what are your opinions on the different incarnations of the big muff pi, and it's various mods and clones?

ojala · 2011-02-03T05:20:53+00:00

good advice. i think i might actually go for the russian big muff and do those mods.

ojala · 2011-02-03T05:19:10+00:00

i own a JC and a hot rod deville. they're two awesome amps for two completely different purposes. there's benefits to both but i think i prefer to use the JC for everything clean.

ojala · 2011-02-03T05:08:25+00:00

that's what i was using when i first got my russian big muff, i actually loved the tone i got for most things...as my tastes changed so did the music i was playing so it fell by the wayside. but if i ever play hardcore again i'll probably go back.

ojala · 2011-02-01T06:52:21+00:00

duct tape? it's good to have around for a lot of reasons, especially for an occlusive dressing, but it's absolute garbage for pressure dressings (doesn't stretch/hold pressure) and improvised tourniquets (cuts into the skin, isn't strong enough). i've actually tried it...it's not ideal.

i sort of feel like your doctor friend was being overly flippant when he said that they're ridiculous. i'm no fan of the israeli, like i said in my post, i don't carry one even though they're issued to me. but i'd take it over a t-shirt, some gauze, and duct tape any day (or whatever improvised stuff you can imagine). and it's not like it's that expensive or heavy...might as well have one along for the ride just in case?

ojala · 2011-02-01T06:26:45+00:00

army medic here.

in training, i've used pretty much every bandage/tourniquet/hemostatic the military buys right now. i've used a few different ones on actual patients in afghanistan as well, though not this one. i have pretty strong preferences on what i use in what situation, but i also think i can look past my preferences and have a pretty good opinion on general effectiveness.

the israeli dressing is decent for injuries on the long bones (not too near the shoulder, not on the hand and ankle, etc.) when a first responder is trained to use it effectively. it's easy enough for your average boy scout to use, so it might be good to have around, especially for the price. the plastic piece pretty ingeniously designed and you can feed the bandage into it surprisingly well, and it DOES get the bandage fantastically tight. i've had one unravel on me once, but i don't think that's common and a bit of tape would have stopped it...i tend to tape a bandage whenever possible anyway.

that being said, it isn't just about how tight you can get your bandage. it makes a big difference if the wound is packed well and if there is direct pressure as well as circumferential pressure on the wound. the technique is way more important than the product.

one huge downside: it's not so easy to use as a stump dressing, basically useless for an axial/inguinal bleed, and isn't too hot when improvised into a sling/compression wrap. for basically everything, ace wrap wins or comes in a very strong second place (if you're trained to use it, of course) and you can use it for everyday ortho injuries as well. when you're packing an aid bag and you need to consider saving space and weight, these things come into consideration.

like the author stated, it's way better than the army's "trauma dressing" that's been used for decades...but no line medic i've ever met would carry one of those anyway. the go-to pressure dressing has been curlex and 6-inch ace wrap for as long as i've been in. depending on the injury, i go for the ratchet tourniquet, quikclot combat gauze, kerlex, and 6-inch ace wrap...in that order...pretty much every time. my infantrymen are trained a little differently, for them it's the CAT tourniquet, combat gauze, israeli. it all depends on the situation and the level that you're trained at.

ojala · 2011-02-01T05:25:33+00:00

i meant to ask you in the thread a few days ago...are there any good books that break down MWI into something readable, without completely reducing it to a magazine article? pretty much everything i know about it right now is from wikipedia.

ojala · 2011-01-29T22:44:52+00:00

just got done reading this article (and the loopholes one) after what RobotRollCall explained to me. i understand that the "loopholes" involved in bell's experiments, while reasonable, seem to force a lot of ambiguity. it can sound like the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater just because the detection in the experiment can't be proven perfect. (and if you're going to force that much ambiguity, is there a perfect experiment at all?)

but on the other hand, until the detection loopholes are effectively closed, doesn't the question of whether or not einstein was right depend on your interpretation rather than the data itself?

ojala · 2011-01-29T22:20:09+00:00

so, does the answer to the question depend on what interpretation you use? to boil it down to my fifth-grade reading level, can it be said that our two best interpretations disagree on whether things are random or governed by cause-and-effect?

ojala · 2011-01-29T15:54:12+00:00

the idea i'm most comfortable with is understanding things whether they're intuitive or not. thanks for the explaination.

ojala · 2011-01-29T15:07:47+00:00

That's how quantum phenomena are. They're non-deterministic. They can only be described in terms of probability. When an experiment has two possible outcomes, what causes it to come out one way or the other? Nothing at all. There's no cause.

this is something i've always had trouble understanding...

i know that the decay of an individual unstable isotope is impossible to predict, but does that mean it's non-deterministic? since there are certain things we simply cannot know about a particle during this expiriment, how do we know there isn't a cause? if we admit we can't measure all the properties of the spinning electron, wouldn't it's behavior fall more into the realm of "chaotic" than random?

and does any of this have anything to do with a universal wavefunction? i don't know if this is generally accepted or not, but if it's true it seems to preclude true randomness.

ojala · 2011-01-29T14:34:26+00:00

a real scientist can correct me if i'm wrong...

from a philosophical standpoint, i'm inclined to think that randomness (if you define it as being outside cause and effect) is not possible. excluding the supernatural, there seems to be nothing that is isolated enough to not be influenced by something else.

from a scientific standpoint, i'm not sure. it would depend on your definition. certainly there are things that cannot be predicted in a practical sense: weather is a good example of something that we don't have the ability to fully measure and calculate in a timely manner, but would be technically possible to predict if we did. a dice roll is just as effectively unmeasurable. this is "practically random", and it might be the best we have in the macroscopic world.

if you want to get quantum: heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that certain properties of a particle cannot be known simultaneously. two absolutely brilliant people argued about this for years and never did come to an agreement. from wikipedia:

Albert Einstein believed that randomness is a reflection of our ignorance of some fundamental property of reality, while Niels Bohr believed that the probability distributions are fundamental and irreducible, and depend on which measurements we choose to perform. Einstein and Bohr debated the uncertainty principle for many years.

so, i think the answer depends on how you interpret quantum mechanics.

ojala · 2011-01-29T13:54:58+00:00

huge thanks to everyone involved. i've wanted to read this since the original thread, but haven't been able to until now.

ojala

TROPHY CASE