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Chinese Man Builds His Own Prosthetic Hands
New submitter macbeth66 writes "Almost 10 years ago, Sun Jifa lost his hands in an explosion. Unable to afford the prosthetic hands recommended by the hospital, he built his own. From the article: 'After eight years of tinkering, he says he finally developed a working model that allows him to grip, hold, and mimic other necessary movements via a system of pulleys and wires.'"
Seems like this would be hard to do without hands...
High five he had after finishing it!
It's that he did that with no hands!
I went from 'go Chinese man!' to 'one of those could have been a chainsaw!' remarkably quickly.
I'm trying to decide if that makes me bad.
He must have become progressively handy over the years, since he did it himself and no one gave him a hand. I wonder if we will hand off the project now? I guess if nothing else, he has become more handsome as a result of his efforts.
See communism works after all. You start with a need, put in a little hard work and entrepreneurialism and poof, new arms. Of wait that's capitalism. Disregard.
That is quite a feet.
Puns totally intended.
Say what you will about the Chinese but, if this were an American, he'd be shopping for a book deal and making millions as a motivational speaker. He'd probably get some weird Craftsman sponsorship as well. Instead, he seems genuinely interested in helping other people get access to what he built. It's inspiring, to say the least.
This man deserves a medal for ingenuity under extreme hardship.
One thing that added unnecessarily to his misery though was that the hospital recommended a prosthetic that he couldn't afford. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination for hospitals to run cheap RepRap-type 3D printers for such needs and print out basic parts on demand. Both the building and running costs are very low indeed.
Of course such parts would be very poor compared to professional prosthetics or even professional 3D printing, but when the choice is between that and nothing, it's hard to argue against it. And the flexibility of such printing means that it is easily adapted to evolve with individual requirements, and replacement of printed parts is almost cost-free when they break or wear out.
It seems a good fit for this kind of unfortunate situation, and it might have made this man's days more bearable as he worked on his own solution, or indeed contributed to it where plastic is more appropriate than steel.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Oh come now my dear AC, don't be so drab; we all know the Chinese will be taking over shortly and just want to have a little fun before hand
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
why no one bothers to hire him. I can imagine that his (hands-on) experience, both form producer and consumer side regarding prosthetics is quite rare and china has to be in great demand of such skills, that is being such a large and industious country.
Actually only a few will float to the top if you use explosives. The majority will sink to the bottom and go to waste. If you want to do it right, stun them with electricity, but not enough to kill them, and then they will float to the top. That way you can also release live the ones you won't eat. I've seen the DNR gather fish for their surveys using stunners and the equipment is rather simple.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Yes, it even looks like automail. But this is Slashdot, people here are not eager to admit their knowledge of these "ugly Japanese cartoons". Now, if only you had mentioned some obscure real-life technology, an instantly assembled group of 4-6 digit id geeks would appear here in comments. They would brag about "good old times", when they worked on most advanced personal computer of that time (Apple 2, of course), and how they built their first ham-radio module in kindergarten, and once had a dinner with Heinlein and Clark at the same time, and it was so awesome, that everybody else have to immediately get off their lawns.
For everything else there is TVTropes.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.