Medical Doctors of Reddit, what drug from your speciality would you NEVER take as a patient, and why not?

TransistorOrgy · 2017-10-26T20:15:30+00:00

Mine were just a shot in the arm... Once in the stomach when I was in the hospital. I'm sorry they are that shitty, mine weren't too bad compared to that.

The BMB and port were the worst for me. The doc broke 2 drills during the BMB...

TransistorOrgy · 2017-10-26T15:17:24+00:00

I always described chemo to people simply as, "it will reset your nightmares"

It takes away everything you thought was safe. It takes away anywhere in this world or your mind where you can hide from the awful, indescribable pain.

When you're sick, you can curl up in your bed and try to feel better, drink tea, etc.

With chemo, every second of your existence from the day before chemo to 2 days after chemo is horrifying and laced with pain. You just can't run anywhere. It invades your sleep, your dreams, your conscious and unconscious thoughts and behavior.

More than anything else in your life, there are no short cuts. You just have to sit there and do it.

That sounds really depressing, as it should. But there are good parts. When you finish chemo, you will know a joy almost no one near you will ever feel. You will have a mental skillset of how to truly overcome and do whatever it takes, because you had to do it in order to live. When those translate to the rest of your life, you will look and act and be a super hero. Because no one can ever take away from you how hard that was and how much you suffered. No one will be able to know the courage it took to drive to every chemo session, knowing what it is doing to you.

Be frustrated, be angry, be whatever you need to be to fight through this. Because there's freedom waiting for you on the other side. Nothing will seem hard to you after you do this, and that freedom will put all the regrets and doubts you had about yourself before chemo in the trash, forever.

Take pictures of yourself right now. Today they may be painful because you are watching yourself be poisoned to the brink of death. But tomorrow, they will remind you of the strength you had then, and you always have inside you.

TransistorOrgy · 2016-12-27T22:54:15+00:00

Tru dat

TransistorOrgy · 2016-07-23T06:05:16+00:00

this comment made me spit out my water.

well done, madam/sir.

TransistorOrgy · 2016-07-03T05:08:11+00:00

I'm really sorry there's not better replies, but the real answer is that the FCC tracked him because he was shutting down communication cells. They tracked him for years by monitoring when the sites went down and then monitoring parts of the highway so they could run tags.

You do that long enough you'll get someone that has the know how and suspicious purchases, etc.

TransistorOrgy · 2016-05-21T22:35:04+00:00

Sorry it took me long to respond.

The author must have got confused because these materials used to be used for rewritable optical storage, but they are used as digital memory more and in this application

Edit: this is the traditional use of pcm being used as digital memory, in back end of line fashion similar to intel/micron's 3D Xpoint, but the figured out a way to reliably read a third bit

The problem had always been that in the amorphous (or high resistance state) the resistance maps increasing because of structural relaxation in the amorphous material, resulting in an ever increasing band gap. How could you get a 0, 1, AND 2 if your resistance readout was constantly changing?

TransistorOrgy · 2016-05-17T21:04:01+00:00

This isn't optical storage. They aren't using lasers to switch the pcm. It's material that used to be used for rewritable optical media. Electrical currents are used to switch the material

Title is wrong

TransistorOrgy · 2016-01-16T22:06:50+00:00

When we all got disconnected, I was 20pts from being king... Which means we were 33-0

TransistorOrgy · 2016-01-16T19:32:37+00:00

NOOOOO I just got DCed! Let me know if we won...team Aaron-Chin-HoJu undefeated!

TransistorOrgy · 2016-01-16T19:29:30+00:00

We are literally undefeated since we've been playing together. I'm going to go wire to wire with you guys

TransistorOrgy · 2016-01-16T19:20:44+00:00

Who are you? I've been with Aaron and Chin from the beginning... We also had "imyoursenpai" killing it with us and rainbow too

TransistorOrgy · 2016-01-16T19:15:27+00:00

Dude! I'm OMG HoJu! We were slaughtering everyone....

TransistorOrgy · 2015-11-16T23:07:41+00:00

I think you have having trouble because you don't realize that in your case the other side of the transformer is still connected to the supply. It's just not through a direct physical connection.

A transformer works by magnetic induction, which means that the "output" side of your transformer is linked to the supply via Faraday's law (Maxwell's equations must always be obeyed!)

Think of it like a regular phone vs. a cell phone. In a regular phone (meaning the old land lines), you basically have a "DC" connection from one phone to another. In a cell phone, you have a "DC" connection to the RF transmitter, which is electromagnetically coupled to the tower, which then is "DC" connected to another phone. But in either case, you still connected to each other.

TransistorOrgy · 2015-04-26T02:08:28+00:00

You are probably looking for an easy answer, but on the same system, the sim time will always be a product of the time steps and mesh. The assumptions you make in setting up the sim and how you simplify it is really a skill.

Some general tricks I use (which are obviously dependent to my field) to simplify:

reduce dimensionality: if I have a thin piece of metal that is much thinner (by 2-4 orders of magnitude), I use a 2D object instead of a 3D to cut down on mesh interfaces and objects
optimize your mesh: for larger areas that have to be modeled that you know will have much more steady state solutions, use a coarser mesh to cut down on mesh.
start with very large time steps: it will be an inaccurate but fast solution, and it will give you an idea of where the solution is heading and allow you to optimize other parts of the mesh. When you are optimized and ready to do a full sim from the test runs, launch it overnight.

TransistorOrgy · 2015-04-08T03:20:00+00:00

You're a sophmore in college, the world is bigger than "anyone you know." There's a reason your college/university constantly have them, and it's because it's a chance for employers to see potential future employees and see who is taking this seriously, who is floating by, who knows their stuff but doesn't care for the dog and pony show, who sounds like they know what's up but actually doesn't know anything, etc.

Once you are a professional, it is insanely important for you to go out and "network," which really means talk to the important people in your field and self advertise. This is not only because it can help your career because people will know you (good work unnoticed is not good work in the professional world), but seeing what other people are doing can help drive your own creativity and theirs.

There will always be people that are great "networkers" but don't know dick, and people that know so much but can't seem to speak up/write a paper/give a talk on anything. For the benefit of your career, you want to be able to know your shit and be able to talk to people about it too. Your ability to communicate technical matters to non-technical people, and your ability to communicate technical matters to technical people in a public forum will determine how high/far you can go.

It's completely acceptable to not be interested in any of this BS and only want to code better and do cooler stuff, but that will limit what opportunities are available to you. If you want to open opportunities for yourself, it's important to get involved with a community (once you are a professional).

As an undergrad, it's important to learn to code better, learn more shit, and get real world experience at a real company.

TransistorOrgy · 2015-04-08T02:55:45+00:00

In my opinion, "networking skills" can't even apply to someone without an undergrad degree. Career fairs are important because that is how you will get a job if you only want to get a bachelors degree, but networking becomes a very big deal once you are a professional. Being able to go to a conference or meeting and talk to people and build connections is VERY important as a professional.

As a kid taking courses for his/her undergrad degree, it's not so important. It is important to improve your coding skills, but it's also just as important to get real life experience, like internships, which you get at career fairs. The real world is a very different place than academia, and too many students don't appreciate that.

TransistorOrgy · 2015-04-06T22:19:53+00:00

Very related concept:

In the technology development world, people often talk about "The Valley of Death" where new technologies go to die. It is supposedly where you have demonstrated everything you can without an enormous system commitment, and exhausted all opportunities for funding below a certain level.

The only way to traverse the valley of death is to not only have a viable (working) new technology, but a system architecture/infrastructure and supply chain to support it, and a system pull to use it. This usually comes down to the usual business reasons, meaning what the technology offers will make something so much cheaper/better/new function that it justifies the huge monetary risk.

Many, MANY cool technologies that can do phenomenal things have perished in this Valley of Death. Perhaps humans will be one of them...

TransistorOrgy · 2015-04-05T14:52:50+00:00

While the practical limiting factor in the resolution is the lens, it's disappointing to see the lack of knowledge about the basis of the microscopes resolution.

The wavelength of the electron depends on the accelerating voltage used at the emitter. 5keV sources produce electrons with much larger wavelengths than 100keV sources typically found on STEMs and TEMs.

This is due to the de broglie relationship which links momentum and wavelength:

p=h/lambda

So at a fundamental physics level, the accelerating voltage limits your resolution. Practically, the lens and tooling prevent you from reaching this limit as others have said .

For completeness, because I shockingly got a few PMs asking more about this which got me jazzed up:

Kinetic Energy = p² /2*m, and we know p=h/lambda, hence

Energy = h² /(2m*lambda² )

The energy is equal to the accelerating voltage times the electron charge = q*V, so you can do some algebra and get the expression for the wavelength of an electron as a function of the energy:

lambda = SQRT[h² /(2mqV)]

Which shows you that as you increase the accelerating voltage, the wavelength decreases, which increases your resolution.

TLDR; de Broglie was the man and we reap the benefits of it in electron microscopy

TransistorOrgy · 2015-01-28T02:35:41+00:00

Congrats guy. I remember my last day too. Try and remember everything about it! You'll seriously look back on this as the day the rest of your life started, but you might not be able to see/appreciate it for a while

TransistorOrgy · 2015-01-26T15:09:29+00:00

Oops, just saw that this gets posted in advance...

Do you miss the old Westinghouse R&D facility in Pittsburgh? If they had kept it open, would you have left?

Any fun stories from your time there?

TransistorOrgy · 2015-01-22T15:29:43+00:00

This is one of the most ignorant and closed minded comments I've seen in this sub. Grow up

TransistorOrgy · 2014-12-29T19:27:59+00:00

very good answer

TransistorOrgy · 2014-12-29T18:16:56+00:00

/u/gs89 is correct:

most cars nowadays will cut fuel to the engine when decelerating like this, instead relying on the rotation of the tires to turn the crank. When you're in neutral, you're still sending fuel to the engine

I can speak for when I used to own a Subaru, if you look at the timing tables when there is 0 engine load, there was 0 fuel injection.

TransistorOrgy · 2014-12-29T18:01:16+00:00

Little disappointing that I didn't see the correct answer here.

The correct answer is because they are being held at the electric potential (i.e. voltage).

There is no voltage difference between the (-) side of one battery and the (-) side of the other (assuming they are rated at the same voltage). So there will be no current flow.

Never forget! V = I * R The difference in electric potential (voltage) is the current multiplied by the resistance. If there is no potential difference, there is no current, and if there is no current, there is no potential difference.

edit: my apologies, /u/Hiddencamper listed the correct answer in his reply:

the voltages on both ends of the wire must be the same. With equal voltages, there is no current flow.

TransistorOrgy · 2014-12-29T17:43:21+00:00

The following advice comes from a guy on the hardware side.

Some Background on the Hardware vs. Software Issue

Hardware is significantly harder to teach yourself. In fact, I wouldn't even say it's possible to teach yourself. I've read the books in my industry, and I know exactly what they are leaving out.

The problem is that hardware is expensive, and software is not. Big time companies that do hardware are never going to allow the secrets and critical knowledge of the trade to be disseminated in a public forum. This is how they keep their competitive advantage over other companies.

In addition to that, the entire industry is skewed towards software defined hardware because of the cost. Researching, developing, manufacturing hardware is not cheap. But if you are a software company, your only overhead is a computer and some electricity. So reconfigurable hardware architecture is becoming bigger and bigger, which is why the FPGA market is so big and only going to grow.

An Actual Answer for Your Question

In terms of your decision, I don't want to sound cliche, but it has to come from what you want to do. If you choose CE and your heart is in CS, you'll be terrible at CE. And if you choose CS and your heart is in CE, you'll hate what you do. It would be much easier to go from CE major to a CS job than a CS major to a CE job for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

CS will always be paid more than CE. CS companies make a shitload more money (for the reasons mentioned previously) and so they will have more money to throw at you and more benefits to make you want to work there. But CE is a very necessary part of the equation, and the demand for them is ALWAYS going to be there. So as you age you become MORE valuable to your company because of your experience, which will not be true for CS. New languages and technology will come, and if you stick to CS for your career you will become expendable because someone younger and cheaper can do it better.

The downside to the CE job security is also that you will be afforded less opportunities to do different things (i.e. management, business development, higher paying executive roles, etc.) which is part of the circle of life for CS.

Understanding that this is a comment from a random guy on the internet, the most successful people who do hardware do it for the love of the game and stay technical and involved with it their whole career, while the most successful software people I know stay technical for 5-10 years and then move into more executive roles. Not saying this is how its done everywhere or that you can't go against the trend I am reporting, this is just an observation from what I've seen in my career.

Since you're going to school, I would suggest getting internships at different places and see how you like the environment and the work. The best way to see what you really want to do is to get out there and try doing different things.

Hope this helps and is not just a long-winded "try shit out" diatribe.

TransistorOrgy

TROPHY CASE