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Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
So the point of this article is that physical tasks, like plumbing or carrying infected blood, can't be done electronically ?!?!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The bandwidth sucks.
I guess the only question is... why don't you take a look at TFA and get all your questions answered, instead of rushing here to try for a FP?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
... Sen. Ted Stevens.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
For that matter, how much information can you send if you load up a 16-Gb USB drive (or a few) and send them off in a tube?
You have a last mile (or last metre) problem there though. Getting the data through the tube will take seconds. Minutes at most. 16GB through USB2 will take a few minutes even if you actually do get the maximum theoretical throughput.
There has never been a more appropriate time for this response: WHOOSH! (as the parcel goes by in the tube)
Both Berlin and Paris had a networks with a total length of more than 400km.
obvious link
Nearly all the department stores did that back in the 1950's/1960's . There were no electronic cash registers, and checkout staff weren't allowed to handle money. So the customer would place their payment along with a receipt signed by the checkout clerk into a capsule. This would be sent upstairs to be processed by an accountant who would send the change back down to the checkout clerk. Just like in the movie "Brazil".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I found the article mildly interesting but the lack of details disappointing. They only mention things like switching points and waiting areas in passing. It would've been a great article if they'd talked about the specific tech - I know it's old tech, but most of us have had little to no exposure to it (I've been to banks that use it at their drive-through windows... that's about it). For example: there are switches; is there any sort of prioritization protocol, or are the switches simply for collision prevention?
#DeleteChrome
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
at the hospital at which I worked, you could select the origin station as the destination, and the tube system would dutifully take the carrier all the way around and back. so you could send yourself something, and receive it a few minutes later. I loved sending stuff to myself in the (near) future.
You stop letting them spend all day in the basement.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually, the blower from a vacuum cleaner at a car wash would be more than enough to power a 100mm dia. (4" in the US, which is a standard tube size here for pneumatic tube systems) point-to-point line, and you could move the carrier several hundred meters with a payload up up to a half kilo. You could use ABS sewage line. The problem is how you would create bends and offsets. The smallest radius for a standard size carrier in a 100mm dia. tube is 60cm. Sealing the system is really not much of an issue. And if you use a piece of 70mm pipe, you'd need to wrap the outside with the fuzzy velcro strips at equadistant points to make your seal in order to allow the pressure/vacuum to propel the carrier. I used to sell the big systems to hospitals for a living.
(and no couriers available to fall back on)
Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.
When I was in high school, I quite stereotypically worked at McDonald's. To this day, whenever I eat there, I can tell you EXACTLY what is happening in the kitchen. Someone really paid attention to make sure no function requiring human attention in that kitchen had the same sound.
Sometimes, if some jerkoff called off and you were stuck back in the kitchen alone, it was MADDENING. You absolutely are more aware of a loud, high pitched beep than a voice telling you to do something
actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
as in Futurama: Governor lady said "I'm sending in more trains!"
I used such tubes all day, every day, for several years, doing Neutron Activation Analysis. The samples were loaded three per tube, known as rabbits. They went into the slot, closed and blew down the outside wall of the building, underground, and then up into the core of our TRIGA reactor. There they got neutrons of various energies for anywhere from 0.05 to 2-3 seconds, and then they blasted back to me. Behind the shields I removed the samples and placed them at the gamma detectors--moving very fast. Counting gammas took anywhere from seconds to days, depending upon type and elements.
We proved the existence of the Northern Hemisphere ozone depletion with 800 samples, and several of my graduates got PhDs. Another project showed trade routes extant through northern Italy at the construction of the Colliseum.
Once in a while a rabbit would get stuck. A particularly hot one did, right at the corner of my lab. We timed that test so no one else was in the building, and it got so hot it wouldn't come back past the tube joint. If I hadn't known just where the 36" wrench was, the building could have been badly contaminated, and would've shut down, as in national news. I got it out without too much exposure, and was offered the job as building manager later.
Another time a sample exploded while removing it from a rabbit, showering my nose with hot dust. I still get stray hairs growing there...
> I've occasionally thought it would be interesting to use this kind of technology for home plumbing. For example, when you turn on your sink and ask for hot water, instead of having a continuous flow in a pipe from the hot water heater to the sink (which wastes a lot of energy), why not use a pneumatic tube system to deliver a packet of hot water to the sink?
Are you fucking high?
>Note that the same tubes could be used for delivering hot water an cold water, and taking away waste water? (You'd have separate containers, of course, for fresh water and waste water).
Are you fucking high?
>You could do cool things with a pneumatic packet-switched water network. For instance, it would be easy to add a storage tank and route shower waster water to the tank, and then from there to the toilets for flushing.
Are you fucking high?
>And I bet with some clever design, you could make it so the pneumatic tube system could double as a centralized vacuum system for house cleaning.
Seriously, are you fucking high?
Why not? Possibly because of the following:
1) The energy required to transport "packets" of hot water is many, many times greater than the losses through the hot water pipes.
2) The cost of building such a system would exceed any logical benefit; adding a large-diameter pipe system would occupy considerable space and would require some (presumably mechanized) system for sorting, draining, and filling the containers (as well as isolating waste water containers from the others) in a space-consuming "sorting room".
3) Each shower, sink, and drain in the building would require a large accumulation tank, since it would take multiple "packets" to flush a toilet, and storing enough hot water for even a brief shower would require many, many trips through the system. Any drain reservoir that filled faster than the system could empty it would back up into the sink/toilet/bathtub. The largest conceivable container to fit into a typical building could hold about a gallon of water and would be twice the size of the system used at banks--it certainly wouldn't fit inside a standard wall and would require a special breakout conduit.
4) For home use, building a sufficiently complex system would simply be impossible--all water flow would stop while your "packets" were en route to other destinations. There is no conceivable way to build bypass structures and waiting areas sufficient to allow multiple taps to work simultaneously at an acceptable refill rate.
5) Given the necessary locations for most of the accumulation tanks, you would need active pumps to run most faucets--the system would not function on water pressure alone as it does now. This adds cost, complexity, and new failure modes. Power outage? There goes the toilets.
The whole idea is a Rube. If the relatively small losses in the hot water pipes concern you, build a home with insulated hot water pipes. Add a central vac if you like. The end result will be cheaper, more efficient, and 99% less insane.
To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
bing bing bong bong
bing bing bong bong
"Well, Theresa, aren't you going to get that?"
"Hell no! That's Marty from accounting! He's been trying to contact me ever since he thought I was coming on to him at the Christmas party. As if!"
"No, that's not Marty. Marty is bing bing bing bong and not bing bing bong bong. That's Bill in IT."
"Are you sure? I thought Bill's was bing bong bong bing."
"Nope. You might be confusing that with Jerry which is bong bing bong bingybong."
"Okay, but only if you're sure."
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
*whoosh*