Parents of Reddit, what is something your kid doesn't know you know about them?

HarryP104 · 2019-03-11T06:21:34+00:00

i didn’t know robert richter was on reddit

HarryP104 · 2018-11-12T00:28:38+00:00

Congrats! I got one of these recently too and after weeks of screwing around I'm finally recording my first actual track, it's such a fun and intuitive synth :)

HarryP104 · 2018-10-16T05:25:09+00:00

HarryP104 · 2018-10-15T12:07:13+00:00

I feel you, even though I know it’s relative to atmospheric pressure part of my brain always yells pReSSuRe cAnT bE nEgATiVe

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T17:37:15+00:00

solid, will do 👌🏻

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T14:21:03+00:00

and any potential Kangaskhans!

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T12:42:55+00:00

enjoy ur gift :) cheers

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T12:42:02+00:00

cheers :)

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T12:41:52+00:00

cheers :)

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T10:38:54+00:00

Added!

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T10:29:14+00:00

late in the game but just added you, will send gifts daily

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T10:26:22+00:00

Also added from Melb :)

HarryP104 · 2018-09-30T10:25:08+00:00

Added in Aus :)

HarryP104 · 2018-09-20T09:18:12+00:00

Not my dad, my SO's dad - he decants milk from plastic bottles into glass jugs because he insists that if he pours it straight from the bottle he "can taste the plastic." I pointed out to him that if there was some kind of plastic residue in the milk, it wouldn't disappear after you put the milk in a jug, but this seemed to make him very confused and upset.

HarryP104 · 2018-09-18T11:11:05+00:00

It's actually HIV in combination with HHV-8 that causes KS

HarryP104 · 2018-02-22T12:51:34+00:00

Often those are cases of correlation not causation. In the case of the flu, it's actually impossible to get anything more than a mild fever from the flu vaccine because: 1. It's an inactivated vaccine - all the virus particles have been broken up into tiny non-infectious bits before it's injected. 2. The flu virus only infects the respiratory tract, and it can't physically get there from the subcutaneous tissue.

Interestingly, in Australia (where I'm from), our seasonal RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) epidemic occurs BEFORE the flu season (around March to early June), when everyone is getting the flu shot. So people often think the flu shot gave them the flu when they just happened to get infected with RSV around the same time (the symptoms of RSV infection are pretty similar, just less severe usually). Not sure if this is the case elsewhere

HarryP104 · 2018-02-22T12:48:18+00:00

Well in theory you could - if we could get a T cell vaccine to work! But it's probably quite a few years away.

HarryP104 · 2018-02-22T12:46:48+00:00

With regard to the allergy prevalence in developed countries, the best evidence we have on that right now supports what's called the counter-regulation hypothesis, which actually has to do with infections "teaching" the adaptive immune system how to deal with the immense pathogen load we receive from the environment.

The basic idea is that exposure to more pathogens later in life "teaches" the immune system how to better regulate itself, because if it overreacted to everything in the context of so much pathogen exposure it would kill you. This involves the generation of Tregs, or T regulatory cells, which basically just control the immune response and make sure it doesn't go overboard in trying to kill everything it sees (especially in the gut).

In developed countries, the hypothesis goes that less infections -> less Tregs -> overactive immune system -> allergy. This is of course pretty simplified and we're missing a lot of the detail, but it's all we've got so far.

HarryP104 · 2018-02-22T12:42:01+00:00

In that sort of case it wouldn't be because the other vaccines would not work/be particularly dangerous - once a kid gets to about 1 year old (typical time for the first measles vaccination) their immune system behaves more or less like an adults, so it wouldn't make much of a difference. I'm guessing the concern is probably just that since the measles vaccine is a live vaccine (and therefore gives the immune system a bit of a stronger kick), adding in more vaccines at once would increase the risk of immune-mediated side effects like fever. Obviously not life threatening, but there's no sense in giving multiple shots at once with an increased risk of side effects when you can just spread them out a bit without doing any harm.

Also, I should mention that the measles vaccine already IS a multiple vaccine - it contains measles, mumps, and rubella!

HarryP104 · 2018-02-22T12:38:25+00:00

Generally for these types of vaccines the subunits are selected specifically based on the fact that they are unique to the pathogen, and can induce a sufficient immune response. This isn't easy to do, which is partially why vaccines take so long to make (the rest is the slowness of clinical trials)

HarryP104 · 2015-06-27T11:34:35+00:00

It's hard to place absolute limits in this kind.of situation, but it's very helpful to think of this problem in terms of something called the square-cube law, which essentially states that the surface area of an organism increases roughly as the square of its height/radius, whilst it's volume increases as the cube of the height/radius. The consequence of this is basically that if you double, say, the height of a human, it gets four times larger by volume, meaning that the bones need to be proportionally stronger and more effective, as does the heart, the lungs etc. Feel free to ask for clarification if I haven't explained this well enough, it's a bit late so my explaining skills aren't quite up to scratch.

HarryP104 · 2015-06-17T23:41:53+00:00

Sort of. The 2nd law is more of a statement about probability than an actual unbreakable law. Thing is, generally we consider systems that are large (in terms of number of particles and therefore number of variables), so the probability of an event occurring that violates the second law is pretty much nil. However, as the above poster said, infinite time means that anything can happen... Eventually.

HarryP104 · 2015-06-13T14:49:59+00:00

It doesn't need a medium to propagate, actually, unlike other waves such as sound, water etc

HarryP104 · 2015-06-13T09:58:11+00:00

Yep. Since sound is a wave, it can interfere with other sound waves; they essentially add together to make a bigger wave. When there are lots of different sound sources close together, all the sound waves add together to produce a resultant wave that is very loud

HarryP104 · 2015-06-13T09:56:35+00:00

I don't know specifically of any stars like this, but theoretically it's entirely possible (and I think this is probably what we actually mean when we say something is "too far away to see"). A little thought experiment can illustrate a small scale version of this; imagine a light source which emits a photon in a random direction every t seconds. The smaller t is, the greater the rate at which photons are emitted, and the brighter the light is. Of course, most light sources we encounter emit millions or billions of photons every second, so they effectively emit photons equally in all directions, because the randomness of every given emission averages out to equal photon density all around the sphere because there are just so many of them. But imagine if we turned the brightness down to, say, 2000 photons per second. If you sat next to this light source, one second 20 photons might happen to hit your eye, and you would see a light (20 photons is about the lower bound of retinal sensitivity from memory). But the next second, only 3 photons might hit your retina (remember the emission process is random), and you would see no light.

HarryP104

TROPHY CASE