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For Those Long Coding Sessions: The Food Patch
rtphokie writes "The U.S. Army has created a Transdermal Nutrient Delivery System which works similarly to to nicotine or birth control patches but delivers vitamins and other micronutrients. It was developed to help "warfighters sustain their physical and mental performance" during high intensity conflict. Is this what ./'ers need during those long coding sessions."
I'd really like tandoori chicken with mint sauce, please. Oh yeah, my arm has no taste buds. Dang.
I just want a caffeine patch. - Well, maybe a junk food patch. I can see this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Clinical studies show that, while only about 20% (less now, I'm thinking) of Americans are addicted to cigarettes, 100% are addicted to food.
Hopefully, this patch will help people with a food abuse problem to combat it and overcome it. In moderation, food is a good and healthy thing, but as with so many things, there is such a thing as too much.
I wonder how long it's going to take them to come up with the Sleep patch? Now that's an addiction I'd like to kick...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Not sure if it would be a wise idea to slashdot a military server these days. You might be considered a terrorist.
Is this what ./'ers need during those long coding sessions.
This may have been said jokingly, but it definately isn't what we need. Not only do TNDS' not give you a delicious taste in your mouth, they don't tell your body that you are full either. If we want fatter geeks, this is the way to go. Otherwise, I'll just stick to my perishable food.
"This processor might activate a microelectrical mechanical system that transmits the micronutrients -- either through skin pores or pumped directly into blood capillaries."
I am warfighter of Borg.
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Anyway, it's nice to see this kind of technology being developed out of the military budget instead of another variation on the bullet, bomb, etc. It has a lot of potential and I imagine it's not long before we see folks using pharmecutical patches soon - probably tailored for their specific needs/doses.
It would be pretty nice if I could take ALL of my daily meds via a single patch rather than gulp down 10+ "easy-to-swallow if you're a horse" caplets.
Good show, GI Joe.
Actually, you could use nicotine patches. Nicotine is a stimulant, and when you first start using the patches, you can really tell. When I first started using patches to quit smoking, I was racing around and away much later than usual, but always full of energy. I stopped taking them abruptly one day, and I crashed, just like what happens after any other stimulant binge.
Forget food. I want one that pumps BEER straight into my veins!
I'm sorry, but when I'm wading through breakpoints, I want something cruncy. When I'm hacking out a killer regular expression, something sweet. While I'm sure the patch is nice and chewy, there's nothing like an ice cold Jolt Cola at about 1a.m. when you've finally inherited and overloaded your native hash object to recursively enumerate its own members.
Point is, some of the fun of eating while coding isn't just the stinking vitamins, more full tummy for that matter. So while I see it as an effective way to feed someone who'd rather starve than gag on MRE's in the middle of a minefield, I'll stick to my pretzels and mint-conditioned coffe thank you very much.
--- have you healed your church website?
the implications of this to long endurance sports, such as 24 hr LeMans car racing, ironman triathlon, long range cycling, and so on.
I think currently athletes drink some sort of soups or something to get their calories... just a semi wild guess.
geek page at KY speaks
"Is this what ./'ers need during those long coding sessions."
Is that anything like the much needed Sex Patch?
Uh, erm, not that I need it. =)
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Yes, carbohydrates, protein, and fatty acids are macronutrients, that is, nutrients your body needs in fairly large amounts (protein 30g/day, carbohydrates 250g/day, fatty acids 100g/day or thereabouts). These patches only contain micronutrients, that is, nutrients we only need in sub gram amounts (e.g., vitamin C 65mg/day - 500mg/day depending on which authotity you believe, and what stresses you're under).
So I really don't see how these patches could be a complete solution, although they might be useful for replacing lost electrolytes like potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium. When you're engaged in physical exertion for long periods of time though, you really need macronutrients. This is why marathon runners and triathletes drink sports beverages and/or eat power bars. In addition to the electrolyes in, lets say gatorade, you also get a load of sugar (carbohydrates) for energy. These patches would only help with half the problem, and the smaller half at that.
Maybe they just expect that with the right micronutrient balance and some hormones the field soldiers will burn their own body fat for energy. Then when they do get some down time, they eat a meal rich in protein (for muscle/tissue repair), carbohydrate (to replace muscle and liver glycogen stores), and fatty acids (to replenish body fat stores, for repair and growth of nerves/neurons, and for various hormone precursors, etc.)
*mumbles* /.'d yet .mil site, should be able to handle the effect..
/. 1 .mil 0
Cant be
*mumbles*
*shakes monitor*
Come on ya bitch, serve the page, serve the page!
*frowns*
too late!
What we geeks need is for those long coding sessions is: better chairs, better screens, workplace ergonomy in general, decent food, short breaks a couple times an hour and a short walk around the block or something now and then aswell as 8 hours of sleep. We do not need anything to keep us glued to our monitors.
I know it's incredibly cool to keep up the pizza/coffee/dew image, I like all three of them too, but considering how bad a lof of geeks handle their eating and sleeping, combined with a bad workplace and little excercise... they're a burnedout zombie with bad back and wrist problems waiting to happen.
Contrary to popular geek belief, our bodies are not made for such abuse, and no, you are not different, you too need nutrition and sleep.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Imagine you'll get pretty hungry, though.
GI Joe: Trade you my patch for your peanut butter and crackers.
GI Ethnic: [bitch slaps GI Joe]
This is army food that even the Atkins diet could love!
What gives?
-Jordan
"Is this what ./'ers need during those long coding sessions[?]"
:-P
What's a dot-slasher?
Going long-term without eating cannot happen... big problems if you don't feed the gut.
Critically ill hospitalized patients with long-term abdominal pathology that prevent them from eating (severe Pancreatitis, shotgun wound to the abdomen, Gastric Outlet Obstruction from cancer, Crohns Disease, etc) are at high risk for all kinds of problems. It can even happen with anorexics. They often end up on TPN (total parenteral nutrition)... AKA Intravenous feedings. Long term TPN puts you at risk for some nasty complications (see below), even aside from the risk of TPN itself (you have to have the electrolytes, osmolality, etc just right).
The current theory is that the intestinal wall needs to be "fed" by absorbing food. Like many things in the body, the gut needs exercise. If it doesn't get it, you get atrophy of the viscera, and bacterial translocation across the gut wall. This results in severe gram-negative sepsis from enteric organisms (think about intravenously injecting feces... it's about the same effect). Overwhelming gram-negative sepsis has a tremendous mortality rate... most don't survive.
Even without the above complication of not eating, the amount of material (think in terms of simple mass of nutrients) you could get from a transdermal patch is miniscule. There is no way you could absorb enough nutrients to stay alive. Even TPN requires that huge volumes be infused, since it can only be concentrated so much. Some components are not even water soluble (lipids), and have to be given as a suspension. Even worse, TPN has to be given through a central IV line (subclavian, jugular, femoral, PICC), since peripheral veins quickly become unusable from the irritation and osmotic load.
Honestly, I can't see this satisfying anyone's caloric needs.
I suspect this will be used primarily to deliver drugs... something we already do.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I don't need a sticky wafer feeding me fancy "nutraceuticals". That's why they make vending machines, I imagine the pork rinds are chock full of them (not that I could ever bring myself to eat them, mind you. I'm in for the sweet rolls).
No, what I need is a patch to feed me lots of "nutrazzzzzicals", giving me a full nights sleep while I do whatever. If that means lucid dreams overlaying normal vision, fine (I'll just be really careful who or what I look at), just give me real sleep I don't have to catch up on later.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
go pills are not crank.
According to the US government, one of the meanings of "crank" is amphetamine. Since "go pills" are dexedrine, and dexedrine is an amphetamine, I think that "go pills are crank" is a logically true statemnt.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
..."works similarly to to nicotine or birth control patches"...
Oh yeah, there's a warehouse mixup waiting to happen.
-- Terry
Of course, Zoloft, Xanthax, Prozac, Lithium and other popular happy pills which are regularly consumed by a third of americans are considered to be a normal way of life
What you say is more true than you know. When I started taking Prozac, my life turned around. My life became normal again. So yes, a lot of people probably shouldn't be taking the drugs they do. But a lot of other people should. Please don't associate scientifically tested and proven useful medical drugs with common street drugs. Anybody who scoffs at the use of medications such as SSRIs and thinks of them as nothing more than "happy pills" probably hasn't been or known someone in their life who has suffered from and been diagnosed with major depression.
Before you jump on the what-about...-train, I'll admit that drugs like marijuana do have ligitimate medical uses. However, recent research has isolated the elements of the plant that work for pain relief from the other elements, such as those that cause the "high" that can permanently damage the brain's pleasure receptors after frequent use. If that first element can be administered seperately in a refined form, say in a pill, shot or nasal spray, it can be safely taken. Heck, even a patch (strangely, sounds almost on-topic). That is the difference between street drugs and prescription drugs.
Now if advocates put half the energy into fighting the medical industry as they did getting their pet stoner-drug legalized, these prescriptions would be cheap enough for anyone (who needs them) to afford. But prescription drugs make a nice scapegoat (mischaracterise, scream "me too!") for anyone who is cranky that they can't get their daily high.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
FOLKS!
This patch is nothing but a fancy vitamin pill. It won't "feed" you any more than a vitamin pill would. RTFA!
The only advantage this patch has is that it lasts many days - the idea being to prevent soldiers from coming down with beri-beri, scurvy, and other diseases due to lack of vitamins (which MREs are not exactly high in). If you can issue a soldier a patch every week,
a) You can quickly determine if the soldier is using it - "INSPECTION - Pruuu-zent PATCH!" This is harder to do with a pill.
b) You only need worry about it once a week - for guys on long range patrol this simplifies life. In combat, simple is good.
For geeks driving a keyboard, just take your multivitamin every (virtual) morning, along with your coffee, and you will get the same effect.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I am a US Army vet, but my only exposure to field food was MREs, I never got to see the next generation MREs used now or the older C-rations. When I was in the service the MREs came in diverse enough configurations that there was something for everyone, plus of course the little black market we had running using the M&Ms as a bargain tool.
:-)
Still, MREs had a small problem, it took time to eat them. The MRE not only gave us a certain caloric load per bag, but it also kept us busy for up to 30 minutes (some of us looked forward to getting MREs instead of a chow truck because you would be literally guaranteed 30 minutes of peace from the cadre as long as you looked busy tearing open packets of food). If you are really in a hurry and you don't eat your MREs whole then over time in a long deployment you could start suffering vitamin deficiencies, which is where a patch like that would rock.
Of course, we know the first three patches that are going to be issued will be:
1. Caffeine
2. Tylenol/Motrin
3. Go pills
The concept sounds great, but it is just too obvious that they are looking for a clean way to deliver chemicals without needles or pills (plus the patch allows a time release).
If any of you has never tasted an MRE and has a chance to, go ahead and try it. I have always been picky about food but I never thought I would be so damn well pleased with cold food (the warming jackets were not widely distributed to non-deployed units). Chicken-a-la-King, Beef Stew and "Ham and Omelette" where the best
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder