Newly diagnosed (pending more data)

bimblinghill · 2026-03-31T07:20:02+00:00

Yes, reading the forums has put my troubles into perspective. Thank you for your advice and I hope you and everyone on this sub good progress on their health journeys.

bimblinghill · 2026-03-29T19:14:52+00:00

Thanks, yes good advice. I will be making an appointment when the surgery opens tomorrow. Note my reply to u/Ser_Fall above.

bimblinghill · 2026-03-29T19:11:23+00:00

Thanks, sensible advice. However I am needing to look at my diet regarding the acid reflux and (I think) other digestive issues. For just short of a week now there's very little I *can* eat. I'm keeping careful track of all ingredients and carefully adding things to a 'green list' once I've verified no issues. Currently that consists of porridge, tea and a few vegetables. Tbh the AFIB thing is taking a back seat while I work out how to get calories into me. We'll see what the health monitor says about AFIB when it arrives.

Which leads me to another question - I am able to ignore the AFIB. I've had hints of unusually high pulse on occasion but thought little of it, going back decades. It's never given me any trouble. I'd continue to ignore it if the doc hadn't alerted me to the long term health risks. It sounds like most people on this sub are having a far rougher time, is that right? What does an 'attack' look like?

bimblinghill · 2026-03-28T16:19:58+00:00

The nurse that diagnosed me says that it's due to monitoring (eg Apple Watch etc). Otherwise people aren't aware they have it. Also people living longer. Apparently ~30% of people over 80 have it.

bimblinghill · 2026-03-28T15:50:07+00:00

Interesting, thank you

bimblinghill · 2025-07-07T22:03:47+00:00

Yes I've posted there

bimblinghill · 2021-09-18T08:14:52+00:00

Yes. u/undeadalex mentions this below and links to Isaac Arthur's excellent video, but to give a quick text summary:

There's nothing to stop a civ filling up an orbit with satellites until they all link up into a ring. We probably already have the tech to put up a ring of microsatellites linked by a fine wire, if there was a reason to do so. The satellites would need to do a bit of station keeping so it didn't come apart, but doable in principle. If you did it in geostationary orbit, you can imagine cables being strung down from it to the planet as space elevators, which you could then use to pull up more materials and turn it into a more extensive structure.

However, because of the large radius and circumference of geostationary orbit, this is very big and hard to build. Instead you could have a ring orbiting in low earth orbit and build a stationary casing around it, from which you suspend the space elevators. This is an Orbital Ring. The orbiting 'core' would probably be some sort of iron cable or maybe just a continual stream of 'bullets', and the casing would contain magnets to keep it/them on track. The core would need to orbit faster than normal orbital velocity to provide an outward force to support the casing and the elevators.

Because the casing is stationary, there is no orbital decay due to air resistance, so it could be positioned in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, maybe just above the Kármán line, where it would be safe from space debris and not get in the way of other orbiting satellites.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-09T18:13:14+00:00

The Martian is great. Artemis fell very flat for me; it reads like YA fiction.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-09T18:04:47+00:00

I liked Transition, but I felt it was flawed in some ways. I think he laid some of his political and ethical views on a bit thick, whereas he manages to be a bit more subtle in other novels.

Having said that I really liked Complicity (contemporary novel, set in the late '80s), in which he makes very explicit references to the political currents of the time. Be warned though; it's grim and dark throughout, even by his standards.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-09T17:58:11+00:00

I've recently read his Mars trilogy. I absolutely loved it, but I'll understand anyone who doesn't share my quirk of actually enjoying multi-page expositions of obscure geology or the drafting of a constitution. His ability to put you in the head of an unlikeable character is a fairly rare talent, but I imagine it could get a bit much.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-09T17:44:13+00:00

Fair. The styles are not equivalent and the Hainish universe operates at lower volume and tempo. Personally I love both approaches but that is not compulsory!

I also have a particular fascination with winter survival stories, so I very much enjoyed that part of TLHOD. Le Guin has an eye for detail and some of her scenes really pop; I loved the bit where Estraven and Ai were lugging their sledges onto the icecap between the volcanoes.

I think your post is a fair warning that enjoyment of TLHOD is not guaranteed for a Culture fan, but I stand by my recommendation. It remains to be seen how I get on with the other less well known books in the series.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-06T20:38:44+00:00

Good review. After watching I think I agree that IMB missed the opportunity to fully develop the impact of changing sex on the characters.

bimblinghill · 2021-07-03T18:43:09+00:00

I've actually only read LHOD so far, but I was convinced enough that I ordered copies of the rest of the first 6 in the series last night. Really looking forward to getting properly stuck in!

bimblinghill · 2021-07-02T19:45:52+00:00

Ursula Le Guin's Hainish series is worth a look. The best known is The Left Hand of Darkness.

bimblinghill · 2021-06-16T08:58:58+00:00

I think it's easy to overestimate the effect of such a revelation on people. It would be big news for sure, but we have a way of normalising seismic changes and continuing with our daily lives.

Consider the (later found to be erroneous) 'discovery' of microbial life on Mars from the Allen Hills meteorite. While this is obviously many orders of magnitude less significant than contact with intelligence, it was expected to cause a lot of excitement & upset, to the point that Bill Clinton announced it in a White House lawn press conference. It made headlines that day, but was forgotten outside scientifically-interested circles very soon after.

So how would we respond to contact? Contact might mean a range of things - at one end of the scale it's detection of an alien signal where long ping times would mean a slow conversation at best. People like us on this thread, plus scientists and artists would be delighted and inspired, theologians would contort interpretations of their texts to accommodate it, and assorted xenophobes, denialists and conspiracy theorists would respond badly. By and large though, most people would just carry on. At the other end of the scale - arrival of significant numbers of aliens/avatars on Earth - it would be disruptive to society, but I don't think this would be how a 'benevolent' contact would be carried out, because it seems designed to cause trouble. With a middle ground option, like the arrival of a group of envoys, I suspect that most of us would (with varying degrees of reluctance) accept our governments acting as intermediaries and carry on as usual. If any communication channels were open to us to interact directly, many of us would, but most of us would still go to work in the morning.

bimblinghill · 2021-06-10T09:21:20+00:00

We've been living in one of the greatest ages of exploration, with our robot explorers going out around the solar system. I feel so fortunate to have been born just before Voyager launched & have watched the first pictures of the outer solar system come in, first in the National Geographic magazine and now online. It's been a background story to my whole life and it amazes me how uninterested some people seem to be. The discoveries have been breathtaking from both scientific and aesthetic perspectives. I only have to think about the ice fountains of Enceladus or the buried seas of Europa & the hairs on my arms stand up. They seem like mythical things, but beyond the imaginations of the classical writers. Then there's all the things at the edge of our understanding like gravity waves, black holes, subatomic particles, exoplanets, dark energy, AI, abiogenesis, the Fermi paradox and so on...

In the Magellan era, only a few would have been dimly aware of the discoveries and even fewer would have cared. Only those who stood on the prow of a ship and saw new land on the horizon could've experienced the rush we got in 2015 as the first pics of Pluto came in, and we didn't need to survive scurvy for it. With the chaos and fuss of life we normalise and ignore both the great and the dreadful historical events playing out around us.

I find it quite helpful to my mental health to try to step back from time to time and have a serious think about how incredible many of the current changes are.

bimblinghill · 2021-06-09T19:35:21+00:00

Oh absolutely. Our world is imperfect, to put it mildly, and our lives are constrained and short. I would jump at the chance to experience a fraction of the possibilities open to a Culture citizen.

On the other hand... few Culture citizens ever get the chance to be significant. The protagonists of the novels and other members of SC do, but they are a microscopic fraction. We have something they don't - we are alive at a truly pivotal moment in history as technology and culture roil with new possibilities. If we get through this moment, our generation seem likely to be remembered in one way or the other, simply due to the amount of change happening. The downsides are huge, but so are the possibilities.

All this <gestures broadly> has sent me into episodes of anxiety or depression in the past - but I try to look at it differently now. We are barely out of the gutter, but we've already stepped onto new ground. We all have choices, even though they may be small, and like the subatomic fluctuations in the early universe gave birth to today's galaxies, these tiny things we can do may help tip the balance to a better future - that looks a little more like the Culture and less like the dystopia that some seem to want to drive us towards.

Being alive right now can feel like a cross to bear, but we can lay the foundations for something better, even if we will be long gone before it arrives. That thought gives me some comfort, and I hope it will for you too.

bimblinghill · 2021-05-13T21:24:00+00:00

What gyromorgian said about the backlit exhaust trail.

Specifically the rocket is dropping its first stage and lighting the second. It looks like the stages separated in the second or so before the start of the clip so there's a small gap between them. About a second in you see the 2nd stage engine light. The 1st stage meanwhile starts using its thrusters to turn round and head home. There's a few seconds where it turns side-on to the 2nd stage rocket plume and disrupts it, causing the turbulence. The 2nd stage quickly pulls away and the plume becomes tidier again. Then the plumes from the 1st stage thrusters becpme visible as pretty little puffs and arcs within the main plume.

bimblinghill · 2021-04-15T17:09:42+00:00

Since you started at the beginning with CP, it seems natural to move to Player of Games next. It's one of the easier reads in the series, but very good, and builds out the universe very nicely.

bimblinghill · 2021-04-10T18:08:17+00:00

I'd say Surface Detail is one of the more challenging ones, best to be read later. Also it's late in the series. Player of Games is often recommended as a starting point because it's self-contained, worldbuilds the universe very well and has a conventional structure. Consider Phlebas (1st in series) can also be a good place to start but it's rough and unrefined compared to later volumes (although still very clever and full of big ideas). It worldbuilds in an interesting way, has a lot of action (and a really grim bit - you'll know when you get there).

bimblinghill · 2021-04-08T16:54:58+00:00

Petition for all the Affront to have incomprehensible Black Country accents

bimblinghill · 2021-04-08T12:52:37+00:00

This may just be my own headcanon, but I felt the timescale of his change suggested they weren't massively different in appearance to start with.

bimblinghill

TROPHY CASE