The post in February triggered a tidal wave of reaction from parents similarly gripped by anxiety about providing their children with a device they fear will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.

Can you imagine having to teach your kids about these risks, help them to deal with them and prepare them for adulthood?

That would be so much work.

you also don’t hear about it as much because people tend to bike more in warm weather so it’s more likely for you to go long stretches of time without biking when it’s getting colder.

Off topic, but I think it’s funny how cycling is viewed in different parts of the world. You look at it as a hobby that is naturally done less in the winter. For me it’s just a way to get to work and I still have to work when it’s cold, so obviously I’m still cycling just as much. And this is true for a lot of people, the bike rack at my job is almost as full in the winter as it is in the summer.

This feels like something that would be illegal in the EU. I have no idea if it actually is.

There are a lot of Boeing 787 in the air at any time. You can go to flightradar24.com, click the filter icon at the bottom, add new filter, then aircraft and as ICAO code you just enter B78* and it will show you only this aircraft type.

The risk for an incident with any 787 at any time in the next few years may be higher that it should be. But the risk for one individual plane on one single flight is absolutely negligible. You’re more in danger on your way to the airport probably.

Nylon can be washed in the dishwasher, but in my experience it does degrade a bit over time. Silicone on the other hand tends to absorb any smell or taste, including dish washing detergent.

Also, check out this one weird trick to get positive results almost every time: just use 20 different end points!

“move fast and break things people”

I really like this. Yes, it should be everyone’s choice to consume it or not. But there really shouldn’t be commercial incentives to get people addicted and to get rich from their addiction.

Imgine the same rules applying to alcohol and tobacco… (yes you can absolutely grow tobacco in Germany).

Germany. One of the oldest populations in the world. Results for the most recent PISA study were terrible. There’s a huge shift to the political right, where even the so called social democrats call for more restrictive immigration policy, while the scientific consensus is that we urgently need mass immigration now to build a workforce that can keep the economy afloat.

Our resource used to be people, but we’re in the process of completely fucking that up. Education going downhill quickly, rapidly aging population paired with a massive push against immigration, the most important jobs having some of the worst pay and working conditions…

We’re in a race to the bottom. Japan mas have overtaken us, but we’re folfowing closely behind.

For toilet bowl cleaner, you want to make sure it has the ‘quality seal’ on the packaging. It looks like this.

Generally, if you have hard water and a lot of issues with limescale, you will need an acidic cleaner. These are usually advertised accordingly. Bleach won’t help with limescale and is usually not necessary. It’s also very dangerous to mix bleach with acidic cleaners.

Never ever. It wasn’t the reason why I got my current phone, but I thought I would use it at least sometimes. I don’t.

…in the US

While we’re on the topic of CPR, I want to address the myth that CPR “almost never works”. It’s great at what it does, which is pumping blood through the body enough to keep vital organs supplied with a bare minimum of oxygen so they can survive.

However, there’s usually a reason why the heart has stopped beating and in most cases, CPR can’t reverse that reason. If the patient is in a car crash and has completely bled out, CPR won’t get any blood back into their system. Or if they’re at the end stage of a terminal disease, CPR can’t magically cure the disease.

But in cases where the cause for the cardiac arrest is simple and easily reversed, chances of survival are much higher. For example, if someone is drowning and you get them out of the water within a few minutes of cardiac arrest, CPR is very effective, with the majority of patients surviving. Here’s a study with 113 patients who were resuscitated after drowning and only 8 were confirmed dead. For 20 patients, the outcome was unknown, but even if they all died as well, that’s still a 75% survival rate.

Yes, a heart that has completely stopped beating cannot be restarted by defibrillation. It only works in a condition called ventricular fibrillation, when the muscle fibers of the heart are still contracting, but are no longer “in sync”. This causes the heart to twitch chaotically, which is not an effective way to pump blood. And without blood pumping, the heart itself does not receive any oxygen as well, so it will eventually go into a complete flatline after a few minutes of untreated ventricular fibrillation.

The electric shock helps the fibers resynchronize. If you want to see the effect directly, here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCbawp9ZSnY

Be warned, it shows an open chest and an exposed heart, most likely during heart surgery. They are using spoon-shaped internal defibrillation paddles. In the beginning, you can see the heart in ventricular fibrillation. It’s twitching chaotically and not pumping any blood. After defibrillation, it starts contracting rhythmically again.

I’ve never heard of a punctured heart personally, but I do think it’s possible. A punctured lung is much more common. But both conditions are usually treatable if the patient survives.

CPR does carry some risks, but not doing CPR is guaranteed to be lethal. So any risk (to the patient) is worth taking at that point.

Ask the Kurds.

Also, Hamas didn’t just come up in a vacuum. People here in Germany are radicalizing because they were asked to wear masks during a pandemic and they heard that brown people are now seeking refuge in Germany. Palestinians have been suppressed, starved and killed for decades and none of the more moderate forces have been able to do anything about it. Not that Hamas would do any better, but it’s understandable that people support more radical movements when they’re literally fighting for their survival.

Slaughtering civilians is never justified. What Hamas did was horrifying and a crime against humanity. But the reason why Hamas ever got so strong in the first place has a lot to do with how Isreal has systematically oppressed and killed Palestinians for decades. And the war it is waging now against the Palestinian people is also indefensible. It should be widely condemned, any support withdrawn and Israel should be sanctioned.

There’s a new, more effective malaria vaccine coming out right now:

https://www.who.int/news/item/02-10-2023-who-recommends-r21-matrix-m-vaccine-for-malaria-prevention-in-updated-advice-on-immunization