. As long as there are flexible ways to string them together, they can be represented in whatever structure makes sense: final law with all current amendments; original law, with amendments as annotations, separate pieces of legislation, linked by the overall law, etc. None of that has to be encoded in a super-strict heirarchy, but as long as it's all being stored in can be presented however one wants.

I don't see the fatal flaw. I see imperfections and compromises, but not the flaw so bad as to say "don't bother".

Possibly "Axiomatic", a short story collection. It has incredible material.

I went to high school with a fellow like Shkreli and with same story: rising fortunes, financial lying, fraud, conviction.

Same traits as above, though unlike Shkreli this guy was extremely personable and likable.

He was just a congenital liar and driven by something inside to... do more, do something bigger. He had the most incredible stories in high school that largely turned out to be lies, but at the time it all hung together with enough reality you couldn't see through it.

It's interesting knowing someone like my acquaintance and seeing the same story in other people of playing fast with lies trying to make it really big, when they actually have the skills to do it more honestly.

weird! The lockered one at our complex is really slick. A room with an ipad and camera is bizarre.

It's true, TVs don't have the same experience the painting. However, they enable a lot of other abilities that let you experience art in a very different way.

With a 4K screen (even the super-cheap one I bought 3 years ago) and sufficient scanning resolution you can zoom in and see the paint clinging to individual fibers of canvas. You can achieve closeness and magnification far beyond what you can at an art museum. You'll never get that close to a real van Gogh, breathing on it and with a magnifying glass!

My thinking is education and exploration. There's a to be said for volume in art viewing too. With the TV+software experience, you can construct progressions of an artist's work, quickly build visual trees showing change and relationship of art genres. You can visualize the _genre_ and _time_ in a way few can at an art museum.

Also think about AR and VR experiences. In the light form, imagine watching curator talks when they can serve up high-resolution images and zoom in to specific features, or highlight and "pull out" sections side by side. Or superimpose their hands to visually guide your eye as it's discussed.

That's where I see the future of art in digital form: bringing it into the home and school, and augmenting the experience within the museum. TV brings vast scale and new presentation abilities, which I think will complement the power and complexity of individual static works.

Then, there is also the ability to deliver art that is not static, which I think will develop soon. Where the image itself slowly changes either by artistic effort (strictly dictated change) and algorithmic. I imagine a Kandinsky-like work that changes subtly over minutes, hours, or weeks.

I'm actually not a big art enthusiast myself. But it turns out I'm extremely passionate about art presentation and how access and exploration can be magnified.

Dang, now I want to pick this up again. I'd be interested in talking more, if you are. I love the subject.

That's essentially the idea of what we were building. Ran out of time due to moving and job change, but I had that working great on Chromecast. Chromecast at least then was awfully clunky though.

For some demos I used cheap Android-powered dongles (like the Amazon Fire Stick, but wide-open rootable Android) to make a plug-and-play display device. With some small work it would be a fun Kickstarter.

Art software startups are a tough proposition. Google invests heavily in art and offers it on Chromecast as a screensaver. Amazon does the same on Fire Stick. Neither is customizable nor allows any interaction and discovery, but it's just good enough as free to make it tough to do anything unique at the consumer end. Art is low on the list of things most people want to access regularly, let alone pay for.

I had a startup that was working on easy art access. Essentially A Spotify for Art with both public domain and contemporary art. Decided the market just isn't there. But may do a Kickstarter of the device or run a simplified version of the software people could access for free or very cheap and see if any interest develops.

To elaborate on a tough situation, Google does show some contemporary art in its Chromecast rotations but the artist is not reimbursed for it. It's all done in name of publicity. Companies working in this area have a market on one side of artists who have little money, so you are a cost to them even to digitize their works. And on payer side you have numerous free art resources from museums. And Google who uses it as a culture talking point and just-good-enough feature in their products.

I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

Thank you for the reference. I look forward to reading this.