Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

Public service - here's a way to find out the cost of the codes you get billed, like what Hedgeless was talking about. Also points how how you can tell double billing...naively assumes they only double bill, in my experience they can count much higher than two....

I suspect I'll be needing this really soon myself..Cardiologist tomorrow AM, Pulmo guy (for that "mass" in a lung) later this month. I just checked and the site mentioned is still there. Here we go. Gotta say I prefer adventures in my lab to theirs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uNGCZikr3A

[Bob Reite]

I thought that they only did the chemical stress test for people that could not run the treadmill.

[Doug Coulter]

They didn't ask me. There was a treadmill in the room, though. Maybe because according to the cat scan I'd already had some heart attacks just walking around?
Getting the mushroom treatment when you're somewhat clued in otherwise is frustrating. I guess part of it is they aren't sure either.
No one likes to admit ignorance, especially if their paycheck depends on the appearance of being sure - and right?
Some paraphrase of this?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

[Donovan Ready]

When I have to see the doctor, I go in prepared. Do the research on your best guesses, narrow it down to specifics, then be surprised.

Stress testing i something I've never done, but you can damned well bet I'd know about what and why, how and when. Too many mistakes are made otherwise.

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, that was a near-death experience. I wonder what they'd have done if the dose of whatever that was had turned out to be a little too big...

At any rate, sorry to be so long, more adventures in medicine. I went to the pulmonologist appt to find out what about that 20mm growth the other guys saw in my left lung...and collapsed in the foyer with 103+ F fever.
They shoveled me into an ambulance and shipped me about 3 blocks to the local ER (this was all 2 cities over from my area - a long drive for me). they did the usual ER routine, yet another EKG (Actually they did one with an emergency defibrillator before the ambulance got there too - thankfully no one pushed that button..), a bunch of other unknown stuff - I had at one count 16+7+1+3 cables hooked to me (some cables were multiconductor)...
The put in fluids and some antibiotic IV, which didn't have any obvious effect.
Took blood and urine samples, closed the door and left me to do the mushroom act for a few hours.

I ... don't like being hog tied by strangers in a strange town and then ignored. I hollered out through the door to the otherwise empty ER (nope, they're not overloaded, it's dead in the ER's in both places I've been) and demanded to be let go, which they grudgingly did. Not all bad - A nurse responded to some flirting and actually wheeled me to my truck - which was a few blocks away not counting a good piece of a mile inside the building complex. Thanks, Nancy!

I drove home, the fever thing recurred a couple times, less each time, over the next few days - reminiscent of a ball's bounce after dropping it - fine in the AM, worse as the day went on, then fine the next AM, a little less bad peak every day, and here we are with a temp about a degree higher than normal for me - but that's still less than "normal" at around 97.7F (at lunchtime).

So I never made it to the appt with the guy who is going to tell me how long I have to live and how they're going to butcher me and any resources I might have to extend that a little. Hope I'm being sarcastic. They're going to set up another one.

The good new I guess is that the beta blocker they put me on after that first issue is working well, and I'm not having any of the side effects warned about - more the opposite, and when this other smoke clears, I feel better than ever, so maybe I can get off this yakking about medical stuff and back on physics and the rather difficult measurement I want to take once I move the electrode setup into the system that still makes good vacuum....Sigh.

But those who won't be stopped...can't be stopped.
If anyone has tips on how I can generate what amounts to a VNA plot on a high impedance electrode - with numbers like 10s kv or so DC and AC sines in similar kv range at a few MHz, I'm all ears.

What I'm looking for is the change in reactance due to induced charge as the ions fly back and forth in there - initially only a few to verify my adaptation of the baseline math for ion traps to this geometry, then a lot, then a partially neutralized kinda-plasma with electrons present we're trying to push around with a variable field gradient, I'll also be looking with some faraday probes that are in the tank - no reason not to.

I see in my books that the "load" presented by the ions (stopped nuclei) at resonance is in the few megs region in ion traps running at the few hundred volts range.
It's pretty daunting to look at measuring this since at the higher speeds and feeds, we're going to be seeing some effects from the air around the conductors outside the tank - roughly how it acts towards a tesla coil, and it's going to take fairly heroic measures to avoid that or null it out.

[johnf]

Doug
some bastardized latin

Illegitimi_non_carborundum
or more correctly
Noli permittere ut pravi te submittant.

keep the chin up

[Donovan Ready]

Ha! What fun!

I like to remind people of this one: Plurissima leges, e corruptissima republica.

I probably botched that. It came from a possibly faulty memory.

Anyway, carpe canem!

[johnf]

Donovan
"The more laws
the more corrupt the government"


you must live in the USA?!!

[Donovan Ready]

Yessir, and proud of it, despite its flaws. Better than China by a long shot.

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, most of us are stuck(?) in the USA. The people are nice, the government...has been screwy for quite a long time and the chickens are coming home to roost.
We can take refuge in the knowledge that UK has even more spy cameras, and the Aussies government is even more full of it, but...best of a bad lot is still not good.

It should be remembered that the things people say they are upset about have been going on and getting worse for my entire life, vs blaming it all on whoever is running things just now - they're guilty too, but are standing on the shoulders of ..gangsters?
It's a racket. I could go on about our indoctrination system, the constant bombardment with the idea that we've ruined things for all future generations - so they have nothing to lose and nothing to gain - no reason to live - and a lot of other crap.
It's the economy, stupid, the Gini coefficient is outrageous and it's a complex issue with no simple solution. Any setup you'd think is fair at first becomes winner take all. Till the next revolt, and even then the top layer tends to skate.
But why should I rant? It's not like people here are too dumb to have figured things out.

I've avoided politics here for that and other reasons - I need a refuge from the emotional crap, and the more I learn, the more disgusted I become about what is to me, some really obvious and blatant falsehoods being created and spread in order to manipulate the normies - and regain or gain more power over us...by those who are as far as I can tell, the least interested in our well being. No matter the color of the tie or clown shoes. As it turns out, a hobby is studying the propaganda in WWII, which is a little bit easier (but some things are still coming out!) since at least events stand still now - it's over with.

Being a conservative* - old skool - there's no one out there who has any interest in representing me - just 'cons of some sort or another, the uni-war-party. Trying to prop up empire. These things have a life expectancy, and this one is long of tooth.

It's so bad that even the tech sites I look at, because you know, tech, all use any excuse to put their spin on things, often in your face, but also by omission, counting I suppose on people being to lazy to discover anything not shoved down their throats. Like all arrogance, it's not how you might make friends with me - it might work on some people who still think the paper won't accept the ink (or the bits flow) if it's untrue.
And it's so bad I now feel comfortable proposing something we can get behind...I want this sign for my front yard...

Thx John, the chin is up unless and until they tell me I need a quarter million of treatment in the sickness racket to live an extra month...(not to worry, I'll spend the money on hookers and ... and let the chips fall).

* not this new crap - radical is radical no matter the side of an aisle that probably shouldn't even be an aisle. I mean "look before you leap", :"spend less than you make", "don't fix it if it ain't broke", "invest in tools, not things that wind up in the crapper or dump in short order", "don't start fights - look for an everyone-wins solution", and related things.