bahurd

iTrader: (8)

TBH, all I remember about waiting in line to buy gas was being pissed. Not too bad where I lived but I remember news with lines in the dozens of cars.

Too young to think about commie/capitalist, just trying to survive... I mean it was only maybe 6 years before that gas was $0.25/gal for high test!

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

Micro-economics - possibly the single best college class that I have ever taken. It was that class - a prerequisite for my college's school of business - that led me to selecting economics as a minor.

portabull

loved micro-economics, hated macro-economics which always reminded me of this joke:

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

As an undergrad at UF, you had to take either micro or macro. I took macro, and hated it. Don't remember much other than the phrase "velocity of money" and lots of discussion about guns and butter. The prof looked like Bill Nye, but was about as stimulating to listen to as Henry Kissinger reading the Delaware corporate tax code. It was in one of the giant lecture halls that could probably have seated the entire population of Norway.


The nerdier part of me, in reading that joke, thinks "No, the physicist would have started by presupposing that the can was resting on a frictionless surface in a vacuum."

kenzo42

iTrader: (6)

Where can I find this microswitch? Is it too specialized for Fry's? It's made by BBJ and it's for an Autochron timer switch.

Thanks.

good2go

iTrader: (2)

^^ Used to be I pulled out the Thomas books. Looks like it's online now:
Industrial Catalogs from Manufacturers and Distributors on ThomasNet.com
http://www.thomasnet.com/suppliers/

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

ramble/
So a co-worker of mine tested his 13 year old for depression, and apparently the kid has a genetic mutation something something... Something odd with Methylfolate? My first though was B9 ? The kid lives in his kid cave playing video games and doesn't eat very healthy. Not one myself to suggest SSRIs for a growing kid. (Guessing that's the way my co-worker is going to go anyways.) He's a single dad, has depression himself (runs in the family he says). Doesn't cook, McD's is always around the corner and from what I know it's what the kid has grown up with when living with the mom.

Thoughts?
/ramble

good2go

iTrader: (2)

Always pisses me off when I hear stuff like this, where the "fix" is to medicate.

I think it's wrong to medicate a child (yes, 13 is a child) until the basics are all completely solid and stabilized to normalcy. Those basics being a genuinely healthy diet (as free of processed foods as possible), a significant amount of routine exercise, and proper sleep. I believe if you stabilize those 3 things, you can eliminate the need for at least 90% of what gets routinely shoved down our kids throats. (Hell, adults too for that matter.)

rleete

iTrader: (21)

You are what you eat. Eat crap, feel like crap.

codrus

I think that's mostly BS.

Current pseudo-science, popular "alternative" medicine focuses on diet. Why? Two reasons as I see it. The first is that's something that it's possible (if motivationally difficult) to control, the other is it enables people who *do* control it to feel superior to those who do not.

Yes, there are genuine health implications of diet, lots of them even. But most of the BS that's making the rounds on the net and Facebook these days isn't science, it's anecdotes, "feel good" BS, or at best single studies with insufficient data being mis-interpreted out of context by people who don't understand statistics. And that's the good part, the bad part is pure quackery and fraud, perpetrated by charlatans out to make a buck by selling books. The patent medicine criminals of the early 1900s didn't go away when the FDA started regulating drug advertising, they just moved into "vitamins", "herbal remedies", "dietary supplements" and diet books.

This stuff is dangerous because it tells people not to believe their doctors. Steve Jobs died because he believed in this kind of quackery instead of science-based medicine.

Depression? Depression is not just feeling sad, it's a chemical imbalance in the neurotransmitters in the brain. We don't really know *why* it happens, but it's not something you fix with diet.

--Ian

shuiend

iTrader: (24)

I just ate some funfetti cupcakes. I feel fettitastic.

aidandj

iTrader: (5)

I agree with Ian. When I eat a big Mac it makes me happy. When I eat kale I want to kill myself.

Depression has been proven to be genetic. If you don't believe it I will lump you in with those anti vaxxer ********.

Yes a healthy diet had benefits. But it doesn't cure all. And it sure as hell won't fix all medical issues.

Bacon is my cure for depression.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Is there a part number on it? The writing I see in the photo is just the electrical maximum rating (2 amps @ 125 VAC.)

Digikey and Mouser are my usual go-to places for hard to find stuff like this. Even if you don't find an exact duplicate, switches like that tend to fall into de-facto standard dimensions, and it's clearly a SPDT configuration from the image.

If you can determine the dimensions, you can probably find something interchangeable with it here: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/...0&pageSize=500

I'd wager than an Omron model D2F would work.

good2go

iTrader: (2)

You guys are taking it to the opposite extreme. I'm not talking about new age pseudo medicine, herbal/vitamin bullshit, or kale grown under sunlight filtered through crystals; just plain old "real" food (and no fukin cheetos washed down with redbull).

As far as accurately diagnosing a true psych disorder in 13yo, good luck. The variables that exist with a subject on the cusp of puberty and just all the normal self-awareness/ identity discovery that goes on with a person at that age is enough too wildly distort the findings. Plenty of docs happy to do so though, apparently.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

We already have a dedicated thread for discussing food/ingredient-fads.


Serious question, with preamble:


At work, at any given moment, I have exactly one "current" spiral-bound notebook. I typically carry one of the half-letter variety, stuffed into the back of my jeans, with a mechanical pencil in my shirt pocket. No, I do not* own a pocket-protector. As many of my silk shirts have no pocket, I often carry the mechanical pencil (and a black Sharpie, and a red Pilot Fineliner Marker Pen) clipped into the seam of the silk shirt. The net effect of this look is "Yes, I am a nerd, but I am also in charge of this operation, and I have the red pen to prove it. You see this slik shirt, these dark jeans, and these boots? This is what I wear when I have lunch with the CEO." I carry a clipboard** only on rare occasion. I go through about one notebook per month. It gets used to jot down pretty much everything of significance which I encounter. Wire numbers, people I need to call, diagrams for stuff I need to design / build / reverse-engineer, to-do lists, etc. When a notebook is full, I toss it in a haphazard pile in a drawer with no real organizational scheme, and open a new one. Once every year or so, I clean my office and toss the old notebooks, along with unpaid invoices, massively obsolete wiring diagrams, business cards from people I don't care about, solid-state storage media smaller than 2 GB or so, receipts that I've forgotten to turn in for reimbursement (my personal record for late-reimbursement is seven years),* and the carcasses of whatever has died behind my rear-most desk. That's the one against the back wall, and it's hard to clean behind.
This works extremely well when I'm at work. I buy notebooks with all different colored covers, and am pretty good at remembering which color notebook any given piece of information was in (to a depth of a few months, after which the information is probably useless, anyway.)

It's inconvenient when I'm not at work, and suddenly need to recall something I jotted down an hour / day / month ago. This is typically at home in the evening, but sometimes occurs when I'm at the doctor's office / grocery store / high-rollers' casino / horse track / barber shop / volcano-lair of my arch nemesis.



I see that there are a variety of digital notepads on the market, ranging from "kickstarter vaporware" to "expensive plaything that was positively reviewed in Forbes" to "product of questionable veracity described in Chinglish on Amazon / Fleabay."

Any first-hand experiences here?

In a perfect world, I'd like something that recognizes my handwriting* with 100% accuracy, and stores it as searchable data. But I realize that this is probably an unrealistic goal. I'd settle for something that stores what I've written (and drawn) in graphical format, organized by date and time. It would need to be remotely-accessible from my Windows PC and Android devices, without paying a monthy fee for a cloud-based subscription service (Dropbox would be ideal, and I can arrange for this to happen in the guise of local storage.) Syncing needs to happen automagically, either via WiFi or whenever it's in close proximity to my desktop PC at work.

Bonus points if I can add content remotely while on a mind-expanding bender away from the office, and have it magically appear on the notepad the following day.

kenzo42

iTrader: (6)

No part #, I'm not that lucky. I found a replacement from a place called Pololu Robotics in Las Vegas with cheap $3 shipping, though. Thanks for the help.

cal_len1

In college, my school had a tablet PC program, basically the older version of this Fujitsu America - LIFEBOOK&reg P727 Tablet PC. I took all my notes on this thing in college, by writing on it as you would a notebook, in OneNote. At that point 2009-10, Windows had a feature where you could teach it your handwriting, and it would convert it to text. I never really used the text recognition though, as my engineering classes required me to draw non-standard shapes, but it could work if you need to record just text. I think something like this could be a solution, because if you have office these days, you can get it to automatically sync to Office 365 "on the cloud" using OneNote. You could then access it wherever you are.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Yeah, I have to agree with the "fix your diet first" group. I don't think a bad diet causes depression, but it sure can be a factor in the severity of it.

I know a guy whose wife struggles with anxiety attacks and depression. When I found out that she was drinking 3 to 4 Diet Cokes a day, I sent him some info about the effects of aspartame. He thanked me but said that "taking away" her Diet Cokes would just cause more anxiety, and that their life is just easier if she takes her psych meds.

Now, I'm all for psych meds if that's what you need. But if you could avoid that just by changing your dietary habits? Wouldn't that be worth it?

And I say that as someone who watched his wife drastically change her diet for a couple years in order to address an ongoing (medical, not psych) issue.

czubaka

iTrader: (3)

I suffer from depression, somewhere over 25 years now (I don't recommend it). It's abated some, even after getting off of my main antidepressant. One of the big changes I made was quitting diet sodas. I don't know if that helped in the mental area, but it was a massive change for the positive in my eating. With the aspartame, I never felt full, always hungry. Within two days after stopping, I could enjoy a meal and feel content. Best change I've made so far.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Pretty much same for me. Several colors of spiral bound notepads, 1 for each month. In a pile in a closet that I might ditch after a couple years. Early in my career it was the little pocket daytimer that was developed into a little empire of expensive predefined notebooks that really never supported my level of disarray.

For an electronic version, I use Google Keep on pretty much everything so it's synced between them automatically. I tend to use it when I'm driving or in a factory and need something quickly like snapping a picture note.

I find it takes mental power to force myself to take digital notes where any piece of paper handy will usually suffice.