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NASA "Bed Rest" Contractor Blogs the Days
Arguendo writes "It seems that earning $5000 a month for bed rest as a NASA contractor may not be so enjoyable after all. A 38 year-old woman selected for the study is blogging about her experience as test subject for NASA's study about the long-term effects of microgravity on people. There's quite a bit of information on her page, including info about the screening process, the food options [.xls link], and the not-so-great days of testing and immobility. It definitely sounds like work."
NASA owes most slashdotters a whole lot of money!
I'm thinking meditation practice would be extremely helpful in this situation (and by extension also for long-term space travel) ... since there is nothing you can do to alter your current (sucky) situation, you just need to be at peace with it and experience it moment by moment.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
You know, I haven't tasted the food that they list but the menu options honestly don't sound that bad. While I am a capable cook, we typically rotate the same meals throughout every two weeks. What they were offering looked like a great and varied selection.
Perhaps the immobility is what's making this person grumpy about everything else?
I would hate this. I already feel "bleh" from sitting at a desk for 40+ hours a week. As much as I'd like to lay around and play video games, I know my body would hate it.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
You have a typo on line 132.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I sustained a serious eye injury when I was about 12 that required me to stay in bed, on my back - only on my back, not my side - for a month. The injured eye was covered with a bandage. I could not read, watch TV, or do anything that might cause the eye to be used (apparently the covered eye would move in unison with the uninjured one if I read or watched TV).
So, except for necessary restroom breaks, and a short bath every 2 or 3 days, I was stuck in that bed with just a radio for entertainment. It was not pleasant. Even less pleasant because Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" was the big hit at the time. That song still causes an unpleasant Pavlov reaction over two decades later.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
There was another guy that was doing a similar study about a year ago. He made a big deal about how he was going to keep a journal and post them on McSweeneys.net. He started out really excited, and then day by day, the posts got more and more terse and depressing. Until finally they just stopped. Only two weeks in. Never heard how that turned out. But it was enough to convince me to never, ever volunteer for a study like that.
Nah, he's just further along in the study!
Here's her Flickr account. I assume the ceiling tiles are from the Galveston research center. I have to say, in general, the food sure doesn't look terribly appetizing, but for some reason, food rarely looks appetizing in photos (which is why lots of marketing photos for food are actually photos of non-food things that look like food, like painted paste, wax, etc).
. . .I won't have to get out of my comfy chair, will I?
Where else can an attractive young lady make that much money just by lying on her back?
At our college there were studies where students were paid to eat a completely controlled diet for two months. These were experiments to what happened if you completely eliminated one component from the diet, like an amino acid. The food was tubs of flavored paste, much like penaut butter. I'd people would go mad after a few weeks. I wonder how they prevented cheating.
I'm new here, someone please explain?
I'm thinking meditation practice would be extremely helpful in this situation (and by extension also for long-term space travel) ... since there is nothing you can do to alter your current (sucky) situation, you just need to be at peace with it and experience it moment by moment.
Buddhist Monks are quite active during the day: cooking, cleaning, tending temple, chores, etc... I think even they would have a problem being completely immobile for long periods.
Contrary to what the New Age types and many American Buddhists think, meditation doesn't make you super human.
Only for the Spanish Inquisition!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Guys, guys, guys, it's obvious this was all just done on a movie set or something. The shadows are all weird and where'd that wind come from? The blog entries are just there to help trick you into believing all of it.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Shouldn't this be in science.slashdot.org, not idle?
It definitely sounds like work.
I'm reminded of a movie by my favorite Spanish director. In Talk to Her, two actresses spend most of the movie pretending to be in a coma. Sounds easy, right? But Almadovar claims its the hardest kind of acting there is.
How dare you pull a fast one this scarred human being?
Criminal, residency & credit checks came back clean.
Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?
Please help metamoderate.
Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?
I'm not sure. Maybe they want to avoid people doing the study and meanwhile sending spam or posting dupes to slashdot or other stuff that might not reflect well on NASA.
Maybe, based on the their experience, a clean credit record is correlated usefully with being able to do the study successfully.
I applied for this study and didn't get in. My blood sugar was a little high they did the blood test. I do studies like this for a living, although none of them pay as well as the NASA one. Info at jalr.org, just another lab rat dot org.
A couple of years ago I had surgery that required me to stay in bed for 5 days without getting up at all. I couldn't even roll over onto my stomach, so I had to lie flat, sort of on my side, or propped up a little bit.
Hellish is a term that I would use to describe it, even though I had ample access to morphine and other drugs.
$5000 a month isn't NEARLY enough.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Yeah, I get that they're studying the body for possible space travel trauma, but who the hell cares ? The way things are going down here on Earth, we probably won't survive long enough to colonize anywhere else. We're too busy killing each other over fabricated issues of money, religion or ideology. We may dream of a Star Trek reality where humans explore the galaxy discovering allies everywhere they go, but the truth is that we're angry little shits and the only think we'll do in space is look for someone new to hate, pillage and murder.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Criminal, residency & credit checks came back clean.
Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?
To prevent guys with baseball bats from interrupting the experiment, obviously.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
After pushing my femur through the back of my hip socket I was in traction for 3 months. It is absolute hell staying in bed for that long (aside from the nurses giving bed baths!).
The worst thing was that I wasn't actually sick, I just couldn't get up and walk around - actually I didn't walk around for quite a while, but at least I could hobble!
When a person is deprived from its ability to estimate time properly the results may not be good. The Windago is a mythical creature that lives deep in the northern woods of northern Minnesota. The stories of those who have seen this entity are all the same. It makes me wonder if there is a hidden human response that is triggered when the mind cant estimate time properly.