Early Risers.

[DaveF]

A quick look in as I need to go and post a somewhat belated birthday card to my godson.  For some reason I always think his birthday is on the 16th, it was in fact on the 6th.

 

I started to put my family tree on Ancestry yesterday evening.  I checked what I was doing against the one my cousins work on and have found they have the wrong person as my mother.  The main reason is that although she was born at the end of August the birth doesn't seem to have been registered until October so if you put in her actual birthday you get the wrong person.  There was also a second marriage in the previous generation which makes it more complicated as her real grandmother died very young.   I will have to send Karen and Tim an e mail so they can correct it.

 

Apart from that nothing much to report.  Oh - a large wood pigeon is slowly dismantling the remains of the big heather I cut down and takling away bits for its nest.  Also it is warmer this morning.

 

David

[iL Dottore]

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

They are venomous so I wouldn't want to be threatened with one!

I didn't know that, but why am I not surprised!
 

Everything in Australia is venomous - even the Sheilas IF you cross 'em....

[Dave Hunt]

6 hours ago, BR60103 said:

I think that the UV activated stuff is not really a glue. I don't think it has any sticky properties.

What it does is solidify hard. To have it hold bits together requires a hole (spherical) in both 

 

My Dad was a research and development chemist whose speciality was UV reactants, absorbents, etc. and was involved with developing a UV sensitive resin for use in repairing gas and oil pipelines in the Middle East. The repair material was resin soaked bandages that could simply be wrapped round the pipes and left to harden by the sun’s rays, which happened quite quickly once the bandages were removed from their packaging. He was called one day by one of the engineers involved who said that they were having a great deal of trouble with the system because the local operatives were wasting most of the material by taking all the bandages required for the day’s work out of their wrapping before starting. The result was that most of them ended up as solid blocks before they could be used and nothing the engineers could say would change the situation. Hence the system was discontinued.

 

Dave

[PhilJ W]

10 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

One other thing to be aware of regarding salt intake actually does not involve salt itself.

 

If you are in the habit of taking "soluble" pain killers like paracetamol/co-codamol etc.  or effervescent vitamins or supplements  (calcium or magnesium for example) then be aware that these are heavily loaded with sodium, which is the bad bit of salt intake.  A quick calculation on my 1g "soluble" paracetamol  tablets shows that the sodium content is the equivalent of just under 1g salt.  So 3 tablets in the day has consumed over  half your WHO advised sodium intake.

Another thing that uses sodium is water softeners, the sort that go in jugs such as Brita. In fact the minerals in hard water are beneficial to health, and make better beer.

[Compound2632]

20 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

In fact the minerals in hard water are beneficial to health

 

... and reduce the likelihood of dying of poisoning from lead pipework.

 

I was going to write something about the Romans there, but on the whole I don't think their life expectancy was great enough for lead poisoning in soft water areas to be a significant factor.

[PhilJ W]

Morning all from Estuary-Land. Bladder control woke me up just before five this morning, then again at seven when I got up. The usual stiff and sore joints this morning but a couple of pills and a bit of moving about sorted that. Still getting the odd bout of hay fever, there was a short shower yesterday evening which makes some plants discharge their pollen. Not sure what I'll be doing today though there's a heap of washing to put on 😒.

[polybear]

50 minutes ago, Dave Hunt said:

My Dad was a research and development chemist whose speciality was UV reactants, absorbents, etc. and was involved with developing a UV sensitive resin for use in repairing gas and oil pipelines in the Middle East. The repair material was resin soaked bandages that could simply be wrapped round the pipes and left to harden by the sun’s rays, which happened quite quickly once the bandages were removed from their packaging. He was called one day by one of the engineers involved who said that they were having a great deal of trouble with the system because the local operatives were wasting most of the material by taking all the bandages required for the day’s work out of their wrapping before starting. The result was that most of them ended up as solid blocks before they could be used and nothing the engineers could say would change the situation. Hence the system was discontinued.

 

Dave

Just one word…..

Camels.

‘Nuff sed?

[jjb1970]

This is what the NHS should be investing in - dangleberry centres!

 

[tigerburnie]

1 hour ago, DaveF said:

A quick look in as I need to go and post a somewhat belated birthday card to my godson.  For some reason I always think his birthday is on the 16th, it was in fact on the 6th.

 

I started to put my family tree on Ancestry yesterday evening.  I checked what I was doing against the one my cousins work on and have found they have the wrong person as my mother.  The main reason is that although she was born at the end of August the birth doesn't seem to have been registered until October so if you put in her actual birthday you get the wrong person.  There was also a second marriage in the previous generation which makes it more complicated as her real grandmother died very young.   I will have to send Karen and Tim an e mail so they can correct it.

 

Apart from that nothing much to report.  Oh - a large wood pigeon is slowly dismantling the remains of the big heather I cut down and takling away bits for its nest.  Also it is warmer this morning.

 

David

I used the Ancestry site to do my family tree on my maternal side(my Dad was not British until later in his life, so difficult to do), be aware that when using other peoples input you will find many mistakes, some of my living relatives got things wrong on their pages. It is fun, but without paying for a lot of extras you will hit brick walls and may have to go to archives, libraries and churches to find more accurate details. If you go back a couple of hundred years, some of those documents are really difficult to read, the writing and wording is quite different. Go back further(as I did) and you will need to know a lot of latin too, have fun, I did.

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

I didn't know that, but why am I not surprised!

 

Platypus venom is not toxic, it was developed as a fighting weapon when male platypi get stuck into each other in a fight over a girl one, but it is apparently extremely painful - top 10 in this list at least.

 

https://www.treehugger.com/creatures-that-deliver-the-most-painful-stings-and-bites-4869305#:~:text=Bullet Ant&text=The bullet ant has the,the most painful sting%2C period.

 

In addition,  Morphine is completely ineffective against it, so as the doctors say here  - "You'll just havta put up with it, mate!"

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

 

Everything in Australia is venomous - even the Sheilas IF you cross 'em....

 

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[iL Dottore]

33 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

This is what the NHS should be investing in - dangleberry centres!

 

A post made for undoubtedly comic effect, BUT this (and walk-in-clinics) for similar services would greatly ease the pressure on NHS hospitals.

 

I think that one of the NHS’s biggest mistakes was to close local “cottage” hospitals; part of the thinking was sound: if you are undergoing a seriously complex surgical procedure you want it to be done in a well equipped hospital where the relevant surgical team is doing that sort of surgery on a daily or weekly basis. But the flip sde of that coin is that you don’t need a large central hospital/teaching hospital/medical research centre to do routine operations.
 

By piling everything from routine surgery to complex life-saving operations to ground-breaking, innovative state-of-the-art-surgery onto one hospital complex, something has to be de-prioritised and it’s usually the routine stuff. Perhaps it is time to consider reprising the 10 to 20 bed local cottage hospital.

 

Another effective way of relieving pressure on large hospital centres (and one used successfully in many US states and other countries) is the free-standing Emergency Room/A&E. Equipped with an X-Ray suite, a quick turn-around lab and a small dispensing pharmacy, such centres are designed to treat the “walking wounded”. Patients would be triaged, assessed, treated and discharged or (equally important) stabilised and sent on to the closest major medical centre.

 

When I was a paramedic during uni (it paid the bills) - which was a good AHEM years ago, we were instructed to assess the severity of a patient’s condition (we had several rating scales for that purpose) and head to the appropriate hospital. To illustrate: if someone fell off a horse, the injury was usually minor and off to the cottage hospital (the US equivalent, actually) we went; if a horse fell on someone it was usually major trauma so we shot off to the big teaching hospital….

[monkeysarefun]

3 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

My Dad was a research and development chemist whose speciality was UV reactants, absorbents, etc. and was involved with developing a UV sensitive resin for use in repairing gas and oil pipelines in the Middle East. The repair material was resin soaked bandages that could simply be wrapped round the pipes and left to harden by the sun’s rays, which happened quite quickly once the bandages were removed from their packaging. He was called one day by one of the engineers involved who said that they were having a great deal of trouble with the system because the local operatives were wasting most of the material by taking all the bandages required for the day’s work out of their wrapping before starting. The result was that most of them ended up as solid blocks before they could be used and nothing the engineers could say would change the situation. Hence the system was discontinued.

 

Dave

 

UV sensitive resin has had a huge kick-along over the last 5 or so years with the advent of Resin 3D printers. I got my first resin 3D printer in 2017 and the resins back then were very brittle - to the point that  if I dropped a print on a hard surface it'd shatter.  7 years and (eight 3D printers!) later its a different world.

 

Now you can get resins that once cured, can be drilled and machined in a lathe, others that are as flexible as rubber. You can get dental resins and temperature tolerant casting resins for reproducing jewellery.

 

On top of that the detail that they can reproduce is insane. Thats mainly  due to the increased performance of printers - my first one had a 2K LCD screen, my current one (as well as the even later one currently  on order...) has a  12K screen, but there is a 14K one out there now, but the resin too has to be able to match the performance of the latest printers so development there has also  been rapid. 

 

Basically resin printers work by sending a burst of UV light into the resin one layer at a time, and the smallest detail they can reproduce is one pixel, so the smaller the pixel size the finer the detail they can reproduce. 12K LCD screens have much smaller pixels than the original 2K LCD screens, so just as a 12K telly (when they release one!)  shows more detail than a 2K screen, the printed  detail possible on a printer with a 12K screen vs a 2K one is much greater.

 

Heres a piece I produced for a certain ER here, Drawn up in Blender, I was very  pleased with how much tiny detail came out. This was printed in "ABS-like" resin, and its properties when it comes to flexibility and hardness etc would be about the equivalent of say the plastic of an  Airfix kit. 

 

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[monkeysarefun]

26 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

If a horse fell on someone it was usually major trauma

 

 

Horses don't' just "fall" on you

 

You make it sound like they do it by accident....

 

 

 

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[DaveF]

1 hour ago, tigerburnie said:

I used the Ancestry site to do my family tree on my maternal side(my Dad was not British until later in his life, so difficult to do), be aware that when using other peoples input you will find many mistakes, some of my living relatives got things wrong on their pages. It is fun, but without paying for a lot of extras you will hit brick walls and may have to go to archives, libraries and churches to find more accurate details. If you go back a couple of hundred years, some of those documents are really difficult to read, the writing and wording is quite different. Go back further(as I did) and you will need to know a lot of latin too, have fun, I did.

 

I am fortunate as I have a handwritten tree for my father's side of the family going back to the late 1700s,  and a copy of work done by distant Australian relatives which goes back to the early 1700s, though part of that may be a bit conjectural.  It should make it easier as all off them have dates of birth, at least to the year.

 

On Mum's side of the family a paper copy goes back to the mid 19th century but then there seems to be a Dutch connection.

 

15 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

A post made for undoubtedly comic effect, BUT this (and walk-in-clinics) for similar services would greatly ease the pressure on NHS hospitals.

 

I think that one of the NHS’s biggest mistakes was to close local “cottage” hospitals; part of the thinking was sound: if you are undergoing a seriously complex surgical procedure you want it to be done in a well equipped hospital where the relevant surgical team is doing that sort of surgery on a daily or weekly basis. But the flip sde of that coin is that you don’t need a large central hospital/teaching hospital/medical research centre to do routine operations.
 

By piling everything from routine surgery to complex life-saving operations to ground-breaking, innovative state-of-the-art-surgery onto one hospital complex, something has to be de-prioritised and it’s usually the routine stuff. Perhaps it is time to consider reprising the 10 to 20 bed local cottage hospital.

 

Another effective way of relieving pressure on large hospital centres (and one used successfully in many US states and other countries) is the free-standing Emergency Room/A&E. Equipped with an X-Ray suite, a quick turn-around lab and a small dispensing pharmacy, such centres are designed to treat the “walking wounded”. Patients would be triaged, assessed, treated and discharged or (equally important) stabilised and sent on to the closest major medical centre.

 

When I was a paramedic during uni (it paid the bills) - which was a good AHEM years ago, we were instructed to assess the severity of a patient’s condition (we had several rating scales for that purpose) and head to the appropriate hospital. To illustrate: if someone fell off a horse, the injury was usually minor and off to the cottage hospital (the US equivalent, actually) we went; if a horse fell on someone it was usually major trauma so we shot off to the big teaching hospital….

 

In my town there is a small hospital with 2 wards used for geriatric patients recovering or whatever.  But it can also do X rays and has a good range of out patient clinics on specific days which work well.  It also has the surgeries for the town's GPs.

 

The general hopsital about 15 minutes away has a walk in centre for relatively minor isuses (more than needing a GP but less than A&E), apart from that it deals mainly with preplanned surgery,  It also has the out of hours GP service.

 

The specialist A&E hospital, 10 minutes away is for accidents and emergencies so almost all ambulances and the air ambulance go there.  Once a patient is over the worst they are then moved to one of the general or small hospitals to recover.

 

It seems to work well.

 

David

[monkeysarefun]

We do seem to have a lot of Medical Centres here.  It seems like every time something gets torn down a fence goes up around the site and a "Medical Centre Opening Soon" sign goes up on it. 

 

They invariably include a pathology lab plus an X-ray clinic and usually a pharmacy, so you can see a GP, give blood , go down the hall for an Xray and get all the results back then go off to get your script filled all in half an hour or so.

 

Most "bulk-bill" which means that for each consultation  they  claim the   mandated standard fee from the government but don't charge the patient anything additional, so they are effectively an NHS style "free" system except that you can see your doctor of choice, go to any medical centre you like and book an appointment online to any one that takes your fancy.

 

  Heightened costs  like rent, wages etc however  means an increasing number now  charge the patient the "Gap"  fee, ie the difference between the government mandated medicare allowance and what the medical centre estimates the actual cost to be, which can be in the $40 to $60 range,  but its still possible to shop around for one that bulk-bills without too much of a problem. Personally I've never paid to see a doctor.

 

In a practical sense of how it all works, , if I wanted to see a doctor tomorrow I could phone my regular doctor, assuming I'd found one I liked and had stuck with, or I could log into   several apps that'll let me search for an available  appointment in any medical centre or GP practice in  the area, and in addition they give you a biographical rundown on every  doctor that the search returned, along with any  speciality they had so if for instance I had a pain in my left elbow, I could search for  left elbow specialists and book an appointment directly with them. 

 

We have the choice of whether or not to allow our medical records to be  loaded onto a national database, and if we do that then we can chop and change doctors and the new one has access to all  our previous records. 

 

I pay private health insurance which is a cost that annoys me but if I didn't pay it I'd have to pay pretty much the equivalent in extra tax each year and in return I get a few extra benefits like immediate surgery if required in a private fancypants hospital with the surgeon of my choice (increasingly an ex-NHS escapee!) , dental and optical subsidies plustrendy quirks like discounted yoga sessions , cheap running shoes and so on. 

 

We sure do have a lot of medical centres though!

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[TheQ]

Cromer hospital was founded with donations in the 1800s, I'm pretty sure it would have been closed down by the NHS except for...

In July 2000...

"The £12 million Sagle Bernstein legacy and the £1.4 million Phyllis Cox legacy have both been used to fund the new Cromer Hospital. Construction work on the new hospital began on 1 September 2010 and work was completed on the new building in March 2012 with the new car park opening in July 2012 after the old building was demolished."

 

Lead in pipes may not have killed a lot of Romans, but the use of lead acetate as a sweetener in wealthy Romans wine, many be a contributory factor in the insanity of several Roman Emperors.

 

Meanwhile,

MRC accounts updated, 

Spoke to neighbours EX who still owns the property, while he was down the hole for the wall extension. He's  found a pebble flint wall down there ( 3 ft down there) but it goes off at a strange angle, not the same as the angle of my or his house. He's about to start filling the hole with a concrete & rubble mix. The rubble having been dug out of the hole, probably from the destruction of the pub formerly on my houses site.

 

Ben took me on the full long walk... Tis quite warm out of the wind, lots of insects around..

 

Now off to play with the spinny thingy.

 

[jjb1970]

I was surprised that Singapore has fewer physicians per capita than the UK. And it's not a marhmginal difference,  the UK seems to have about 50% more physicians per capita.

 

Why it is surprising is there are clinics everywhere here and there's no issue with appointments, you just walk in. And it's not because Singaporean people avoid doctors, the MoH has an active health screening program encouraging regular health screening and people go to the doctors at the stop of a hat for anything and everything.

 

The system here is much more decentralised and built around small clinics in the community. That said, based on our limited experience the clinics are extremely well equipped and seem very efficient.  Despite being private you don't see many non-clinical staff and doctors seem to have a lot more decision making responsibility. Another thing which might surprise British people is the ease of using the system and how fees are managed. I can use an app which is cashless and automatically generates a letter of guarantee for specialised treatment. There is government insurance and government polyclinic for low income and unemployed people. I have to say, you don't hear many negative comments about healthcare here, on the contrary people are very positive about it.

 

What limited debate we have on health care in Britain seems predicated on an assumption that there are two options, the NHS or 'American health care', ignoring that there are lots of models for health care provision. I  have to say that the system here seems superior to the British model.

[monkeysarefun]

28 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I  have to say that the system here seems superior to the British model.

 

Sadly, many  countries can now say that.  The "NHS is the Envy Of The World!!"  claim is a bit tattered due to either wilful vandalism or incompetence. 

 

Which is a massive shame - The Whitlam government in the 1970's  created  our national system of free universal healthcare   based upon it and gave us Medicare, back when the NHS was a system to aspire  to  and one to copy.

 

 

Edited May 8 by monkeysarefun

[45156]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 Perhaps it is time to consider reprising the 10 to 20 bed local cottage hospital.

Couldn't agree more Flavio - we still have a few of these in Shropshire.  When I was taken ill, I was admitted to the large (and inefficient) 500+ bed centralised hospital, and most if not all ERs are well aware of the outcome.  The food was terrible and the standards of nursing were, to say the least, variable, as wad the quality of the doctoring.  I fully understand that for me, that was the best place to be as I needed some quality care after my brain infection.  However, had I been able to go to a local hospital with competent care, and less pressure to get rid of me to release the bed, my condition might not have deteriorated - and if it did,  I would still have been sent to the major hospital for more intense treatment - by fast ambulance with blues, only 40 minutes away. 

 

When I was discharged into rehab, the small hospital was excellent - caring staff, and better food  - the only real issue was that it only had 24 beds - but they did not seem to have the same obsession with getting the beds available.  The doctors were actually three of the local GPs on a rota basis.  It seemed to work well.  So what is the future for this - it is under threat of closure.

 

Afternoon All

 

Not a lot to report, had a pretty bad night's sleep with about 1.5 hours lying there with lots of thoughts churnng.

 

Dinner calls.

Regards to All

Stewart

Edited May 8 by 45156

[Andy Hayter]

It's easy to make comparisons @jjb1970 but not see the full picture.  So I will start by asking,

What is the Singaporean age distribution and how does that compare with the UK? 

How is mental health viewed in the little island compared with the archipelago?  Is it a quasi-taboo topic?

 

 

[jjb1970]

10 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

It's easy to make comparisons @jjb1970 but not see the full picture.  So I will start by asking,

What is the Singaporean age distribution and how does that compare with the UK? 

How is mental health viewed in the little island compared with the archipelago?  Is it a quasi-taboo topic?

 

 

 

Mental health isn't a taboo, and in general people seem if anything more open about health than in the UK.

 

[Hroth]

4 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

UV sensitive resin has had a huge kick-along over the last 5 or so years with the advent of Resin 3D printers. I got my first resin 3D printer in 2017 and the resins back then were very brittle - to the point that  if I dropped a print on a hard surface it'd shatter.  7 years and (eight 3D printers!) later its a different world.

 

Now you can get resins that once cured, can be drilled and machined in a lathe, others that are as flexible as rubber. You can get dental resins and temperature tolerant casting resins for reproducing jewellery.

 

On top of that the detail that they can reproduce is insane. Thats mainly  due to the increased performance of printers - my first one had a 2K LCD screen, my current one (as well as the even later one currently  on order...) has a  12K screen, but there is a 14K one out there now, but the resin too has to be able to match the performance of the latest printers so development there has also  been rapid. 

 

Basically resin printers work by sending a burst of UV light into the resin one layer at a time, and the smallest detail they can reproduce is one pixel, so the smaller the pixel size the finer the detail they can reproduce. 12K LCD screens have much smaller pixels than the original 2K LCD screens, so just as a 12K telly (when they release one!)  shows more detail than a 2K screen, the printed  detail possible on a printer with a 12K screen vs a 2K one is much greater.

 

Heres a piece I produced for a certain ER here, Drawn up in Blender, I was very  pleased with how much tiny detail came out. This was printed in "ABS-like" resin, and its properties when it comes to flexibility and hardness etc would be about the equivalent of say the plastic of an  Airfix kit. 

 

 

Very nice!

Re: your comparison with an Airfix kit, it certainly looks like something that comes out of Dapol using the old Airfix tooling....

 

 

As an illustration and that I'm not trying to be sarky.

 

 

Edited May 8 by Hroth
image

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, TheQ said:

...but the use of lead acetate as a sweetener in wealthy Romans wine, may be a contributory factor in the insanity of several Roman Emperors.

The ultimate low calorie sweetener!

 

It may not be an UP foodstuff, but it certainly isn't good for you. Fortunately for us, the cost of 1kg of lead acetate (about US $6755.26/Kg) far exceeds the cost of 1 kg of sugar (or even High Fructose Corn Syrup) - thus not making it attractive to those (ahem) "entrepreneurs" wishing to create an even more profitable industrial LDC

[PhilJ W]

4 hours ago, tigerburnie said:

I used the Ancestry site to do my family tree on my maternal side(my Dad was not British until later in his life, so difficult to do), be aware that when using other peoples input you will find many mistakes, some of my living relatives got things wrong on their pages. It is fun, but without paying for a lot of extras you will hit brick walls and may have to go to archives, libraries and churches to find more accurate details. If you go back a couple of hundred years, some of those documents are really difficult to read, the writing and wording is quite different. Go back further(as I did) and you will need to know a lot of latin too, have fun, I did.

Yes it is a lot of fun, and sometimes embarrassing. When I started looking into my family tree I discovered one of my great grandmothers had the maiden name of Mogg. Being such an unusual surname I started tracing it back and got as far back as my 3X great grandfather a farmer living in Podimore, Somerset in the early 19th century. I was using Genes reunited through which you can compare family trees so I looked for the surname Mogg in the surrounding villages and contacted the owners of the family trees. One of the first I contacted replied that her 3X great grandfather was a brother of my 3X great grandfather and whats more she sent me a copy of the Mogg family tree dating back to Tudor times when the name was 'invented'. It was adopted by a father and son originally named Keen in the mid 1550's when Mary Tudor was on the throne.