Half your age plus seven is a really good rule. It works for all ages and is solid for keeping you near those of a similar level of development. If I had a similar situation I would be concerned.

Concerned does not mean stepping in and being an ass. It means paying a lot of attention to what is happening and how. What situations are allowed to exist, what conditions are placed, what level of alone time etc. It also means conversations and resources. Condoms are one type of protection, though only moderately effective. Assertive communication skills are another. But the best protection is knowing that she has allies.

You can be the ally she may need. You can be trustworthy, available, honest, direct, loving, and protective. You can be there no matter what to support her. You can bring something to her attention for her to consider, then trust her to think about it, learn from the experiences of those around her, and to talk to you when she needs more help. You can be explicitly on her side, no maybe or sort of, on her side.

Alternatively you can go against her. You can show her that you don’t trust her or her judgement by restricting her access to this person. You can show her that you think of her as a child and that you will never respect her. It doesn’t matter if it is true, it is how she sees it that matters.

Having a way out, no matter the time of day, an unconditional “If you need to get out of something or somewhere I will be there”, something she can rely on, that is the key thing she needs. If she thinks she will get anger or retribution she will be ripe for abuse. If she thinks she is safe with you and can bring a challenge that you will help her solve she will be able to recruit all of your skills and experience when she needs it.

Benedict Cumberbutch is all I can see… Nicely done

Yep, so good to be able to recover. I love btrfs for this exact reason. Immediately before updates a new snapshot is taken and if I lose power or similar it doesn’t matter, I can just boot to the state before the update. Linux is awesome, the full ecosystem around it is amazing, made by such passionate nerds, we are very lucky.

What I don’t get is why they don’t make a model with more battery space to flatten out the back. I would love a phone with 10Ah instead of 3Ah and I already carry a battery pack for this exact reason. The lack of options is super annoying.

If you have a variation in your genome it may not manifest in a change in your proteome or phenotype. Many variations of a single nucleotide actually don’t change the selected amino acid. For example in English we have the spellings mom and mum, one American and one other, and both are understood and mean the same thing. Whereas dog and dug mean something very different. In your specific case the change you have likely makes no difference at all. It could be a chunk that is not read, a chunk which is snipped out, and chunk which has almost no impact on expression, and so on.

Fear of sensory issues is valid and normal. Fear of being treated in a way you don’t like by family is both common and difficult to resolve. Talking to your family, specifically your dad, about how this behaviour makes you feel may solve it, but it is also possible it will backfire. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about how they will behave other than to let them know that it’s going to cause you distress.

Speaking to your mother is probably a more effective strategy in this case. Explaining the situation and asked her not to talk to your father yet but to first understand what is happening and why it’s a problem for you is probably going to be more effective. If she is able to understand it and explain it back to you in a way that makes sense then she may be able to talk to him in a way that will be more effective given her experience with him. It is worth saying that you value the relationship with him and don’t want to cause harm to that relationship as part of the reason why you’re speaking to her rather than speaking to him directly.

As for the actual surgery, i’ve had many surgeries and i have never found the inclusion of metal to be particularly comfortable. I’ve had it screws put into a burn as well as metal pills which continued to protrude from my flesh after the surgery for multiple weeks. In need the case was it incredibly pleasant, but it was tolerable and the fact that it was time limited made it much more manageable.

The post nasal drip that you’ve been experiencing probably impacts you every day. If you could have a temporary set of suffering and in exchange have a permanent solution to that problem it is likely worth it if the success rate is high enough. I don’t know about the success rate for that particular surgery for your particular condition. That said if there was something that could resolve the issue and had low enough risk i would consider it a worthwhile trade.

The same goes for the sleep., Having a few days of really crappy sleep as a result of anesthesia, post surgical pain, and discomfort from the presence of a splint or similar items is not much to pay for better sleep for the rest of your life. It may suck for a couple of days. But chances are it will become a memory that you won’t really experience at the same level as you are experiencing now in anticipation. For me i was worried about open heart surgery and experienced some distress at the idea of the amount of pain it would cause. Now i can remember that it caused pain, however i cannot remember the pain in a sensory way like i could predict the pain. It is much more tolerable after the fact.

Good luck!

Yep, and surviving longer increases cancer rates. Cancer used to be a death sentence, now it is far less so. Many cancers which were a short time from death at diagnosis are now routine to remove or fix. Others that were soon fatal have 5 year survival over 90%, and some are even higher.

We haven’t cured cancer just like we haven’t cured industrial accidents, but honestly, so few people are eaten by hungry machines and left disfigured that it is likely you know less than a handful. Not cured but reduced to a much more manageable level.

I have well above average vision and my partner has slightly below average. I can see the pixels on a 4k screen at a distance my partner cannot make out pixels on 720p. But both of us find 60Hz, the default for monitors, to be choppy. I think we have reached a fairly good level for pixel density but the refresh rate will keep going up to something like 150-200Hz for displays. Adaptive sync with stable parts being 60Hz and moving parts being higher make sense, as do different refresh rates for different colours. I think eink is also going to play a role as it doesn’t flicker except when updating and it looks very similar to paper in terms of detail density.

Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.

For your next hop consider EndeavourOS. It is Arch based and so has pacman and the AUR but it also has sane defaults and good configuration tools. Also, the default is quite pretty. Much less work to get a system going but all the flexibility of a pure Arch install.

The crazy thing is we actually do have things that work in humans but not in mice. Mice are omnivores and are very different in terms of optimal energy state. They tend to run in glucose more easily than on fat and their whole biology is built to be small and fast, with short life spans.

Checking how DNA repair works in an animal which lives for maybe 2 years is great for understanding DNA repair in short lived organisms, but we have tk repair damage for 50 times as long. It is just so much more complex and requires such different tools when you switch from maybe 2 years to maybe 80 years, it really isn’t sane to assume it will all carry over.

Now for an accute toxin, say tobacco, sure, some things work just fine. There is not a huge difference between humans and mice when subjected to cyanide or arsenic. Being crushed by a falling piano is going to kill both of us. But a chronic poison? That will take decades to kill? That is very different. We can shed cells in a different way to how they can. We have more mass to store things. We have more energy storage. We have bigger kidneys with more opportunities for filtering. We are different.

When we enter ketosis we have some fairly significant cancer responses. When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting. This does not replicate in mice. So yes, some treatments (not cures because that doesn’t really apply) do work in humans and not in mice.

To be clear though, the two defined states are separated by a voltage gap, so either it is on or off regardless of how on or how off. For example, if the off is 0V and the on is 5V then 4V is neither of those but will be either considered as on. So if it is above thecriticam threshold it is on and therefore represents a 1, otherwise it is a 0.

An analogue computer would be able to use all of the variable voltage range. This means that instead of having a whole bunch of gates working together to represent a number the voltage could be higher or lower. Something that takes 64 bits could be a single voltage. That would mean more processing in the same space and much less actual computation required.

I used spite.

I lived with my partner and two friends who all smoked at the time. We all decided to quit on new years day and by about 2am both of my friendship had started again and by 4am my partner had started too. Pure burning spite and superiority kept me from starting again.

It felt really good to my petty younger self to be haughty and superior, but I was definitely ungracious about it. My partner somehow managed to stay with me through that, they are a very tolerant person, and we ended up getting married and are still together now 19 years later.

My partner also quit about 10 years later using a vape. They outsourced nicotine dosage to me and I was manually mixing their juice, so I reduced it very very slowly. Each time I reduced it the frequency of puffs went up for a while then tapered back to the previous level. It took about a week to level out and about two weeks to use the bottle and I would then adjust again. It took most of a year to slowly land at zero but then it was done and vaping was only done with nicotine free juice and it only lasted a month or two after that. I would strongly encourage it as a less harmful version of smoking and as a reasonable quitting aid.

So other people will detail all of the products which can assist you but I am going to recommend some exercises instead. Much of the pain comes first from fatigue of muscles and second from the soft posture that happens after fatigue. Both cause pain, though in different ways, and both can be helped by a few fairly simple exercises.

First, standing on your toes will build your arch. Going up and down, bouncing, slowly raising and lowering, all of these will help train your calves and the support muscles in and around your feet and ankles. This will help stabilise your ankles and that will actually cascade all the way up your legs, back, and even neck. Some people I have worked with have had a reduction in neck pain from simply bounding on their toes when possible.

Second, you need flexibility in your ankles. 6 hours standing is absolute abuse for your joints and they need your support to be OK after that. Squats, especially deep squats, can help with ankle flexibility and strength. Reaching your toes will lengthen the muscles on the back side of your body, all the say up. Getting to having your hands flat on the floor while having your legs straight will improve your back flexibility a lot. Rolling your ankle a little to the side while very very lightly loaded can train the stabiliser muscles for strength at extension.

I would also recommend going barefoot when possible, at home etc, so that your feet can do the work. This will help them train for when you have to wear shoes.

As for the ibuprofen, it is a tool but it has consequences. I would recommend using ice packs and hot water bottles to alternate the temperate of your ankles when they are sore. Spend about 5 minutes with the ice, then 5 with heat, back to ice again if you need. Ibuprofen removes inflammation but you actually need inflammation to heal well, so use it as needed but try to do the temperature methods first if you can. The same goes for paracetamol, use it when it is the best tool but try the other tools first.

Oh, and for your ankles and feet just feeling awful consider a bucket of fairly hot water. Soak your feet for as long as you like. It works really well and is mostly consequence free.

Some cats are just like that. Mine will look at a laser dot and watch it for a while, but he really needs to actually catch something to be happy with it and will lose interest without winning.

I got some toys from Temu the other day and he loves them. They are balls that roll themselves and have a little frame with a tail. The movement is somewhat chaotic with pausing, shaking, and reversing. Because they are balls they tend to drift to the left or right so they don’t just go back and forth in the same line. He will watch them move until they stop then have a big pupil dilation reaction watching them paused and eventually hit them. If they move before he bops them then he keeps watching, but if he acts quickly enough he bops it and it looks like it reacts and runs away.

He also absolutely loves the cheap versions of Da Bird, a carbon rod with a toy on the end of a line. It looks like a bird when you swing it around the room and you can make it land on things and wiggle which really gets him engaged.

I had tonnes of problems when I used Mint which went away when I switched to Arch. I switched from Arch to EndeavourOS and didn’t get the problems coming back. I think EndeavourOS is about on par with Mint in terms of difficulty and set up time, but seems more stable and capable. I use KDE and the associated Bluetooth management stack and it works well.

That said, in the rare case I do have an issue I just restart Bluetooth through systemctl and it starts working again. The most recent time I had this was when I had my left earbud working on my phone and my right on my computer. It worked fine until I stepped away for a second, it dropped from my phone but not my computer, but then the left earbud tried to join up with the right connecting to the PC and everything broke. A quick restart of Bluetooth and boom, all good.

Sudden changes are generally worth investigating. Unfortunately it can be hard to get actual medical care relating to menstruation and other “women’s issues” as a lot of doctors are quite limited in their training.

The key would be to get an idea of how much you atet bleeding and at what level of consistency. Is it a constant flow? Is it coming in waves after cramps? Does it come with pain beyond normal levels? Is the colour different to what you are used to? Bright red?

If you are having ongoing heavy bleeding there could be an issue and it should be investigated if possible. That said, my partner has had heavy periods since childhood and only suffers low iron as a consequence, so the range of normal or fine is fairly wide.

Fantastic, the dishwashing gloves are an absolute winner. If she finds something they aren’t good enough for consider a second set of gloves inside them, such as cotton gloves or disposable latex gloves. This further reduces sensation through the gloves and enhances the protection.

Just a quick point on the cost of nuclear. A large part of the cost of nuclear is due to the very intense safety systems which have been added on a little at a time. Each small safety thing has increased the cost but nobody has taken all of the intentions of those changes and integrated them into a stable and safe system without the need for all the little safety features.

The best example I can give is cars. Adding air bags, lane change detection, car in front detection, ABS, and so on each makes cars safer, but never questions the underlying adduction that cars are good. Why not trains?

In rectors we can have passive safety systems where the moderator is a liquid which is blocked in by a solid plug. The solid plug is frozen moderator and sits at the bottom of the system. If the power is cut or fails the plug stops being cooled and melts, draining the moderator. Without the moderator the neutrons are going too fast to trigger the chain reactions and everything stops. No sensors or control systems are needed, it just passively stops and cools naturally, while also being way cheaper.

Could it also have been the texture of the insides of the pumpkin? Was she wearing thick gloves? I know a couple of people who would find that specific texture awful. That said, knowing she can step away is good, being reminded at the first sign of trouble can help, but ultimately she will have to learn her own limits and learn how to assert them. This is a great situation to learn from and practice that skill.