Well, the ones from the Hammer films perhaps -- or as it says in the links "[the above] castle provided a visual palette for Bram Stoker when he started writing the book in Cruden Bay".
Historical Dracula (Vlad III) lived in Romania tho
I was expecting blockchain smart contracts being composed somehow using logical operations. That would have been kind of cool, as someone forced to become a cryptocurrency hater. Silly of me, really, to think they had started paying attention to PLT principles. :)
In my experience, most nurses come in, socialise and cheer you up, take your blood pressure and temperature with automated devices, that one can buy for home use, and give you medicines that a doctor has prescribed (someone can also can do at home if they are feeling up to it). This is a wonderful profession and they should be highly paid but do they really need a bachelor's degree or master's degree to do this job? Some specialised nurses can even draw blood but, again in my experience, many of those were unable to "find a vein" and had to call on someone more experienced or a doctor. Pretty sure some experienced heroin users could do a better job at this. Just my experience.
Where a less credentialed person can do the job it has already been done. Here's how it breaks down:
Registered Nurse (RN): The 'specialized nurses' you talk of, and what this article is mainly about. Requires at least an associate's degree to be licensed, but increasingly an bachelor's is expected. Only they can administer any medication a doctor prescribes, and only they can assess your condition.
Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN): If they are certified they can also do blood draws. Requires graduation from an LPN program (usually about one year) to be licensed. They perform easily predicted tasks like a dressing change that do not require assessment. They can also administer some drugs based on the situation.
Unlicensed Assistive Personnel (UAP): In a big hospital, these are who are checking your temperature most of the time. They can only do basic tasks that do not require any medical training, even if their experience is larger than the RNs and LPNs they're under.
There are also many different technicians. In a big hospital, an RN acts as a middle manager delegating their work to these many different tiers. In an ICU, or in a small hospital, it will be done much more by themselves.
Need to point out that the disease theory of addiction is hotly debated in the US. Not so much in developed countries where socialized medicine is available, where the theory is widely discounted. Those interested should take a look at the work of Stanton Peele.
I’d imagine most addiction occurs when the body has a natural imbalance in certain neurotransmitters (GABA), so it seeks a way to adjust the balance (alcohol). Seems fair to call that natural imbalance a disease.
You're onto something there. These imbalances (rather, deviation from the average in terms of various regulatory pathways) are absolutely key to differences not only in personality but perspective, cognitive abilities, and as you mention propensity to use psychoactive substances. I've been thinking something similar for a while now, that most people with addictions to psychoactive are likely attempting to correct for something.
Not to mention, most of the illegal compounds have pharmacological activity that would be nearly impossible to get from a prescription for most people.
Your US medical insurance will cover an illness or disease (why 12 step for profit rehabs continue to lobby this idea). Less likely to cover you for a lifestyle choice that became a learned behavior.
Sure I read a statistic that roughly half of "happy", long term marriages are, in fact, unhappy and unfulfilled. If true then about 20-25% of first time marriages do not have happy endings.
It could have an application in remote desktop scenarios, but it would suffer when high entropy images are on screen, like photos in a web browser - the variance in output size for a fixed input may not be ideal.
It would be hugely helped by being able to look at the previous frame.
No. This is a very simple and reasonably efficient image format. It is notable for its simplicity and straightforward implementation, as well as its speed compared with png.
Video compression is typically not about "take each frame, and make it as small as possible". Video compression revolves around cleverly making use of deltas and segmenting the image so that you can reuse as much data as possible from previous frames/keyframes.
2D image compression is missing a dimension. Much of the savings to be had in a video compression algorithm are going to be based upon the similarity between frames (ie. across time) rather than within a given frame. Therefore, an algorithm that is designed only for the 2D image is not going to deliver the goods when applied to video. An example would be animated GIF. It's terrible.
I didn't read the spec, but I assume that if a single-picture format doesn't have the concept of making use of reference pictures (so previous or future frames), it's leaving _a lot_ of compression potential on the table.
You can of course just have a sequence of individually compressed frames, just as you can do with PNG, TARGA, or JPEG, but these are not usually the ways you would want to distribute the video due to the huge sizes.
I'm no expert on this but I assume because it would be all keyframes? I.e. the format doesn't support encoding transitions from frame to frame. But I guess decent video support could be possible if you define video as pixel perfect animation, i.e. Animated GIF. These would of course not compete with traditional video.
Video is massive. Uncompressed 1080p video at 60fps is 1Gb per second, compared to ~5mbps for compressed video. QOI is great for pictures where 3-5x compression is about as good as you can do, but video compression is about getting close to 500x compression.
