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> It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary.

You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years.

If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust.

This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.


> My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment, and it worked twice: early detected lung and prostate tumors, both removed.

My mum gets scanned a little more frequently than that, following treatment for an inoperable tumour in her lung around five years ago. During treatment she was getting scanned every three months or so, and it was remarkable watching this thing go from the size of a tangerine, to actually expanding a bit and looking "fuzzy" once the drugs kicked in, to being the size of a plum, then the size of a grape attached with a little thin thread of tissue, to being a thing the size of a pea. Now there's a tiny ripple of scar tissue that no-one wants to investigate further, because if it's not doing anything let's not poke at it.

There is a roughly pea-sized "thing" on her adrenal gland that was a bit worrying because anything like that is going to get intimately involved with your lymphatic system and then it's going to metastasise like hell. But it neither got bigger nor smaller in the nearly six years since the first scan, so it can't be that important.

This is one of the great things about the NHS, especially here in Scotland where we have (possibly as a result of the weirdly high levels of cancer) some of the best oncology services in the world.

If we'd lived in the US, the insurance companies would have taken one look at an 83-year-old about to become a grandmother and sent her home with a bottle of morphine to die. As it is, she's doing very well and got to see both her grandchildren start school.


> in Scotland where we have (possibly as a result of the weirdly high levels of cancer)

Interesting, I had no idea and just looked this up[0]:

> Scotland had the highest overall incidence (446 for men and 379 for women per 100 000), and Wales had the second highest rate (450 and 366 per 100 000), compared with 394 and 338 per 100 000 in England and 394 and 345 per 100 000 in Northern Ireland.

This would make Scotland rank 3rd in the table on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_ra... .

PS: Glad to hear your mom is doing well!

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1939786/


> PS: Glad to hear your mom is doing well!

Thanks, she had little to no side effects from the experimental immunotherapy drug. She'd said at the outset she didn't want to be a "chemo zombie" having been through all that about 20 years ago (she's had four different cancers throughout my lifetime, treatment getting better every time).

It's fucking expensive, but immunotherapy is really a miracle cancer treatment. We're not quite at "Oh you've just got a wee bit of cancer, we can give you something for that if you see the pharmacist on your way out" but we're not far off.


> The danger of an unnecessary CT/PET is causing cancer

You'd have to be massively overexposed to CT or PET scanning to cause cancer, like in the region of spending months being scanned continuously with it at full beam current.


Even if you don't agree with linear no threshold models for cancers induced by radiation (I don't think LNT is accurate).

It comes down to the scan and the age.

3 scans for a 1 year old? Strongly associated with cancers later in life. 5 scans of a 50 year old? Less so.

The 1 year old has an 80 year run way to develop cancer, along with cells already set in a state of rapid division, and a less developed immune system.

But the association is quite strong.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0720048X2...


> I don't think LNT is accurate

There's excellent reason to think LNT is accurate: at low doses, almost every cell is exposed to at most one radiation event. The dose affects how many cells experience a (single) event, but does not affect the level of damage to those exposed cells. Linearity naturally falls out of this.

To abandon linearity you have to imagine some sort of signalling system (not observed) that kicks in at just the dose we're talking about (not lower, not higher) to allow exposure to one cell to affect other cells.

There's also no good evidence that LNT is wrong. The typical things that are pointed to by anti-LNT cranks are cherrypicked, often involving interim results from studies the full results from which do support LNT, which is evidence it was statistical noise.


I think the bigger point you are making is that the 50 year old is also more likely to have developed cancer.

Maybe a full body MRI once a decade is fine until your 30s, then once every 5 years until 50, then once ever 2 years beyond 50.

The test should scale with the probability of cancer.


> 3 scans for a 1 year old? Strongly associated with cancers later in life. 5 scans of a 50 year old? Less so.

Someone being born with no legs is strongly associated with them using a wheelchair in later life.

Why are you giving a one-year-old three CT scans? For shits and giggles? Or because you think they might have cancer?


> You'd have to be massively overexposed to CT or PET scanning to cause cancer

The mean effective dose for all patients from a single PET/CT scan was 20.6 mSv. For males aged 40 y, a single PET/CT scan is associated with a LAR of cancer incidence of 0.169%. This risk increased to 0.85% if an annual surveillance protocol for 5 y was performed. For female patients aged 40 y, the LAR of cancer mortality increased from 0.126 to 0.63% if an annual surveillance protocol for 5 y was performed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36856709/


> 0.126 to 0.63%

So, a just-about-measurable increase, if you pick and choose your values carefully?

You are not going to die from cancer caused by getting a PET scan. This will not happen.

You're going to die of heart disease or as a not-too-distant second in a car accident.


That data is for one scan, ever.

Continuous scanning for months would give a dose many orders of magnitude higher.


Approx. 5% of all cancers in US are caused by CTs

[citation needed]


I think they're reading too much into it.

How are they determining "this cancer was caused by the CT scan" versus "this cancer was caused by the cancer we were originally looking for that was there all along"?


Radiation doesn’t label the cancers it causes.

Other than comparing population groups, what method do we have?


Well, you could work backwards and look at your assumptions.

Why is "We think this person has cancer so we gave them a CT scan and look! Now they've got cancer! It must be because of the CT scan!" the conclusion to jump to?


Please just read this article - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... It's funny that you instantly assumed that authors are stupid and did not think about this obvious pitfall. It's extra funny that you also accuse them of jumping to conclusion without actually reading the article.

But what is it marketing, though? Buying 40-year-old cameras in car parks? I already do that, no need to sell me on it.

It's the Big Video8 cartel astroturfing.


Capturing off Video8 is no different to capturing off MiniDV, if you use a Digital8 camera.

I shoot on full-size DVCAM as well as HDV occasionally. Yes, it's 576i or 1080i depending on which you use, but you'd be surprised how good that looks with a decent lens and a bit of care in shooting.


The bad old days of de-interlacing and post-production with avisynth. I've shot and watched more videos since cell phones, thanks to the immensely improved UX.

I use ffmpeg. I had a play with avisynth years ago but it hasn't been updated in about a decade.

If they're still quite small, put a radio mike on them (or one of the ones you get with recording built-in that you sync up later, I guess, is easier these days) and stand well back and let them play.

That's when you get the good stuff.

A couple of years ago when my son was a chatty, fast-moving toddler, his granny couldn't really follow what he was doing because she's a bit deaf and not as quick on her feet these days. Take him down to the park, mike him up, let him run around, stand well off with a long lens.

Also, because that's a Digital8 camera, it'll output analogue tapes over FireWire as described in the article. It's worth doing this even for Video8 because the output is so much cleaner than with capturing over composite.


Oh, that's unexpected idea. I hope I'll try it one day, thank you.

I use FireWire as well. Spent a month connecting it, that was a devastating part. It turned out, only IEE1394 cards with TI chips works with Sony cameras. And only some cables. But to me, result is worth it.


I'm using a VIA VT6306 based card for mine, cheapest one on mz*n at about a fiver.

It will only detect the camera if the camera is plugged in and turned on when you turn on the PC, and this is consistent across various Sony, JVC, and Panasonic cameras.


> I don’t remember exactly which tape I popped in, except that I saw my mother as she looked when she was around my age now. She passed away in 2013 at 55 years old, and I hadn’t seen her at this age in… well, I don’t know how many years.

Similarly, I found a tape I'd shot in the mid-to-late 80s, probably Christmas 1988. On it was some footage of my dad, who died in 1993 when he was 47.

That's the first time I've seen that tape or indeed heard his voice since he died. He must have been about ten years younger than I am now.

So, the first time I've heard my dad's voice in over 30 years, and the first time his grandson has ever heard him (he recognised his grandad straight away).

Quite a moment, that.


> "Award-winning journalist on Fox News" and the padlock with an American flag really sells it for me.

About 20 years ago I worked on backend stuff for the sales site for a well-known UK retailer that advertised their spiffy new web store on TV.

Part of the TV ad had a couple of smiley young people with Techie Girl typing on a computer, and a big animated padlock swooping in and clicking shut and Mumsy Middle-Aged Manager smiling happily, and cut to Hacker Guy typing furiously in a darkened room as a big padlock pops up on the screen and "SECURITY LOCKED" popping up, as he scowls at the screen. The VO was something like "and it's safe to buy online - our site has Security Built In" <fx: heavy padlock clunks shut>

This sequence - the animation and filming this part right their in our own web dev office - cost over five grand of mid-2000s money to make, most of which being the padlock animations. The clunk was my bike lock.

£5000. Five Thousand Pounds.

I can tell you they spent well under 1/20th of that in developer time to actually write the security code for the site. It didn't even use HTTPS, which was kind of a requirement even in 2006.


> If you have a well secured LAN where trust is social SSH gets you nothing. SMTP telnet http being plain were from days when users were able to actually reason about what was happening within their OS

I've had this conversation recently with a "Cyber Architect" who was losing his shit over SNMPv1 on our network passing community strings as plaintext.

Yes. If you sniff the traffic you can see the read-only password, which is left as default, and from that you can deduce that the ODU temperature for the microwave link is 32°C at the moment (pretty toasty for 3° outside air temperature). Big Fucking Whoop.

Concentrate on not having "bad actors" sniffing traffic on our network.

If the burglar is in your kitchen eating your sandwich out of the fridge, the problem is that the burglar is in your kitchen, not that he's eating your sandwich.


Same feeling I get when I see people freaking out about security flaws in smart locks

A burglar isn't going to hack your lock. He's going to smash your door or window and steal whatever he can get his hands on


I believe there's an XKCD about that.

Walmart is an insanely profitable business that pays most of its employees well under a living wage.

Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.


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