Medical news

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Apr 172019
 

Two things:

Israeli flight attendant in coma after getting measles

The 43-year-old woman has been in a deep coma for ten days, has encephalitis and cannot breath on her own. Keep that in mind the next time some anti-vaxxer moron tells you that measles is just some harmless childhood disease.

It is believed that the woman was vaccinated as a child. The vaccine is about 93% effective, and that should have been perfectly sufficient if we lived in a world where everyone was vaccinated: soon, like smallpox, there’d be nowhere left for the virus to hang out and soon, like smallpox, it would disappear into the pages of medical history books. Instead, anti-vaxers have given the disease fertile new ground to not only continue in, but to mutate in.

But wait, there’s more:

Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs

“Dead” as in “killed and butchered FOUR HOURS earlier;” “some function” as in “no sign of consciousness.” But also noted that some of the drugs used in the treatment inhibit cellular functions of consciousness, so…

Prior to this, true death for warm mammals meant you had maybe four or five minutes before brain death set in and then….thppblt, that’s it, brain’s kaput. After this… well, I bet that even if they did everything they could to bring that four-hour-old brain back to life it’d be a vegetable at best (turning bacon into a vegetable? Heresy!).

Bioethecists are going to go bugnuts over this. There were *no* ethical issues about the studies being done, because there are no ethical concerns about animal welfare and experimentation when the animal is well and truly dead in the first place. This process not only beheaded the pigs, but extracted the brains from the skulls and resulted in the classic Brain In A Jar, ready to be whisked off to Yuggoth. And What If they could actually restore a brain to consciousness, but they had to de-skullinate it first? Bleah.

The true test would be a brain intact in the body… and a human brain at that. Someone, say, dies of a heart attack and it takes an hour to get them to the hospital. Hook up the tubes, flush the system and hit the big red REBOOT button. Will you get Grampa back… or will it be one of those “sometimes, dead is better” things and he comes back as a mindless/soulless ghoul hungry for human flesh? Hell, what would be the religious implications? People have difficulty enough with those who’s hearts stop for a moment but the brain never quite dies, meaning that the person was never truly dead. But someone dies deader’n disco due to getting shot in the heart with a .44 and they’re cold on a slab for a few hours, then they’re brought back? Oh, yeah, people will freak the frak out.

 Posted by at 8:43 pm

Honestly, I envy the enthusiasm

 art, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Apr 172019
 

A few days ago I posted the teaser trailer for the next/last Star Wars movie, and pointed out that it left me massively unmoved. There was a time when this was not the case… watching previews for “Empire” and “Jedi” for the first time on the tube back in the early 80’s made me geek the frak out. By the time of the prequels it had damped down substantially, and the sequel series has only continued the downward mehspiral. But there is a simple truth that a whole lot of people don’t really get: “I am not everybody.” For instance, this guy posted what I assume to be an honest reaction video to his first time watching the new trailer, and he was as enthusiastic as I wasn’t. And that’s ok.

Huh.

It is a tad on the cringey side, but, hey, good for him to have something to look forward to. I think the last time I came anywhere near close to this sort of emotionalism about a movie was walking into an Imax theater showing “2001” last year just as the opening notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra kicked in and the MGM logo gave way to the Sun, Moon and Earth. Watching a pair of Falcon 9 cores hoverslam to a landing within a second of each other comes close, but involves less tears and more yelling of expletives.

 

This one is good too:

 

 Posted by at 8:05 pm

B-58 weapons possibilities

 aircraft, art, drawings, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Apr 172019
 

An early-ish Convair illustration of the potential weapons and other payloads to be carried by the B-58 bomber, both in the centerline pod and under the wing roots. Note not only ballistic missiles but also several recon options, and a “bomb bay pod” giving the aircraft a payload of several gravity bombs, presumably nuclear.

I have uploaded the full resolution scan of the illustrations to the 2019-04 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 6:29 pm

Stop liking what I don’t like

 blather, Forward!, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 172019
 

As Rich Lavish Cash on Notre-Dame, Many Ask: What About the Needy?

This one is a little different from yesterdays outrage-a-palooza over people caring about Notre Dame: in this episode, there are a bunch of French people PO’ed that there are other French people rich enough to cough up a hundred million euros at a moments notice. In other words, the tired old “wealth inequality = bad” canard. The people complaining here want France to enact a wealth tax, as some of the Socialists running for the Democratic Presidential nomination do, in order to stop rich folk from being so rich. as Obama said, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” which it’s safe to assume he thought was a level below which someone like Elon Musk could use to create Tesla and SpaceX. In Wealth Tax World (the Socialists tend to *say* they want to tax wealth at 3%, but once that foot is in the door, expect it to creep upwards),musk might have made his millions selling PayPal, and then been taxed down to the point where his only further future contribution to human endeavor was, say, Hyperloop.

 Posted by at 6:14 pm

The sliding scale of give-a-damn…

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 172019
 

… is not a scale that some people would allow you to adjust yourself.

White People Don’t Live in Flint or Puerto Rico, So President Sends Aid to France

In short: there are local problems, so we shouldn’t care about distant problems. This is in fact a position I can *kinda* get behind: let’s face it, proximity often drives give-a-damn. A bus crashes in Zimbabwe: you’ll never hear about it, much less care. An equivalent bus crashes into your neighbors house: suddenly it’s newsworthy.

But the water problems in Flint are not *historic* like Notre Dame.

And it does raise another philosophic ponderable: as some of the angry selfish commenters on the racist website linked above make clear, lives are more important than stuff. But… are they *really*? It’s easy to say that a single human life is more important than and physical object. But most people, like it or not, are filler. Most people will NOT be remembered when they’re gone, just like most buildings won’t be. But then, most people are not Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, and most buildings are not Notre Dame or the VAB. Is a single human life more important than, say, a single USB drive? How about a hundred lives? A thousand? What if that USB drive contains the single copy of the cure to cancer or a map to a cavern containing a backup copy of the complete library of Alexandria?

If the Notre Dame cathedral was just an elaborate warehouse… who’d care. But it is a historical structure that means a *lot* to a *lot* of people. “Meaning” is important.

 

Now, clearly people can care about multiple things at once. But if we shouldn’t, if we should only care about the most important issues first, then clearly we need to yank all funding from historic preservation and artistic spending, including defunding Hollywood and shutting down Netflix and Facebook and whatnot, and devoting every last ounce of effort and dollar to the colonization of space, since that’s obviously the most important thing that humanity can do. Every moment we delay we put at risk not only the survival of humanity but of all the other species on Earth. A single major impact or supervolcano, an interesting new virus or the sun burping, could turn the Earth into a lifeless rock. Anyone who stands in the way of dealing with that existential threat, from directly opposing it or spending money that could go into nuclear rocket engine design on frippery like lipstick or childrens toys, is a traitor to the species. That’s how this sort of thing goes, right?

 Posted by at 1:00 am

Guess who’s a right wing nationalist now…

 Crazy, Forward!, humor, politics  No Responses »
Apr 162019
 

Snerk. The Socialists have turned on Bernie. If you are not quite as far left as Trotsky, you are right wing.

Bernie Sanders silent on Assange, vocal in promoting nationalism at Michigan rally

Sanders’ silent support for the persecution of Assange and his promotion of nationalism arise from his pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist political orientation. These right-wing positions demonstrate that his real aim is not, as he claims, to lead a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” but to misdirect, disorient and suppress opposition among workers and young people by channeling it behind the corporate-controlled, pro-war Democratic Party.

Yeah. They describe his views as being to the right of Trump and praised by neo-Nazis.

Clown world indeed.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 6:18 pm

Star Wars tries to do something to recover the fanbase. SJWs outraged

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., politics, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 162019
 

After Disney bought out Star Wars, their writers have gone to great lengt to eliminated Straight White Guys from respectable roles, never mind heroic ones. Look at The Last Jedi:  never mind white men, what *men* at all were portrayed as someone to look up to? There were the bad guys, there was DJ who turned out to be a bad guy, there was Luke who turned into some weird mutant lame version of Luke, there was Finn who was an utterly useless coward, there was Poe who existed for no other reason that to be berated by the womenfolk. Other than Ezra and Kanan in “Rebels,” white guys have been written out of the script for Star Wars except as villains and saps.

So then a new Star Wars video game was announced… Jedi: Fallen Order. Video games aren’t my schtick anymore, much less Star Wars games, so I watched the trailer initially with only vague interest. As I watched it it occurred to me that I don’t know what kind of game this’ll be, but it looks like the sort of thing that would make a decent Star Wars movie along the lines of Rogue One. Give it a $80 million budget and set some enthusiastic director and cast of inexpensive unknowns loose on it, and way you go.

The problem (?) is, the main character triggers the SJWs. Guess why.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s protagonist is such a wasted opportunity

The game is not yet out, so the author here is not upset about a “wasted opportunity” in terms of game play, or capabilities or storyline. No, the author here is upset that the protagonist is the wrong race and sex.

And…

Some Fans Upset Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Protagonist is a White Guy

Think about that for a second. Imagine this being a valid concern were the race and sex any other race and sex than “white guy.”

Last time I cared enough to play a Star Wars game was going on 15, maybe 20 years ago, when I played a starfighter game based on Phantom Menace. In that sort of game, you see a *ship* not a protagonist, so your protagonist could have been a transexual pansexual furry cybernetic Hutt for all that you could tell.

 

 

 Posted by at 5:59 pm

Notre Dame: now what

 art, blather, history, Hmm..., politics  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

The fire destroyed pretty much everything within the cathedral that was not made of stone, but for now it appears that the stone structure is actually in good shape. So what should France do with the shell? Seems to me there are three main options:

1) Tear it down, build something else. This is a TERRIBLE idea and should be rejected out of hand.

2) Leave it as a ruin. This has of course been done (including a castle with the same name as me, which fell into ruin less than a century ago because the last “Earl” in charge of the joint was a friggen’ moron), but man, it’d be depressing. This idea should be rejected.

3) Rebuild it. This is the obvious choice, and apparently has already been announced.

So, let’s say France chooses to rebuild. No matter how they go about it, it will be a massive project likely taking decades to complete. But how should they go about it?

Clearly (to me) they should rebuild it so that it looks and sounds just like it did. The stained glass windows are likely all gone, but those can be remade; the organ is likely a puddle of solidified molten lead. there are a vast number of wood carvings, wood pews, wood etc. that are gone but which can be remade. But… should everything be made of the same *materials*? Whatever it’s made from should be made to last for centuries. Thought should be given to making it fireproof, or at least fire resistant.

What could the pews and wood carvings be made from that *look* like wood, don’t weigh a whole lot more than wood, are as durable as wood, and burn less than wood? The wooden beams that formed the structure that held up the roof and other stuff… those could probably be made from something like stainless steel with a wood-like (or perhaps even actual wood) outer covering. It would look the same, weigh a little less, support a lot more, burn a whole lot less. The organ and the stained glass windows: I don’t know if those could be meaningfully improved upon. It’s not like stained glass window technology today is centuries more advanced than it was centuries ago. I would imagine that the lead framing melted and the little bits of glass fell to the floor. If those bits did not themselves melt or shatter, it would be great if they could be collected and used in the reconstruction.

It would not surprise me if there are a bunch of high-rez 3D laser scans of all the artistic goodies. It’s entirely possible that a lot of the lost wood art could be remade in relatively short order on CNC mills. Would that be the way to go, though? If a machine could spit out a relief panel that is indistinguishable from one hand carved, but vastly faster and cheaper, should they do that? Or should everything be hand-carved because Of Course It Should? And if so should it be a “worldwide heritage project” with bits carved all over everywhere, or should the French people do it themselves? I would recommend the latter, if at all possible. That would be just the thing to bring the nation together and give them a sense of unity and purpose.

Probably the most important thing for the people of France to keep in mind: 9/11 and the World Trade Center. Take a good hard look at how New York went about rebuilding… and then DON’T DO THAT. An army of bureaucrats with a truckload of regulations, with infighting and corruption and CYA and politicking. Gah.

 Posted by at 8:41 pm

Next: the Series Seven Sports Heart by Jensen

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, science  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

Israeli Researchers Print 3D Heart Using Patient’s Own Cells

The heart took about three hours to print… and is a bit subscale at 2.5 centimeters, said to be the size of a rabbits heart. But it has all the chambers, ventricals and blood vessels. It’s suggested that a full-size heart might take a full day to print. Imagine that… a full day to a replacement heart. A heart that doesn’t have any known flaws, is the right size, doesn’t come with hepatitis and won;t be rejected. The researcher say that it’ll probably make more sense to just print *bits* of a heart as patched for damaged original bits.

This story doesn’t say if the heart came equipped with nerves. I’m a little fuzzy on how the body – and even the mind- controls how hard and fast the heart beat, but clearly current transplanted hearts more or less do the trick, and any nerves there likely don’t link up to the existing nervous system.

And it does raise an interesting idea: how would the body respond if you plugged in auxiliary subscale hearts? The advantages of that evade me at the moment… but then, people poke ink into their skin, pump thickeners into their lips, jam bits of metal through their ears and nose and other parts, and some even chop their junk off, all for no medically necessary reasons. eventually *someone* will pay to have secondary hearts grown and implanted. Maybe swimmers of bicyclists would benefit from thigh-mounted hearts to boost blood flow to the legs, I dunno. Seems almost just as likely that the secondary hearts will actually interfere with blood flow, especially if you go to Thailand to get the work done on a budget.

 Posted by at 4:35 pm
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