• 26 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s very difficult and dangerous to be near an MRI ‘shutting down’. Assuming what you mean is turning of the magnet. The magnet is always on, its a coil of superconducting wire submerged in liquid helium with a very large permanent current flowing around it. In order to turn off the magnet quickly, the electric current must be quenched, which can happen if the coil every stops being a super conductor. The current starts heating the coil, causing the liquid helium to boil off, which doesn’t cool the coils as efficiently, and causes a rapid run-away effect where huge volumes of helium explode out of the machine, displacing all the breathable air in the room and blasting all the doors off their hinges, maybe even breaking windows. There’s a lot of energy stored in the coil. It’s not easy to turn it off.

    Look up videos of MRI quenching



  • This exact thought has been tossing around in the back of my mind since I read it. I was trying to figure out the legitimate reasons for not wanting to live in a city, and as far as I can tell, there are a few. But I’m not sure if it’s worse than living 45min away from downtown in some suburb and always feeling stranded without gasoline, no-matter if you are at home(too far away from the grocery store), in the city, or somewhere on the long highway connecting the two. There is no place for a person without a car really, not for more than a couple hours.



  • I just read it, what a good article. I’m not sure I see the vision at the end, but I totally agree with the way he describes every aspect of the problem.

    Some of my favorite excerpts, in addition to the one you quoted:

    “The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

    You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

    These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

    No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.