• 8 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • Losing weight and not sleeping face up may help in any case.

    If you usually feel tired or sleepy during the day, it could be sleep apnea, which can have long term negative effects on your health. In that case, see a doctor, who will usually perform tests while you sleep and then may prescribe CPAP. If that doesn’t work or you find it too uncomfortable and the apnea is severe, you may be offered surgery.

    There are some commercial devices that might help. Nasal strips are an option if you suspect your nasal passages could be compromised (deviated nasal septum). Chin straps and other devices that position your jaw do help in some cases wherein the issue is in your throat, especially when combined with CPAP.

    Edit: also, don’t take medical advice from people on the internet ;)



  • somewhere with less ethics

    Hysterectomy is the standard procedure, but obviously isn’t performed if the patient doesn’t want it (which in this case is idiotic, but removing organs without consent is never allowed). The reason she flew abroad was not that her doctors would force her to undergo hysterectomy (which would be against medical ethics), but simply that they had less experience in placenta accreta surgery. Many patients that suffer this complication aren’t in such a ridiculous situation, and keeping their womb is an interesting option for them, it is routinely offered in mild cases. Since placenta accreta is very common in China, there are many doctors there who are specialized in it, that’s all.




  • Thank you! :)

    I managed to get 4 piezo elements to work, limited by the FPGA. This was actually enough for some reasonable horizontal resolution since I used a phase array configuration, so the downside was the electronics had to generate very precisely timed pulses. The fourth prototype had 10 working elements thanks to replacing the MCU-FPGA duo with just a more powerful FPGA and using conductive glue to more reliably connect the elements themselves.

    It was configurable to use any even divisor of 120 MHz, but in practice anything over 1 MHz would not even make it out of the acoustic lens due to the low voltage and low quality impedance matching layer. And much lower frequencies are barely useful anyways, so the true working range was narrow.

    For the acoustic lens, I used the parametric design software OpenSCAD, with an equation for aberration-free lenses I had found somewhere and saved long before (will find it if you want) and the speed of sound in the different materials.



  • Of course!

    I wanted to test whether a cheap piezo buzzer could be used as a crude ultrasound probe. It worked, so I tried to upgrade it into full-blown ultrasound imaging. The third iteration of that did produce an image, using a piezo buzzer cut in sections, a cheap FPGA, a MCU, custom PCB and mostly 3D printed pieces (acoustic lens, etc.). Aside from the expected low resolution, turned out that it wouldn’t image anything beyond about 1 cm.

    I did make a fourth iteration of the device, much smaller and theoretically much better. But life happened and I never finished the coding part.










  • Countries anger and provoke each others’ populations by pointing out the bad stuff, and defend against that by censoring or otherwise cracking down on dissent. Articles like this are just attacks against us in this process, true, but I think specific ones like this are still useful, when critically understood, to help us realize that not only the countries we don’t like use those authoritarian tricks, but more or less every one (and those countries that don’t are couped by one or another who does).