Interesting but the wrong model for me. I'm looking for a Spotify/Netflix type solution. All the news in one place with annual payment for all I care to consume. Otherwise I have to think about each article and act to keep the costs in line.
Think about that: children have died from 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴. It's easy to be smug power user complaining about design when you only consider how you interact with things.
This very thing happened to me decades ago: I walked into parents' bedroom to find my fearless younger brother, ignoring my yells, climbing up the handles on the front of my father's dresser. I yelled for my parents but I couldn't stop him fast enough. As the dresser began to tip I got between him and it and pushed upward, both removing him from the dresser and tipping it back to rest.
I was truly shaken and astonished that this child might have killed himself, since I knew that the top drawer was filled with my father's most valuable (and heaviest) WWII memorabilia and that the entire dresser, about 5 feet tall, was hardwood with decorative protrusions on the front.
Makes you wonder how we as humans haven't evolved the ability to innately perceive being crushed by large objects.
I know I become hyper aware of any small black specks in my peripheral vision since they resemble spiders that could have posed a threat to our ancestors so we evolved these heightened senses to avoid them.
And in nature you do not really have much big objects that could fall on you if you climb them.
Maybe a large boulder loose ... but they are very rare in my experience. So I guess it makes sense we are not prepared for it. What is much more likely, a loose rock which breakes off at climbing .. we are prepared for. Instinct reflexes are pretty fast in that case, I noticed ..
A cabinet being wobbly and starting to tip over towards you should feel pretty dangerous I'd imagine, we have various biological mechanisms that detect balance [1].
I would hope the ability to sense loss of balance equilibrium would innately result in having the strong urge to bail from that activity to sturdier ground, given you knew you could safely land on the ground without a worse outcome.
A tipping cabinet takes much longer to fall unlike a rock dislodging when you are climbing the side of a cliff in nature. Maybe it is simply a blind spot in our evolution like you suggest, evolution never optimized us for this edge case scenario not experienced in the wild.
As a parent, this is one of the silent killers that haunts me. We only have one dresser and I have it tilted back... but I should also strap it to the wall.
I was a PICU nurse before I started writing software for a living. A surprising number of kids also get seriously injured by pulling TV sets/cabinets over onto themselves. Affixing things to walls definitely a good plan.
Also PSA for the holidays: fence pools, use your reversing camera and know where your kids are before backing out of the driveway, and that dishwasher detergent does horrible things to kids (airway/oesophagus) and people tend to keep it down low for some reason.
Just the other day my toddler fell out of a shopping cart. I never paid much attention to the warning signs because I'm always right there pushing the cart, this time though I'd moved a few feet away to wrangle his older sister and he stood up in the cart. I immediately moved back towards him but I was too late. Normally he has great balance but as he reached out to me his weight shifted causing the cart to roll forward and he toppled right out. He landed right on his face in the most horrifying moment of my life. Thankfully he's all right (giant bump and a black eye) but it easily could have been fatal. I'll never leave him unrestrained in a cart again.
Surprised to see Lyme disease on HN, since bringing affordable DNA testing for B. burgdorferi & other pathogens to the public is the startup I've been working on since 2014.
As mentioned in other comments, serological tests fall short in various ways (accuracy, time). If you keep the tick that bit you, we can test it for the presence Lyme, and several other pathogens. If negative, we can effectively rule out much of the risk. Super quick & accurate, too.
What they thought me for first aid was: remove the tick with a proper tool, wrap it in some scotch tape and put it in something storable (back then a photo roll plastic thingey) and give it to the person affected and send them to a doctor or emergency service. That was over 20 years ago. Apperantly the "save the tick" advice is not as wide spread as I believed it to be as you were the first to mention it (my reading).
Yeah, that's proper procedure--except for the scotch tape. Our lab techs need to tediously remove ticks from adhesive every day because some authority (first-aid manuals?) is telling people to do that. It ends up in pieces after extraction which hinders us from identifying the species, life stage, and duration of engorgement. Hopefully this practice phases out with time.
So how else do you store the tick? I can see why they would recommend scotch tape: deer ticks are tiny, and the tape helps keep you from losing them. Don't say "put it in a film storage canister" because no one has those any more! I haven't seen one of those in decades. I'm not sure what I'd do with one honestly; I have some small Tupperware containers I could use, IF I happen to be at home when I pull the tick off.
Good point about the size. Unengorged nymph ticks are tough to spot. That's why most people don't notice them until after multiple days of feeding. The adults are much easier to catch early, and thus pose less of a threat.
For storage, a Ziplock bag works well (especially for mailing). Just make sure it's sealed air tight. A prescription pill bottle works great too because of the secure lid.
When I was in the woods and found one on me, I took the batteries out of an extra flashlight I was carrying and kept the tick trapped in the handle.
When I got home, I transferred him to a double ziplock labelled with the date and where on the body I found him and tossed him into the freezer for a few months until I figured I was in the clear.
Interesting. I got bit by 2 blacklegged ticks in the past 3 months but I couldn't find any free tick tests, so I never had them tested. Both were within a few hours so I assumed based on CDC advice that I was still in the green zone. It sounds like one of those things that health insurance companies would be out of their minds to not cover.
Separately: Bay Area hikers beware -- change your clothes immediately after getting home, do complete body checks after hiking -- ideally, shower immediately.
We can't get reimbursed by health insurance because we aren't a medical facility, but rather a DNA lab. I'm sure in some regard, it's a downside. However, it does force us to compete intensely on price, value & service. And I'm happy with that because consumers win.
When the cost of prevention is higher than the cost of treatment, you know the system is truly messed up.
IMO health insurance should be paying for everything preventative. It's in their financial interest to stop fretting about what kind of lab you are, encourage early diagnosis and reduce long-term medical costs.
Thank you for this service! It has brought peace of mind to me after a number of tick bites (they are nearly impossible to avoid entirely if you spend a lot of time camping in the upper Midwest)
