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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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Several decades ago, a friend had kidney stones.  They put him in a tub of water and used sound waves to smash the big stones into smaller pieces that could pass.

Hasn't anyone improved this system to the point where it smashes stones into dust?

"Kidney stones Mr Tutin?  Go to the clinic on Maine Street and bring your trunks.  They'll have them cleared out before lunch."

Edited by Pharaoh RutinTutin
spelling

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Lithotripsy. Unfortunately, it's not 100% effective, and it's not for everyone.

It's also supposed to work on gallstones, but I was told I wasn't a candidate. Found out why later: I had pigment stones instead of the larger cholesterol stones. Surgery is the only option for pigment stones. Besides, my gall bladder was close to bursting when I went to the emergency room.

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6 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

They put him in a tub of water and used sound waves to smash the big stones into smaller pieces that could pass.

Those machines are more or less still state of the art.  My favorite uncle used to be a sales rep/technical support/installer1 of those systems.  He had stories that would curl your hair about the size of some stones.  Golf ball size stones were not uncommon and some twice that size.  I get stones smaller than most grains of sand.  I can't even start to think about ones larger than that.

Grain of rice to corn kernel sized stones may be removed by laparoscopic surgery.  My brother is a scrub tech that specializes in laparoscopic cases, and that is the second or third most common type of cases he works with.  For a grain of sand-sized stones, the conventional wisdom is that letting them pass naturally is better in the long run that doing anything surgical.

1His current job is being Santa.
366f275ac6e65c1c57d8a102afdfff69.jpg

Yes, that is his real beard and beard color.

 

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6 hours ago, mlooney said:

Grain of rice to corn kernel sized stones may be removed by laparoscopic surgery.  My brother is a scrub tech that specializes in laparoscopic cases, and that is the second or third most common type of cases he works with.

Do you know what the threshold is between laparoscopic surgery and lithotripsy with natural passing afterward? Or is that even an option?

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Do you know what the threshold is between laparoscopic surgery and lithotripsy with natural passing afterward? Or is that even an option?

I have no clue.

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Another thing I am annoyed about.  After my brief use of "Dropbox business" I now effectively have two Dropbox accounts, and it's pushing impossible to have both of them syncing at the same time.  I am less than fully gruntled by this.

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I'm not quite sure why this bothers me as much as it does, but Rodger has it backward.  You get tone, then a lock.  Must be the 16S in me coming out.

autowb142.gif

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6 hours ago, mlooney said:

I'm not quite sure why this bothers me as much as it does, but Rodger has it backward.  You get tone, then a lock.  Must be the 16S in me coming out.

Something within your specialty that is done badly in a movie or comic is always more annoying than other slips. I have the same experience myself. When someone uses language in a pretentious way in a story I read and does it badly, it sends me straight up a wall.

(*grumble grumble* Bloody C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine who couldn't conjugate 'thou' and 'thee' properly and just used 'thee' all the time. Maybe Cherryh thought Morgaine sounded cool, but to me she sounded like frigging Jar-Jar Binks.)

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Ok, we got Prof's fridge, mlooney's dishwasher, and we can add my bedroom window to the list as it's making a noise like an animal crying in pain whenever the wind blows across it, or a really bad kazoo player.

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34 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Ok, we got Prof's fridge, mlooney's dishwasher, and we can add my bedroom window to the list as it's making a noise like an animal crying in pain whenever the wind blows across it, or a really bad kazoo player.

I have a feeling your window might be acting as some sort of BMEWS system for the Elder Gods.

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An open rant to publisher, designers, and authors of role-playing game supplements:

For the love of all things lawful good do the following:

  1. Hire an editor.  Or at least use a mechanical one.  At a bare minimum use a spell checker. 
  2. Don't wrap text around images.  It doesn't look cool, and it makes things hard to read.
  3. Even if you don't have an editor, have someone with normal eyesight look at your page layout to spot weird issues.
  4. Use full justification or use ragged right.  Don't do both on the same page.
  5. Use the same font size for the body of your text.  Don't change it mid-paragraph.
  6. When you cut and paste from one description to another, make sure you replace the item names in the description.
  7. You don't need to have a reproduction section for every species of monster or player character race.
  8. We don't need more world killers.  The Tarrasque is open game content in the 3.x SRD, the Pathfinder SRD, and the 5th ed SRD.  Don't need more like it.  If anything, just add your special touch, like it can fly or can live in space.
  9. The f-bomb shouldn't be used as a general-purpose adjective.  If you are going to use it, please restrict it to the normal sexual meaning or excited utterances.  Don't toss it around like copper pieces.
  10. Speaking of copper pieces, assuming a gold piece is equal to a current US dollar is just silly.  A bog standard RPG gold piece weighs 9 grams.1  That puts its value at around $360 today.
  11. No one wants to read about coprophagia.  And really, no one to play a character that has that as a major part of its racial backstory.
  12. If you are trying to be gender neutral either use singular they or alternate between male and female pronouns, but don't use all three in the same paragraph when talking about the same thing.
  13. Advanced space-going civilizations will not have high-tech melee weapons.  And if they do they will not be katanas.
  14. Monomolecular weapons are impossible.  Stop using them
  15. Chainsaw like swords, axes, and pole arms are silly.  Stop it.
  16. Shotguns don't have nearly the spread of shot you think they do.  Consult this handy chart for the actual size.
  17. Learn the difference between an Armored Personnel Carrier, a Tank, and a Self Propelled Gun.
  18. Understand why multi-turret tanks went out of style in the late 20's early 30's of the 20th century.
  19. Understand why a two-person crew of an armored fighting vehicle with a main gun is a bad idea.

Thank you.
Signed: a person who reads way too many RPG PDF files

1Most version of D&D, to include Pathfinder, put "coins" at 50 per lb.  That works out to almost exactly 9 grams per coin.

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Trying to transfer a little under 1.5 gigs from my laptop to the tablet without a flash drive.  This is taking more effort than it should.  All my cloud drives are taking too long, enough too long that the tablet gives up.  Doing a sftp to the laptop is slow as a slow thing going from the laptop to the tablet as it is going from the iMac to the tablet.  As the last hope, I'm using Chrome to upload to my Gdrive then trying that from the tablet.

#1stworldgeekproblems.

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Using Clonezilla's "parallel xz" compression to back up the used parts of 6 GB worth of hard drives onto a 3 GB drive. So far it's working, but it is sloooooow. I started this morning. It's 11:37 p.m. CDT, and it's still backing up.

I need a larger external hard drive.

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I'm starting to have "tickle" in the back of my throat.  I strongly suspect that I'm going to have a sore throat or even a cold within the next 12 to 24 hours.  I'm off to take a proactive dose of NyQuil.  I suspect I'm going to be missing most of tomorrow.

[edit]  Damn that red version tastes way nasty.

yellow-15-128.png

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7 hours ago, mlooney said:

An open rant to publisher, designers, and authors of role-playing game supplements:

For the love of all things lawful good do the following:

Speaking of copper pieces, assuming a gold piece is equal to a current US dollar is just silly.  A bog standard RPG gold piece weighs 9 grams.1  That puts its value at around $360 today.

Advanced space-going civilizations will not have high-tech melee weapons.  And if they do they will not be katanas.

Monomolecular weapons are impossible.  Stop using them

Chainsaw like swords, axes, and pole arms are silly.  Stop it.

Shotguns don't have nearly the spread of shot you think they do.  Consult this handy chart for the actual size.

Learn the difference between an Armored Personnel Carrier, a Tank, and a Self Propelled Gun.

Understand why multi-turret tanks went out of style in the late 20's early 30's of the 20th century.

Understand why a two-person crew of an armored fighting vehicle with a main gun is a bad idea.

Thank you.
Signed: a person who reads way too many RPG PDF files

1Most version of D&D, to include Pathfinder, put "coins" at 50 per lb.  That works out to almost exactly 9 grams per coin.

Injecting a little reality into the arguments here:

On gold: I think that people give them low value for the sake of raising the encumbrance of carrying around large amounts of cash. In real life, gold's value of around US$1k per Troy oz. makes it possible for an individual to carry around the equivalent of a few years' gross income for middle-class folks, but gameplay concerns might lead a GM to want to prevent players from walking around with that amount of buying power on their persons.

On melee weapons: Ordinarily, we would expect to see advanced civilizations using rayguns of some sort, or at least semiautomatic ballistic guns. If you have something like a Star Trek Phaser which is reliably capable of rendering an opponent unconscious non-lethally even if the opponent is wearing armor, then melee weaponry is rendered entirely moot. If you do need melee weaponry, all of that fancy-schmancy motorized or vibrating crap is rather pointless--all you need is a good old-fashioned blade that is presumably made of something tougher than the opponent's armor.

Monomolecular: Technically, any polymer is monomolecular, so you could just make it out of plastic. However, what most folks probably mean when they talk about a monomolecular weapon is that they want something that has the stiffness, sharpness, and compressive strength of synthetic diamond crystal, with the tensile and shear strength of carbon nanotubes.

APC: Meant chiefly to transport infantry and to fight off any soft targets that try to get close enough to shoot the infantry when they exit the APC. Expect machineguns but no big artillery piece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle

Tank: A heavily armored vehicle centered around a rotating turret with a main weapon typically of (in current designs) between 70 and 125 mm caliber, plus machineguns for point defense. Tanks are meant to be as mobile as possible given their relative firepower and armor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams

Self-propelled Artillery: A large artillery piece (typically 105 or 155 mm these days) on a mobile chassis. The key differences from tanks are the lack of rotating turret (the entire vehicle often rotates instead), much lighter armor, and lesser mobility. In exchange for these drawbacks, it can mount a more powerful gun for a given vehicle weight, and is cheaper to build and deploy. A self-propelled gun is not intended to drive about the battlefield with enemy fire coming from all sides--it is expected to "set up" in one spot, fire a few rounds, then move, preferably only taking fire from the "front". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_artillery

Multi-turret tanks: The penetration of an artillery shell scales as a function of the shell's mass. Thus, having one gun as large as possible will allow a tank to penetrate a heavier target than two smaller guns of equivalent total mass.

Finally, on a tank crew, even if the main gun is auto-loading, you still require a driver, a navigator/co-driver, a main gunner, and secondary gunners to man any point defense machineguns--and that's assuming that the tank's commander is performing one of these functions himself instead of being a separate position. Unlike in a fighter aircraft, the guy who is steering the vehicle is not operating any of the weapons--it's more like a heavy bomber, with the bombadier and machinegunners separate from the pilot/copilot.

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8 hours ago, ijuin said:

Finally, on a tank crew, even if the main gun is auto-loading, you still require a driver, a navigator/co-driver, a main gunner, and secondary gunners to man any point defense machineguns--and that's assuming that the tank's commander is performing one of these functions himself instead of being a separate position. Unlike in a fighter aircraft, the guy who is steering the vehicle is not operating any of the weapons--it's more like a heavy bomber, with the bombadier and machinegunners separate from the pilot/copilot.

In addition, in a fighting vehicle of any sort one of the most vulnerable components - and also one of the most easily replaced (if you have a spare on hand) components - and therefore one of the things you most want to carry spares for - is the crew.

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True, but even without having extra crewmembers on hand, it's just not possible to perform all of the functions necessary for operating a tank in battle with less than four people. Trying to have the driver or navigator operate the weapons means that they have to neglect one of their tasks while performing the other, which means not steering the tank while they're trying instead to steer the weapons.

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17 minutes ago, ijuin said:

True, but even without having extra crewmembers on hand, it's just not possible to perform all of the functions necessary for operating a tank in battle with less than four people.

The USSR and the Russians after that seem to get by with 3.  Driver, Gunner, and Commander.  They have an autoloader that replaces the loader.  The western version is 4, with a human loader.  The fact that almost every time there has been a battle between FSU tanks and NATO tanks the western tanks have won may or may not be related to this.

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I seem to have pulled my back out while shopping.  I have too many hurty bits in the lower left quadrant of my back of late.  Need to find a clinic that is taking new MediCare patients and have that looked at.

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5 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I seem to have pulled my back out while shopping.  I have too many hurty bits in the lower left quadrant of my back of late.  Need to find a clinic that is taking new MediCare patients and have that looked at.

Oww! Don't delay getting that one looked at. Trust me.

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On 3/26/2017 at 3:35 AM, ijuin said:

Chainsaw like swords, axes, and pole arms are silly.  Stop it.

I blame chainsaw manufacturers  for designing them in a way that looks like it can be weaponized.

14_4.jpg

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