cookerg

cookerg t1_j2dv2dk wrote

There is no "whole time". When you take a medicine, a certain portion of it gets into your blood stream and permeates your body. Immediately your liver and other body parts start deactivating and removing it. If the half life is 12 hours, then at 12 hours half of it is gone, so you are down to 50% of the peak level. In another 12 hours, you are down to 25%, then 12.5%, and after about 5 half lives, so little is left we consider it pretty much gone, but trace amounts actually remain in your body for longer.

It's also useful to know that if you keep taking the drug, let's say for a condition like epilepsy where you need a constant minimum amount of drug in the body, at first it starts to accumulate in your body as you are adding more drug before the previous dose is cleared, and it takes about 5 half lives before you reach a steady state or plateau, where the blood level is the same every day. It still shoots up to a peak after each dose, and then drops somewhat before the next dose, but the peaks and valleys are the same every day at steady state, so you can be confident that even at the lower blood level just before each dose, there's enough drug to prevent seizures.

Half life is also useful to know if you stop a drug, because you know that in about 5 half lives it'll be pretty much gone.

Sometimes half life can change due to some other drug or medical condition, and that is useful to know as it may mean you have to adjust the dose of your drug to correct for that. In overdoses, sometimes the mechanisms that clear drugs from the body can't scale up to deal with high drug levels, and the half life is longer and it takes longer than expected to recover.

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cookerg t1_j1xzp6x wrote

There are a couple of reasons why wood burning might be banned.

Some towns are located in valleys that retain smoke, so if a lot of the residents burn firewood as fuel all the time, the whole town is continuously cloaked in smoke. That's bad for everyone's health. Forest fires are short term events that last a few days and then end.

Forest fires may have some benefits but they also destroy homes and kill people, and firepits might be banned where you live in case you accidentally start a larger wild fire, if you are in a high risk area. Controlled fires are only set in areas and at times of the season where they can be closely monitored and controlled and hopefully not end up creating a disaster.

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cookerg t1_iy93zns wrote

My daughter took professional lessons but I don't think they did enough highway time. Also it was probably in a sedan and not our minivan. The first time I was riding with her on the 401 (in daylight), she changed lanes too sharply, and the van rocked aggressively from side to side, scaring us both, but fortunately she didn't panic, and things settled quickly without us veering or rolling.

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cookerg t1_iwdeww2 wrote

Both the sperm and the egg carry a random half of the respective parent's DNA, so you get half from the mom and half from the dad. So you can get an approximately 50% different mix from your sibling who is not an identical twin.

(There are slightly different details for mitochondrial DNA and the X or Y chromosome from the father.)

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cookerg t1_iuillon wrote

Gerrymandering can be a good or bad thing. Let's say an area can elect three representatives, and lets say a third of the population is a minority group which lives spread across two or three neighbourhoods and usually votes for party A, while the rest of the population usually votes for Party B.

If you encircle those minority neighbourhoods into one district, then the minority can essentially elect one of the three representatives. If you divide up the minority group so they are spread across all three districts, then their votes may not count.

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