Not sure what’s with the situation at your CVS, or when you tried to get it (there have been some big changes to the regulations and policies around narcan over the last year or two that might have made a big difference if you tried to get it before then) but FYI, you can get a 2 pack of name-brand narcan on Amazon for like $45, no prescription, prime eligible, shipped to your door or an Amazon locker. Looks like they also have generic for slightly cheaper, and through Amazon pharmacy with a prescription you can allegedly get it down to $11 with insurance.

Not that I particularly want to support Amazon, but it’s pretty hard to beat that convenience, especially if other ways of getting your hands on it are proving difficult.

You probably don’t need to hear this, but for anyone else reading it, a little PSA: I’m a 911 dispatcher, narcan/naloxone is a wonder drug. It has no significant side effects worth mentioning, so in the event you come across someone you think there’s even a snowballs chance in hell might be overdosing, go ahead and squirt some narcan up their nose. You’re not going to hurt them, barring some really rare allergic reactions and medication interactions, it’s not going to have any meaningful effects on someone who’s not on opioids, maybe their nose gets irritated and they have some nausea and dizziness, and if they are in fact overdosing you might just save their life. I get a lot of callers who are nervous to use narcan when they have it available, but it really is that safe and easy to use (there’s some generics out there that have kind of a fiddly syringe-looking device that you have to put together, they’re becoming pretty rare I think most have switched over to the narcan-style pre-assembled spray)

And the effect is pretty dramatic. In the space of just a couple minutes someone can go from being, for all practical purposes, dead- unconscious, not breathing/agonal breathing, CPR being performed, etc. to up and talking (but feeling like grim death since they’re often going to go into full-blown withdrawal immediately.)

There’s stories of patients getting up being really agitated and aggressive. I’ve been on the phone with a lot of narcan cases, but I can’t say I’ve heard that exactly, usually they’re just very angry but not aggressive, more often they just try to leave before the cops or ambulance get there (which is a bad idea, because depending on how much they used, the narcan might clear their system before the drugs do, and when that happens they could fall right back into an overdose, and then there’s no one around with narcan to bring them back again) still, you probably don’t necessarily want to be crowding around someone you just narcan’d if you can avoid it.

If you take up the project and decide to make my dream your reality, all I ask is that you share the code

I haven’t done a deep dive into how I’m going to make it happen, my programming is rusty as all hell, and I’ve never tinkered too much with a pie or this kind of project

But on its surface it seems like an easy enough problem, just need to turn on the appropriate lights when an emulator starts.

Easier said than done I’m sure, I also suspect you’d probably need some kind of led controller or maybe an Arduino or something between the pie and the lights, I don’t think the 3.3v it puts out from its GPIO pins would be enough for some light strips.

If someone had a lot of money to throw at the project, I imagine you could also do a pretty cool setup with smart lights like Philips Hue that would be pretty clean and require minimal tinkering with the physical electronics side of things, but you’d probably be throwing as much or more at it in bulbs as the rest of the project put together.

Yeah, I like to bring it up and put the idea out into the world whenever I get an opportunity because part of me is kind of hoping that maybe someone out there will do the hard work and write the code and share it online so someday when I have the space for it all I have to do is wire up the lights

Also when it comes time to fill in the gaps in my collection, I can save some money and still get the same effect because the console doesn’t even have to be in working order, it just has to not be too beat-up looking. I could probably even 3d print some dummy consoles to hold me over (though of course I’d prefer to have actual working consoles if possible)

A dream project for me, when I have the space for it, is to have a set of Ikea kallax shelves with a cubby for each retro console with some LEDs inside hooked up to a retropie emulating those consoles so those cubbies light up when that console is being emulated.

I have a lot of the actual consoles and they’re in working order, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get them hooked up, swap cartridges, etc. sometimes. And I have just enough programming and electronics background that I feel up to the task of trying to make it work, just don’t have the space for a big display shelf at the moment.

I can appreciate the experience of playing on the actual hardware and the cases where it’s superior, but for me the experience emulating them is 99% as good with significantly less effort. Totally cool if others prioritize things differently though.

The CB radio thing is going to be very location specific, I work in 911 dispatch, I think the state police around me theoretically monitor channel 9 on the highways, but in practice I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in that, they barely look at info we send them over the computer, CB also has a somewhat limited range, so you’re counting on them having an officer somewhat nearby or you being close to their station.

As for local police, around me I suspect a few of them probably still have a CB antenna on the roof of their station and maybe even an old radio stashed somewhere in a closet but not hooked up and not being monitored, and the officers definitely don’t have them in their vehicles.

I’m in a pretty dense suburban area outside of a major city, they might still get some use in more rural areas where cell signals aren’t as reliable, though you’re probably going to run into the same issues with range limitations, in normal ideal conditions, you might get a range of about 20 miles or so, depending on atmospheric conditions, geography, etc. you might get only a fraction of that.

To build on/give some example about what you said with the comments and function names (programmers, excuse the sloppy pseudocode that’s about to follow, it’s been a long time since high school intro to computer science)

Let’s say in a video game, you run around collecting coins, and if you get 100 coins you earn an extra life

One small part of that code may look something like:

IF
newGame = TRUE
THEN
coinCount = 0
lifeCount = 3
coinModel.all.visibility = TRUE
//Players start a new game with 3 lives and 0 coins, and all coins are visible in the level

IF
playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE
THEN
coinModel.x.visibility = FALSE
coinCount++
//If the player character model touches one of the coin models, that coin model disappears, and the players coin count is increased by 1
IF
coinCount % 100 = 0
THEN
lifeCount++
//if that coin count is divisible evenly by 100, then the players life count is also increased by 1

Quick notes for people who have even less programming background than me

++ Is used by a lot of programming languages to increase a value by 1

% is often used as the “modulo” operator, which basically returns the remainder from division. So 10 % 2 = 0, because 10 is evenly divisible by 2, 10 % 3 = 1, because 10 is divisible by 3 but not evenly and leaves a remainder of 1

// Are comments, they don’t affect the code, they’re just there for human readability to make it more understandable, so you can explain why you did what you did for anyone who has to maintain the code after you, etc.

Hopefully, between the simple variable names and comments, those pseudocode blocks all pretty readable for laypeople, but if not

The first block basically detects if you’re starting a new game (IF newGame = TRUE)
If it is, then it resets your life counter to a default 3, and you start with 0 coins and sets all of the coins in the level to be visible so you can collect them
Otherwise it would carry over the values from your previous level, or save game, or whatever

The second block detects if you touch a coin (playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE) If you do, that coin vanishes (coin.x.visibility = FALSE)
It also increases your coin count (coinCount++)
Then if your coin count is divisible evenly by 100 (coinCount % 100 = 0) it increases your life total (lifeCount++)

When the code gets compiled, that gets turned into machine code, basically all 1s and 0s that the computer can understand. The computer doesn’t care if you call a coin a coin or if you call it object1, it’s going to strip all of those human-readable elements out because it would just be a waste of storage and processing power to keep it in.

So when you recompile that, you don’t get any of the explanatory comments or the easy to read variable names, so you might end up with something looking kind of like this

IF
Variable1 = TRUE
THEN
Variable2 = 0
Variable3 = 3
object1.all.condition1 = TRUE

IF
object2.condition2.object1.x = TRUE
THEN
object1.x.condition1 = FALSE
variable2++
IF
variable2 % 100 = 0
THEN
variable3++

Which is a lot harder to understand. The code will still work, you could recompile it and run it, but if you want to make any changes, you’d basically need to comb through it, figure out what all the variables, objects, conditions, etc. are, and try to piece together why the programmers who originally wrote the code did it the way they did

And that’s of course a bit of an oversimplification, for various reasons it may not decompile and recompile exactly 1:1 with the original code, it’s almost like translating the same sentence back and forth between 2 languages with Google translate.

And even this little snippet of fairly simple and straightforward code would probably going to be backed up by dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of other lines of code just to make this bit work, defining what a coin is, the hit boxes, animations, how it determines if it’s a new game or or continuing a previous game, etc.

There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.

In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.

Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.

They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.

At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.

I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.

There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.

The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.

Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.

And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)

The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)

And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.

I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)

I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.

But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.

There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs

There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.

FYI, there’s a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it’s not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn’t prove that room temperature superconductors can’t exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven’t quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

I’ve seen a couple places offering what they’ll call something like “enhanced ebooks”

I admit that I haven’t given any of them a try, but the gist is that they’re an ebook with some extra multimedia content. It kind of looks like some places that do them do the absolute bare minimum to slap the “enhanced” label on them and just add some extra pictures and maps and such, and others go whole hog with added video, the full audio drama treatment with sound effects, different actors for the various characters, narration, etc. so some of them may potentially fill the role you’re looking for

I don’t really like that they seem to be floating the idea of adding ads to the mix, but as long as this stays a separate part of the service from the on-demand section, I don’t exactly hate it.

I’ll occasionally have parties where we’ll use Pluto or similar services just to have something on. Usually something like the The Asylum channel to have a stream of something going that we’re not really invested in but that we can comment on and go “what the fuck was that‽” once in a while, and kind of do our own little MST3K thing.

And sometimes you just kind of want something on in the background while you’re doing stuff, and I know I’ll sometimes get a little bogged down trying to choose what I want to have on even though I’m not really going to be actively watching it.

I remember once upon a time there were some people who really wanted Netflix to add a “random episode” option, I wasn’t really one of them, but this could kind of fill that niche.

Also, if they curate it right, it could be kind of a cool way to drop new episodes. Say a new episode of a star wars show drops at midnight (or whatever-o’clock) For those who care to watch it immediately as it drops, they just need to be tuned to the star wars channel and it will come on automatically, no having to refresh and hit play. And leading up to the new episode they can do a mini marathon of relevant episodes from other star wars shows and movies that will help you understand what’s going on in the episode, maybe even create some new content summarizing content from the books, comics, and video games, etc. sort of an extended “last time on…” segment for the new episode. I’d also want it to be immediately available on-demand when it drops, but it could be kind of a good way to get yourself back up to speed about what’s going on in the show.

So there are ways this could be a cool addition to the service. Whether they actually use it that way is another matter entirely.

Charcoal isn’t the same thing as regular coal

Smallpox eradication comes to mind, same with the ongoing efforts to eradicate Polio (we very well may see it by the end of the decade)

A humans life is not worth more than anything else on the planet, no more, no less

So it’s an equal trade, a pig life for an equally valued human life. One of them is going to die regardless.

And from certain points of view, since that pig would not have been born if it weren’t for this, that is one more life created in this process. It may have been a short life, it may not have been the highest quality, but if we’re valuing all lives equally and believe that life is a good thing, the fact that that pig existed at all, regardless of the circumstances of its birth, life, and death, is something to be happy about.

On the other hand, they also believe that we were created in his image, so perhaps he created atoms because he himself is made of atoms.

I usually have to stop and think about it, not recalculate it but it takes a few seconds for the query to run.

I’m not big on celebrating my birthday, I just kind of check off some milestones

Old enough to drive, vote, drink, rent a car, run for president (not quite there yet, look for me on the 2028 ballot though) get an AARP membership, retire, and then that’s pretty much it, then I’ll coast the last couple of decades of my life no longer needing to know how old I am.

If your wife is the type who would want to wear a sleep mask, you could put your lights on a timer to make you up, if you have smart lights a lot of them have a feature to turn the brightness up slowly to wake you up more gently. She wouldn’t be bothered by them if she’s wearing a mask but they’d get you up.