My regular doctor looked at my CAT scans (not the pulmonary specialist, who I see again in December) and said that the thing in my lungs looks like damage from an infection. This is not news. The news is that he said it looks like tuberculosis damage. How the hell I could’ve gotten TB and then gotten over TB without specialized treatment, I have no idea.
I guess it might be possible that I’ve had a low-level case of TB for a decade, but it seems kinda on the really unlikely side.
A Charlotte, North Carolina, high school biology class gave a test on genetics. One question raised some eyebrows:
“LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess. What is the probability that LaPrincess will inherit her mama’s big bootie?”
One concerned parent wrote a letter of complaint:
“I am extremely concerned that this type of language is being used and considered expectable [sic] to be issued to students”
If you’re looking for “the dumbest thing I’ve heard all year,” I believe we have a good contender:
On the larger scale, this sort of thing *might* be a valuable way to combat Ebola. Because it will *kill* people with Ebola that much faster, thus possibly limiting the spread of the disease (and of course, likely also take out some homeopaths). But wouldn’t a FAE be more effective?
[youtube lO2-YxWkRxk]
An ad from 1989 showing the Boeing-Sikosky competitor for the LHX program. This was the winning design and was built as the RAH-66 Comanche, though not without some notable design tinkering.
It was a fast process… took longer to check in than actually deal with the machine. The preliminary results also came back quickly. It seems my lungs, liver and lymph nodes are littered with little lumps of calcium… but hey, no cancer.
The spot that showed up on the X-ray a week ago is a 7mm nodule “compatible with granuloma,” and showed up ona chest X-ray that was taken in 2011 (during a prior bout with bronchitis. So it’s not a new thing. The “punctate splenic calcifications” and such, I dunno. These might be reactions to prior buts of bacterial infection, I suppose. But hey… not cancer.
I was given a DVD with all the images. A DVD which, upon getting home, turns out to have been badly formatted or some such and is unreadable. Hmmmph.
Take a moment away from looking at the new nekkid photos of Kim Kardashian to ponder this photo taken from the surface of a comet:
I’m a little confused about just what I’m seeing here.
I suspect this might void the warranty…
I haven’t been able to find the specific story behind ths, but clearly it’s an example of what can happen when you repeatedly fire a revolver with a jammed bullet. From the background it seems likely that this is now a display piece at a shooting range; guns that have been destroyed in various and entertaining ways are often used as decorations in such places.
One thing the movie “Gravity” got right: when things exploded, they did so silently, unless Sandra Bullocks character was attached to it so that the sound could pass through her space suit. If her character couldn’t hear it, the audience couldn’t hear it. Of course, there was the musical score, which of course her character probably couldn’t hear (unless you assume that the stress of the situation has driven her nuts and now she has her own soundtrack playing in her head).
In February, a new Blu Ray of the film will be released that will have an audio track *without* the musical score. Instead there’ll be long patches of little more than Bullock’s character breathing and bumping around in her suit. I suspect that might get old after a while, but it might also be an interesting experience.
It is a common enough gag in cartoons and sitcoms and such to show someone trying to cool the world by throwing open the doors of their freezers or fridges, or cranking up the AC and directing the cool air outside. This is obviously not only futile but counter productive.
Fridges and freezers and AC’s work by compressing a gas (freon or ammonia, commonly); as a gas is compressed, it heats up. If you then run the hot compressed gas through a heat exchanger – a mess of copper tubes, often enough – and transfer that heat to, say, the outside air, when the now-cooled gas is allowed to expand again, it cools down, often by rather a lot. You are not, in fact, really cooling off the whole system; in a perfectly efficient setup, the total thermal energy of a closed environment – a fridge in a sealed chamber, say – would not change no matter how cold you made the inside of the icebox, because the outside would just heat up that much more, exactly balancing the equation. And in reality, nothing is perfectly efficient… so you would actually slowly *add* heat to the total system due to friction in the mechanisms and inefficient electric motors and slight resistance in the wiring, etc.
So obviously firing up a bunch of fridges ain’t gonna cool the planet, because their heat exchanges would simply warm up the atmosphere or lakes that they are connected to.
But… what if you went overboard, and made a fantastically powerful heat pump? Handwave some ridiculous machine, a kilometer ona side, that sucks in atmosphere just as fast and the nuclear reactors powering it will allow. The atmospheric gasses are compressed and warmed up. But not compressed a little, and made kinda warm… I mean compressed *a* *lot,* and made ridiculously hot. Hot enough that the heat transfer mechanism is no longer entirely conduction to the outside air. No, the compressed gases are so hot – call it thousands of degrees – that the gas sheds heat rapidly through *radiation.* Direct these hot gases to the top of the machine, up in the thinner air, and surround the rampagingly bright tubing with mirrors that effectively direct the white light and the IR radiation out into space. The compressed air sheds vast amounts of thermal energy not back into the environment, but off-world. The air is then allowed to expand back to normal pressure; if it has shed enough thermal energy, the machine will probably be spraying cryogenic liquid air out into the world.
I have no doubt that this is a monumentally stupid idea on many levels (not least being that inefficiencies could well overwhelm any cooling effect). But does it seem, at least in principle, like it might possibly be a way to manipulate the overall heat budget of the planet?
Some years back, Glenn Beck was an interesting and useful radio political yammerer, doing some good work in pointing out the foibles and frauds of the Left. But in recent years he has become more and more odd and irrelevant. I stopped paying any sort of attention to him a few years back, when it seemed that he was beginning to transition to a radio evangelist.
Sadly, it seems he’s gone even further down the rabbit hole of nuttery:
The illness, Beck said, baffled doctors all over the world, but has now been diagnosed as “adrenal fatigue” by maverick “chiropractic neurologist” Dr. Ted Carrick.
“Chiropractic neurologist?” Uh-oh…
Now, after a range of treatments by Carrick — including being strapped into and spun around in a giant gyroscope — and an intense regimen of spiritual work and fervent prayer, Beck claims to have a “clean bill of health.”
Oy.
Why do I have the feeling that John Kellogg would have approved?
I you haven’t seen or read “The Road to Wellville,” I highly recommend both versions.