Aqwis (u/Aqwis) - Readit News

Aqwis commented on Hungarian Railways' Live Countrywide Map vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/in... · Posted by u/popcalc

cyberbolt23 · 2 years ago

In the Netherlands there is also this site https://treinposities.nl/ with positions, train history and much more

Aqwis · 2 years ago

The icons being tiny pictures of the actual trains is cute, but makes the map quite confusing to look at!

Edit: I just noticed that the marker style changes if I choose something other than "Equipment" from the map style dropdown, selecting "driving/stationary" certainly makes it a lot more readable.

Aqwis commented on Hungarian Railways' Live Countrywide Map vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/in... · Posted by u/popcalc

Aqwis · 2 years ago

Just to add to the list, we have this in Norway: https://togkart.banenor.no/

Train movements between stations are simulated based on the expected speed between two points and not based on GPS tracks, sadly, so it's not very useful if you want to check whether your train is stuck (say, due to traffic or signal failures). Notice that the circles representing trains occasionally move at unnaturally high speeds -- this presumably happens when a train enters a station and its location is corrected. It would certainly be useful to be able to see the actual real-time location of a train and not just the approximate location (and I'd assume that at least some of the maps from other countries are indeed based on real-time GPS data!) -- this exists for buses in Oslo (only available in the public transport company's app, unfortunately) and it's nice to know for sure whether you'll have to run to catch your bus or not.

(Several years ago when looking into the possibility of creating a real-time train map, I read that certain train operators and/or the national government considers publishing the exact locations of trains to be a security risk, so unless opinions on this have changed I don't have high hopes that we're getting it soon.)

Aqwis commented on MRI brain images become 64M times sharper today.duke.edu/2023/04/br... · Posted by u/CharlesW

Epa095 · 2 years ago

Maybe back problems are prioritzed higher than knee problems?

Aqwis · 2 years ago

Another possible factor is specialist availability. As I assume is the case in all public healthcare systems (and in some way or another, e.g. through price differences, in private healthcare), some specialties have a glut of physicians while others have a real scarcity. I've personally experienced having to wait many times longer for a neurologist than a gastroenterologist, even though the issues my GP referred me to those specialists for were about equally serious, simply because there are so many more gastroenterologists available (relative to the demand) compared to neurologists (be it because too few neurologists were trained 5-40 years ago, because neurological issues have gotten more common, because GPs refer patients to neurologists more often than they used to, because neurologists may be more likely to go into private practice than gastroenterologists...).

With medical imagery, you don't just need to get to get the MRI, CT or whatever done, there often needs to be a specialist available who can decide how (or if) to treat you based on the results (the exceptions being very routine stuff that a GP can often handle the treatment of, e.g. common bone fractures; or screenings where a negative result is expected in 95%+ of cases, such as if you present with a headache and your GP wants to make sure you don't have brain cancer).

In the public healthcare system we have where I live, if my GP thinks I have a problem that's serious/non-obvious enough that an MRI would be useful (and it's not a highly routine issue as previously mentioned), the waiting time for that MRI will depend almost completely on when a specialist in the relevant field (or subfield) of medicine is available – otherwise, the MRI won't be up-to-date, etc. The MRI scans themselves tend to be done by private labs that are subcontracted by the public healthcare service anyway, and (as you'll learn if you ever book a private appointment with one such lab) these labs have lots of capacity. MRIs in themselves are cheap enough (it would surprise me if the public healthcare service paid these labs more than $500 per MRI on average, a pittance compared to the cost of a physician*) that there is no point for the public health service to queue up MRI appointments for months if they manage to book you an appointment with one of their own specialists.

The details vary between countries, of course, but if a public healthcare system in a rich country has so few MRI machines (and doesn't subcontract out outpatient MRIs to private labs) and/or are so penny-pinching that they find a speedy $500-$1000 MRI to be too expensive, then I would say those problems seem to be relatively easy to fix without changing anything fundamental about how the country's healthcare works.

*) Although this may not be the case if the physicians in your country earn less than, say, $30,000 USD on average – the cost of technical equipment matters less the richer a country is.

Aqwis commented on 97% of American adults own a cellphone or smartphone (2021) pewresearch.org/internet/... · Posted by u/shpx

Aqwis · 3 years ago

Unlike seemingly everyone else who has commented here so far, I actually took some time to read through the results. There are some interesting findings, like whites being the racial grouping least likely to own a cellphone at 97% ownership, compared to black and hispanic people at 99% and 100%, respectively. Assuming this isn't just a statistical artifact from a low sample size (the sample sizes are not stated, unfortunately), could this be at least in part due to luddite conservative Christian (and nearly exclusively white) groups like the Amish or Mennonites? In total, groups like these seem to have millions of members, but I'm not sure how many of them actually live without modern technology.

Aqwis commented on Do heat pumps work in cold climates? carbonswitch.com/do-heat-... · Posted by u/tejohnso

joaodlf · 3 years ago

> The load also depends on unique characteristics of the home like the amount of insulation or the type of windows and doors. A home built in 1850 with no insulation requires more energy than a brand new home. The load is just a technical way to describe and measure all of this.

No kidding. The site is all about switching from carbon, which I am all for, as would anyone that cares even slightly about the planet.

BUT. If you do live in a 1850s house with no insulation, getting a heat pump is a colossal waste of money that will not do the job. No matter how many fancy biased graphs and numbers someone comes up with.

Any responsible heat pump installer will firstly look at your home to determine if a heat pump is remotely feasible. Unfortunately, in the UK, only very recent new builds can comfortably accommodate a heat pump. That or older properties that have had CONSIDERABLE insulation work done to them (and I am talking the expensive kind like internal/external wall work, not just the easy jobs like loft insulation).

Be very careful with heat pump cowboys, if you are getting quotes that don't include a site inspection, run.

Aqwis · 3 years ago

Could you elaborate a bit? My parents live in a not-very-well insulated wooden house from around 1900, and use a heat pump as their primary means of heating the house. This is Scandinavia, so it might be that this house (despite not even coming close to modern insulation standards) still has better insulation than most British houses, but it would surprise me (older British houses are generally built in brick, which should provide a better base level of insulation than a wooden house, and I'd think Britain isn't warm enough that nobody would build a house without any insulation whatsoever).

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by the word "feasible" – they don't have a goal of getting their living room above 23 C at most in winter, and I guess heat pumps are insufficient in such a house if you desire ambient temperatures above that. However, while other means of heating could plausibly bring the temperatures higher, that would end up being very expensive also because of the poor insulation – it's just harder in general to heat a drafty house and keep the temperature up, and I don't see how heat pumps are a uniquely bad choice for homes like that.

Edit: This is coastal Norway, so the climate in winter is quite similar to somewhere like Edinburgh, with temperatures usually above 0 C in January. The heat pumps would probably be insufficient somewhere the temperatures regularly reach -10 or -20 C, but that's a very infrequent event both here and in the UK.

Aqwis commented on What are those dents in I-90 outside Seattle? boards.straightdope.com/t... · Posted by u/haossr

tda · 3 years ago

And the best thing: new top layers are applied frequently (sometimes yearly). And they are literally applied overnight: construction starts at 23:00 and is completed before 06:00. And even better, the road isn't even closed. One night they pave the right lane and the next the left lane is paved. Complete road closures for maintenance are exceedingly rare. And if they happen, it will be at night and/or in the weekend. Compared to any place I've been Dutch road infrastructure and maintenance is really on another level. Not just some roads, but pretty much all roads in the entire country are designed and maintained to an entirely adequate baseline (not saying there is no room for improvement, just that the baseline is so much higher than anywhere else).

Aqwis · 3 years ago

The difference between the quality of the infrastructure (esp. roads and rail) in the Netherlands and Belgium must surely be the most convincing testament to what a country loses from even relatively mild (from a worldwide point-of-view) levels of interethnic squabbling!

Aqwis commented on Doors of McMurdo brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mc... · Posted by u/Amorymeltzer

13of40 · 3 years ago

Barcelona gets a lot of love despite most of it being a very regular grid of city blocks.

Aqwis · 3 years ago

Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets.

Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.

Aqwis commented on Potential fabrication in research threatens the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/panabee

spoonjim · 3 years ago

I was not closely involved with the project. They essentially built the first one to "spec" like "use this kind of steel in the tanks" and the remediation process was essentially tearing those out one by one and "use the steel that we used in the first tank."

Aqwis · 3 years ago

Sounds like a process similar to how you would debug a difficult bug in a big and/or complicated codebase – through trying to isolate the code causing the bug, comparing the buggy code with code that's known to work, replacing other parts of the code with dummy code/mocks etc. And sometimes a bug seems impossible to solve regardless of how much developer time you throw at it, and you just have to ship the product with the bug (seems to be especially common in the game dev business).

Aqwis commented on The golden age of the aging actor theringer.com/movies/2022... · Posted by u/BayAreaEscapee

MisterBastahrd · 3 years ago

Holland is going to fade as soon as people realize he can't comfortably play a teenage boy anymore. Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors. I don't know who Anya Taylor-Joy is, and can't say that anything Zendaya has ever been in has made me want for more Zendaya in a leading role. She's utterly replacable.

Aqwis · 3 years ago

>Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors.

Unless you mean something different by "squeaky" than what I think you do, then Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an example of a successful actor who fits that description, don't you agree?

Aqwis commented on Volt, Australia's first online-only bank, shuts down due to fund-raising woes reuters.com/business/fina... · Posted by u/hestefisk

Aqwis · 3 years ago

Can someone explain the logic behind this excerpt? I don't understand the connection between rising inflation and interest rates and online-only banks being outcompeted.

> "Rising inflation and interest rates this year have made it harder for online-only banks, called neobanks in Australia, to compete with established lenders, making fundraising much more difficult."

The first online-only bank in Norway was founded all the way back in 2000, and has overall been very successful. (Unfortunately, in my opinion, they were bought out by the largest local bank this year.) I understand how regulations and local habits/expectations can mean that an online-only back won't work in certain countries. For example, I can't imagine it'd work very well somewhere like Germany which is very conservative when it comes to tech in finance – cash and faxed contracts still being very much a thing and so on (correct me if I'm wrong, though). However, Australia doesn't strike me as being as conservative as Germany in this sense, so I'd be interested in hearing more about why online-only banking doesn't seem to be doing well there.