There is a vast (many orders of magnitude) difference between the amount of power required for a pacemaker and for an artificial heart.
A pacemaker sends a very tiny signal to existing heart muscle to trigger it to contract. At this late hour I'll abstain from the actual calculations, but the signals are transmitted for brief periods of time (milliseconds) at small voltages (~100 mv) and represent an incredibly small amount of power. Even a tiny lithium battery can run a pacemaker for ten years.
A heart, on the other hand, must do the mechanical work to pump large volumes of liquid at fairly high pressures. The required power is roughly what you need to run a small cordless power tool continuously. How long will your drill run non-stop? One could make a twenty-hour battery, but it would probably weigh a significant fraction of the patient's body weight (say, 10 or 20 kilograms), which would defeat the entire purpose of this device.
I guess you could use plutonium to build an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) like those on most deep-space probes; that would have enough power to run it for a couple of months. But it would be huge, and the amount of plutonium required would be unhealthy...
Oh yeah - and I'll echo what the others have said: Security, security, security!
Password-protection won't cut it. With medical info, you can't afford to screw this up even once, ever, so hire a real expert and Take the time to educate yourself about the issues.
Web browsers available in the waiting room, instead of an aging pile of "cosmopolitan" and "guns-n-ammo"...
But seriously, despite the disparaging remarks by some posters, I'm glad to hear a doctor thinking this way. It's been my experience that most elements of the medical industry are among the last to adopt information technology, even when it could significantly improve their practice.
Things to muse about that may help you:
What can the 'net do to improve your transcription/dictation process? Digital dictation: audio securely transmitted to off-site transcriptionists, text securely e-mailed back, etc.
It can help doctors and patients both if doctors could access films/MRIs from home. Think about those late-night calls when you wish you could see that x-ray again before making a recommendation or prescription over the phone.
Heck, extend the above to accessing your full patient records and charts from home. This would really help on-call docs make better decisions, especially when the caller is another doc's patient.
In addition to allowing patients to see a list of available appointment slots before calling, good scheduling software could be used to help generate statistics on the promptness of appointments and average wait times. This could streamline the patient experience by helping you identify places where your schedules tend to fall behind, thus helping you make allowances for them in the future.
Hire a web jockey (hey, I'll offer...) to put together web pages and links to information about the conditions you treat. Have terminals available in your lobby for patients to review this info and/or email parts of it to themself. This information could me much more complete and interactive than those ubiquitous "about your condition" pamphlets. Just review the content yourself because there's so much crap on the web these days...
Hope these suggestions inspire thought, good luck with your new office!
And the ONLY PC CPU that doesn't need a fan is the Cyrix III, the LAMEST PC cpu that will be released.
Wow, I couldn't have made the point better myself. This is because PC CPUs are all still CISC, and have tons of extra circuitry to maintain backward compatibility all the way to 8086. So they need fans because they are bigger, hotter, and less efficient. This is also why Apple's performance advantage in laptops has been large and steady ever since the PowerPC was unveiled; Batteries and pentiums do not get along.
Yes, it sucks that Apple was forced to go dual-processor before OS X is out. When they have a multiprocessor OS, increasing processor number is a cheaper way to improve performance, but it's a bit premature today. They are forced to because, essentially, Motorola can't get its head out of it's ass and clean up its fabs. IBM has faster PowerPCs, and Apple can't use them because of moto's intellectual property controls.
Additionally, I have 5 fans in my computer in it's not noisy.
Noisy is a subjective measure. I have three in mine and it drives me crazy. I even wish they could get cheap, big flash-ram drives because I'm tired of listening to drives spin. Some people like quiet machinery; I'm one of them.
If you drive a Harley and like a computer with lots of fans, more power to you. I'll stick with a super-quiet EV1 and no fans in my box. (except the high-end computers still have a fan)
I looked up the abstract of the original article because the news article reference wasn't all that clear. It's listed in P.N.A.S. as a chemistry study, not a biology study.
It appears the researchers were examining self-organization of microtubules in solution, but not actually sending living cells into space. And it's pretty big stretch to extrapolate from a simple chemical solution to living cells in a human body.
I'd hold off for now on calling this study the solution to the question long-term health deterioration in space.
All valid points but fuel/money isn't one of them.
It is if you have to *launch* the components of a large station
My argument is different - to wit, 'so what'? If you really want to have people living in space for long periods of time, you want to have a lot of people in a fairly large space, or they go stir crazy and develop serious social problems. Mir was not always a fun place. Even a place as "big" as McMurdo station gets pretty loopy during the winterover. (pop: 200)
Really, if you want people in orbit permanently, you ultimately need to be prepared to send a small city. At which point making it a rotating city (and all the designs are) is not much harder.
I remember reading an article, back in gradeschool, that actually discussed the technology and strategies that could be used to, say, visibly paint the Coca-Cola wave or the golden arches across the face of the moon. I still shit myself thinking about it.
But I have to say I won't complain about the pizza hut logo anyway. Whatever it took to get that particular lego brick into the sky, I'm happy. Besides, you couldn't really see the pizza hut logo before launch anyway because it was behind the scaffolding.
G4 MP a bandaid for the PPC clock rate disaster?
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 1
This article at The Register argues that Apple's decision to go MP on the G4 series is because they simply can't get higher clock-rate chips from Motorola. Worse, they mention that even when the next G4 goes up to 700+ MHz, Motorola will only accomplish this "in exchange for architectural changes that will reduce the chip's inherent superiority..."
Now that's certainly not an unfounded argument - the G4 is still at 500MHz, which is after all the same speed at which the G4 mac was introduced, months ago.
None of the mac sites that I can see have talked about this in a while. What's up? It seems wrong, given that:
The simpler RISC architecture of PPC should be easier to clock up...
IBM was the first off the block with copper a while back, which should have put the whole AIM alliance a mile ahead...
So admittedly my understanding of CPU manufacturing is limited, but *why* is this issue going on so long?
The roton *got* off the ground, but not very far - they were only testing the last stage of the landing system.
They don't need $10 million, they need $200 million.
I'd love to see them succeed more than anyone - their design is one of the most radically innovative anywhere and could really have been something. But the investment capital for launch startups has simply gone dry the last year or so. If your seti@home idea happens to fly they'll get my 20 bucks, but I wouldn't count on that really accomplishing much...
Disclaimer: I work at JPL so the last year or so I've gained experience being bitter and jaded about the space program...
Specific ideas: Make a deal with Hollywood to make a space epic actually shot in space ("On location...from the moon!").
This is not that far from one group's plan, actually. Check out the Artemis Society's web site; they plan to initiate a permanent human presence on the moon within about 15 years, and they intend to raise funds through a combination of the entertainment potential and the industrial potential.
I personally think they've got a great idea that will never fly, but who knows. http://www.asi.org.
in part by being an old, well-respected (by the government; meaning past military contracts) aeronautical company using a tried-and-true design.
It's not quite so bad as all that... in the last couple years, with the recent spate of innovative launch startups (i.e. rotary rocket, pioneer rocketplane, kistler aerospace, kelly space & tech, etc...) the FAA and other regulatory agencies have been working quite hard with these companies to establish new rules/regs that would allow more companies easier access to orbit. I'm sorry, I can't easily find the URLs for the articles I read on the subjects months ago, but you might find references to them on the web sites of those companies. If nothing else, the companies' sites are rather interesting and exciting for the possibilities they present.
Unfortunately, funding for most of these little guys has kind of dried up since Iridium crashed, taking some 30% of the near-future launch business with it. Too bad, Rotary was really getting somewhere with live tests of it's vehicle, too..
Actually, it's worse than that, even. Remember that orbits closer to the parent body are *faster*, not slower orbits. To drop to a lower orbit, you have to speed up. And you have to speed up a lot from 18mps to drop the orbit within the surface of the sun.
You have to make your orbit increasingly elliptical to do it reasonably; a thinner ellipse until one side intersects the solar surface. Cheaper than shrinking a nearly circular orbit that far, but still prohibitive.
It's actually cheaper to chuck it out of the solar system.
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A pacemaker sends a very tiny signal to existing heart muscle to trigger it to contract. At this late hour I'll abstain from the actual calculations, but the signals are transmitted for brief periods of time (milliseconds) at small voltages (~100 mv) and represent an incredibly small amount of power. Even a tiny lithium battery can run a pacemaker for ten years.
A heart, on the other hand, must do the mechanical work to pump large volumes of liquid at fairly high pressures. The required power is roughly what you need to run a small cordless power tool continuously. How long will your drill run non-stop? One could make a twenty-hour battery, but it would probably weigh a significant fraction of the patient's body weight (say, 10 or 20 kilograms), which would defeat the entire purpose of this device.
I guess you could use plutonium to build an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) like those on most deep-space probes; that would have enough power to run it for a couple of months. But it would be huge, and the amount of plutonium required would be unhealthy...
Oh yeah - and I'll echo what the others have said: Security, security, security! Password-protection won't cut it. With medical info, you can't afford to screw this up even once, ever, so hire a real expert and Take the time to educate yourself about the issues.
- What can the 'net do to improve your transcription/dictation process? Digital dictation: audio securely transmitted to off-site transcriptionists, text securely e-mailed back, etc.
- It can help doctors and patients both if doctors could access films/MRIs from home. Think about those late-night calls when you wish you could see that x-ray again before making a recommendation or prescription over the phone.
- Heck, extend the above to accessing your full patient records and charts from home. This would really help on-call docs make better decisions, especially when the caller is another doc's patient.
- In addition to allowing patients to see a list of available appointment slots before calling, good scheduling software could be used to help generate statistics on the promptness of appointments and average wait times. This could streamline the patient experience by helping you identify places where your schedules tend to fall behind, thus helping you make allowances for them in the future.
- Hire a web jockey (hey, I'll offer...) to put together web pages and links to information about the conditions you treat. Have terminals available in your lobby for patients to review this info and/or email parts of it to themself. This information could me much more complete and interactive than those ubiquitous "about your condition" pamphlets. Just review the content yourself because there's so much crap on the web these days...
Hope these suggestions inspire thought, good luck with your new office!Wow, I couldn't have made the point better myself. This is because PC CPUs are all still CISC, and have tons of extra circuitry to maintain backward compatibility all the way to 8086. So they need fans because they are bigger, hotter, and less efficient. This is also why Apple's performance advantage in laptops has been large and steady ever since the PowerPC was unveiled; Batteries and pentiums do not get along.
Yes, it sucks that Apple was forced to go dual-processor before OS X is out. When they have a multiprocessor OS, increasing processor number is a cheaper way to improve performance, but it's a bit premature today. They are forced to because, essentially, Motorola can't get its head out of it's ass and clean up its fabs. IBM has faster PowerPCs, and Apple can't use them because of moto's intellectual property controls.
Additionally, I have 5 fans in my computer in it's not noisy.
Noisy is a subjective measure. I have three in mine and it drives me crazy. I even wish they could get cheap, big flash-ram drives because I'm tired of listening to drives spin. Some people like quiet machinery; I'm one of them.
If you drive a Harley and like a computer with lots of fans, more power to you. I'll stick with a super-quiet EV1 and no fans in my box. (except the high-end computers still have a fan)
I looked up the abstract of the original article because the news article reference wasn't all that clear. It's listed in P.N.A.S. as a chemistry study, not a biology study.
It appears the researchers were examining self-organization of microtubules in solution, but not actually sending living cells into space. And it's pretty big stretch to extrapolate from a simple chemical solution to living cells in a human body.
I'd hold off for now on calling this study the solution to the question long-term health deterioration in space.
All valid points but fuel/money isn't one of them.
It is if you have to *launch* the components of a large station
My argument is different - to wit, 'so what'? If you really want to have people living in space for long periods of time, you want to have a lot of people in a fairly large space, or they go stir crazy and develop serious social problems. Mir was not always a fun place. Even a place as "big" as McMurdo station gets pretty loopy during the winterover. (pop: 200)
Really, if you want people in orbit permanently, you ultimately need to be prepared to send a small city. At which point making it a rotating city (and all the designs are) is not much harder.
I remember reading an article, back in gradeschool, that actually discussed the technology and strategies that could be used to, say, visibly paint the Coca-Cola wave or the golden arches across the face of the moon. I still shit myself thinking about it.
But I have to say I won't complain about the pizza hut logo anyway. Whatever it took to get that particular lego brick into the sky, I'm happy. Besides, you couldn't really see the pizza hut logo before launch anyway because it was behind the scaffolding.
This article at The Register argues that Apple's decision to go MP on the G4 series is because they simply can't get higher clock-rate chips from Motorola. Worse, they mention that even when the next G4 goes up to 700+ MHz, Motorola will only accomplish this "in exchange for architectural changes that will reduce the chip's inherent superiority..."
Now that's certainly not an unfounded argument - the G4 is still at 500MHz, which is after all the same speed at which the G4 mac was introduced, months ago.
None of the mac sites that I can see have talked about this in a while. What's up? It seems wrong, given that:
- The simpler RISC architecture of PPC should be easier to clock up...
- IBM was the first off the block with copper a while back, which should have put the whole AIM alliance a mile ahead...
So admittedly my understanding of CPU manufacturing is limited, but *why* is this issue going on so long?The roton *got* off the ground, but not very far - they were only testing the last stage of the landing system.
They don't need $10 million, they need $200 million.
I'd love to see them succeed more than anyone - their design is one of the most radically innovative anywhere and could really have been something. But the investment capital for launch startups has simply gone dry the last year or so. If your seti@home idea happens to fly they'll get my 20 bucks, but I wouldn't count on that really accomplishing much...
Disclaimer: I work at JPL so the last year or so I've gained experience being bitter and jaded about the space program...
Specific ideas: Make a deal with Hollywood to make a space epic actually shot in space ("On location...from the moon!").
This is not that far from one group's plan, actually. Check out the Artemis Society's web site; they plan to initiate a permanent human presence on the moon within about 15 years, and they intend to raise funds through a combination of the entertainment potential and the industrial potential.
I personally think they've got a great idea that will never fly, but who knows. http://www.asi.org.
in part by being an old, well-respected (by the government; meaning past military contracts) aeronautical company using a tried-and-true design.
It's not quite so bad as all that ... in the last couple years, with the recent spate of innovative launch startups (i.e. rotary rocket, pioneer rocketplane, kistler aerospace, kelly space & tech, etc...) the FAA and other regulatory agencies have been working quite hard with these companies to establish new rules/regs that would allow more companies easier access to orbit. I'm sorry, I can't easily find the URLs for the articles I read on the subjects months ago, but you might find references to them on the web sites of those companies. If nothing else, the companies' sites are rather interesting and exciting for the possibilities they present.
http://www.rotaryrocket.com
http://www.rocketplane.com
http://www.kistleraerospace.com
http://www.kellyspace.com
Unfortunately, funding for most of these little guys has kind of dried up since Iridium crashed, taking some 30% of the near-future launch business with it. Too bad, Rotary was really getting somewhere with live tests of it's vehicle, too..
Actually, it's worse than that, even. Remember that orbits closer to the parent body are *faster*, not slower orbits. To drop to a lower orbit, you have to speed up. And you have to speed up a lot from 18mps to drop the orbit within the surface of the sun.
You have to make your orbit increasingly elliptical to do it reasonably; a thinner ellipse until one side intersects the solar surface. Cheaper than shrinking a nearly circular orbit that far, but still prohibitive.
It's actually cheaper to chuck it out of the solar system.