I remember in one of his books, Dr Karl recalls knowing when winter started because the ER suddenly fills up with kids fighting for their lives.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/lesson

You can also be the “good at maths, bad at maths” kind

AC’s use electrical energy to take some heat energy, and move it outside. You can kinda reverse the process in certain types of heat pumps to generate power, but it’s not even close to worth it, the efficiency is horrible.

You need a temperature gradient to capture heat energy, basically a cold thing and a hot thing, you harvest the energy as it moves from hot to cold. You’ve cooled your house down, and want to use the waste heat to create power, you’ll either have to find a very cold place somewhere nearby (unlikely to be cold outside if you’re using AC) or you can use the fact that your house is cold. So now you’ve both lost energy and heated up your house, because that lost energy has been added to the heat you originally tried to remove.

The simplified but always true rule of thumb is that whenever you use energy to create something from which you can harvest energy, you’ll never be able to harvest more than what you spent. In reality you’ll pretty much always lose energy trying to do this, I’m not aware of anything that’s 100% efficient in both directions (or even one honestly).

I’m afraid I can’t answer your technical questions, I’m really not that knowledgeable about this. All I know is you ideally want the frequency curve to be flat, I don’t think it matters much where it sits relative to that line.

Honestly, that Danon dropping off at the low end is pretty typical though it’s one of the better ones. You’d really just have to test it I’m afraid, it might be totally fine to chop off the bottom for some things but maybe it’s necessary for certain heart conditions, I wouldn’t know. If it were an option I’d say the best bet is to always stick to the analogue, but I’m absolutely with you on hating traditional stethoscopes, they’re so painful…

You probably can just leave the crushers on your neck with the volume maxed out, but I’m really not sure if that’ll work. In all honesty the speaker might be worse due to the way the acoustics in the room can change what you hear, it’s really hard to say.

Rtings.com provides frequency response charts when they test speakers, let me see if I can find one that goes low enough for you.

As for the bonus question, absolutely love it. I love when people come up with cool solutions to life’s problems, and this lets me hear my own heartbeat? Hell yeah!

Here’s an easy way to check a bunch of them quicky, the Denon home was the best I found in terms of the very low end. I’m sure someone else can do better, I’m not that much of an audiophile and know very little about speakers.

Probably worth noting that they stretch out the low end of the chart so they tend to go lower than it seems (I assume it’s a logarithmic scale). You might be able to go to a store and ask to test them yourself.

Second edit: if headphones are at all a possibility (they might be better for patients who don’t want to hear their own heartbeat) then can I recommend Skullcandy crushers? They’re completely ridiculous as regular headphones, they basically just have a metal plate they vibrate for the bass, but it goes all the way down to 20Hz, and you can crank it waaaaay up with a slider on the side. (I use these daily for music because I’m a bad audiophile who wants to have fun sometimes, I have a proper wired setup if I want the audiophile experience.)

I started a free writing journal to help generate ideas and learn to get a little more creative. It’s basically just a regular journal at this point, I just write in it whenever I have a thought that I feel I should keep. It’s been invaluable for coping with mental health stuff too. I don’t think I’ll ever stop, it’s not something I have to force myself to do any more.

Rode one recently and the actual insane restrictions on where you can ride these things left me stranded over a freeway and took longer than walking home because I had to turn around and push the stupid thing across a bridge. They charged me to not ride the bike…

Having never done it as part of one such group, I don’t know exactly what goes on, but essentially there’s a large body of literature on leftist political concepts, covering the ideas of why anarchy rather than archy, how to practice it, how to organise etc. I’m definitely the wrong person to explain it, generally socialists (at least here) are the ones doing all the reading, I’m a lot more interested in praxis tbh.

Some classic anarchist writers include Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon, but the communist and socialist literature often applies too.

The anarchist library has lots to browse and the anarchist faq is a great starting place despite its huge volume of content, I highly recommend casually browsing it.

We do! In my area there are quite a few of us and we operate a number of collectives providing things like:

• Free meals
• Free groceries
• Bike repair workshops
• Theory reading groups
• Clothing
• Social activities

Of course there’s also a lot of direct action going on for various causes.