"The only real theoretical advantage over a regular videotaped operation would be the interactivity of a simulator, at which point you might as well use a model/cadaver/etc anyway."
I agree with you... I don't think videotapes could teach surgery near as good as doing the surgery itself.. whether simulated or on real cadavers.
No more than watching videotapes of others doing analog design is going to make me a good designer.
I get the idea nothing is going to replace the genuine cadaver ( once you get over the smell ).
We have one over at our college, and when I saw it and got a whiff, I got a whole new respect for the class of pre-med students. I don't recall having a thing in my engineering training that smelled quite like that.
I would think the simulator would mostly be for training how to apply the surgical knowledge through the telesurgical robot. There would be advantages and disadvantages to using the bot. Having an assortment of tools all ready to go, with macros in place so that repetitive things such as stitching could be automated, but there is also the drawbacks of latency and use of unfamiliar tools. I noted in another post how important I feel it is to standardize the interface if we expect surgeons worldwide to be able to use it. Hopefully, as we engineers and robotocists hone our skills to produce better products, doctors hopefully will find these products more useful in the OR. The idea being to make a surgical assistant that contains all the tools a surgeon needs and can perform under the direction of the surgeon what has to be done. Hopefully, the idea is that the surgeon will find the robots to be a useful aid in the OR so that the surgeons will be comfortable working through them. When the surgeons can see through the robot's eyes and work through the robot's hands, the distance between surgeon and robot falls out of the equation. And if the robots are standardized - then it does not make any difference which robot the surgeon works through, just as I have several identical tools I use, it does not make any difference which oscilloscope I get, they all work the same. Same concept - just extended.
Because the robot is not as constrained as we humans are, I get the idea a lot of work may be done out the end of catheter-style tools so we can minimize invasive surgery. Advances in miniaturization of cameras, optics, light sources, and actuators could make for some dandy tiny yet powerful operating tools.
But then, if we have telesurgical robots, it only follows that interactive simulation would be the only way to go. Kinda like a videogame. It would make videotapes obsolete , as nobody wants to learn how to play a videogame by watching instructional tapes!
For review though, the images and the action taken by the surgeon could be stored so it could be reviewed and used for demonstration, it would probably become part of the patient record. Hopefully it would replace that long essay my surgeon had to prepare when I had surgery once. Surgeons should not have to spend their time messing with all that paper.
I definitely side with you about elective and convenience surgeries. I feel as you about the bot being primarily for when time is of the essence. I do not think we are quite there yet, and I'll hold off for the Doctor's opinion on what they feel right with. I would expect no less.
Consider how much we pay to train and equip ambulances and paramedics to try to buy a few minutes.
Please consider I am not referring to elective or "convenience" surgery - there is no way I would want to go under a telesurgical knife for that. That is something I could travel in person and be in the immediate presence of my caregiver for.
I think we are talking about that hope when there was no hope. A telesurgical robot can begin work immediately during a crisis situation. The blood and life fluids are draining from the patient every second that care is delayed. Its not the best care in the world, but its the best care that can be provided under the circumstances. I do not see these machines as really being astronomical in cost once they are standardized and mass produced.. Note they will have to be standardized and mass produced if you expect interoperability amongst teams of surgeons. Kinda like a piano keyboard is going to have to be a standard if pianists worldwide are going to be able to play it.
"Not if you use the Internet. There'll be a minimum one second lag, coupled with the potential for a route to go down at any time, resulting in a pause while the IP packets are re-routed."
Yeh.. latency... Thats the kicker. I am confident though that there will be some way to set the protocol streams up so that this can be optimized for this sort of stream transfer much like the corporate videoconferencing. But exactly as you say, it *is* a problem.. and sorely needs our attention. The internet itself is pretty darned reliable though - I just hope these latest worms teach us not to code things in "untrustworthy" ways.
As you indicated, the main problem is indeed latency.
I note many corporations use live video teleconferencing over the net... so the idea of streaming video back to the surgeon does not seem all that off. Motor control has much less need of bandwidth than video. Packet loss can be handled by redundant packet technologies. I am very confident that suitable compression/encryption/data integrity assurance can be implemented to mitigate disruption or eavesdropping of the surgical procedures. I am afraid nothing can be done about DDoS or critical router failures, but consider the alternatives are no help at all.
In a time of need, I am willing to grab for any help I can find. Consider how reliable the net is and how little it is really crippled from technical issues such as this.. its something I am willing to bet my life on, given what the alternative is.
"However, allowing dangerous operations to be undertaken in remote locations is probably not a great idea... without qualified staff physically on hand, I don't think you'd want to trust someone's life to an IP connection; otherwise, the next time some DDoS or Outlook worm strikes, servers aren't the only
thing we lose. "
Good consideration and caution. Nicest to err on the side of safety if at all possible.
Consider I am driving down some back woods road and have my accident. I am tore up bad. They run me into the hospital. No-body there is really up to doing open-heart surgery to fix where the steering column tore into me. But they do have a robot in the OR. I am bleeding to death NOW.
Sure, I would love to have qualified staff on hand standing by to see to it my needs are met, but that is just not an option here. Inside of two minutes, they can probably connect to somebody in some time zone somewhere in the world who knows what to do. Wheel me in and let the guy over in Australia fix me up while I lay bleeding to death in Kansas at 2AM. If the system goes down while I am under the knife, I am really still no worse off than if I did not have the option of telesurgical care in the first place. There is maybe a 0.1% chance of system failure, but there is 99.9% chance there won't be technical problems. Its that probability I am betting my life on.
And, as noted, the whole operation, being digitized, is a movie record of what happened so it can be later reviewed for doing it better next time and training students.
Can't you imagine the simulation software we can come up with so students can run simulations until they feel comfortable with the real thing? Kinda like flight simulators for pilots, so you can crash a few times without getting all the next of kin on your tail.
Being I work in robotics a lot, this technology is typical of what we are trying to do.
We already use micro-manipulators to do things so fine that we humans find it hard to control our own hands to do. There are many things a machine just does much better than we can.. things like zoom vision, ability to see from angles where we can not get our heads to, and doing precision tasks. Ever tried to make stitches as precise as a sewing machine?
The business end of the machines can be much smaller than our fingers, and tools on the machine are designed expressly for needed things. None of this "hand me the scapel, nurse" stuff. The machine can have as many arms and tools as the designers deem necessary.
And the machines can be made absolutely sterile. It is really hard to sterilize a human, and still have us functional.
It is really a tiny, very tiny, step from going to having a surgeon sitting next to a patient doing the surgery, to having one on the other side of the world doing it... ( the main problem is latency ).
The biggest advantage to the patient is that his need of surgical services may happen at any time - what it means is there is a world-wide pool of surgeons available to help - right now. They do not need to get scrubbed. If they are a critical care surgeon, by golly, they may have their end right in their den at their personal residence. Even if the surgeon was in a most unsanitary condition at the time of need, that would not be a factor. Time is. And that is what this technology gives us. Who is best equipped to meet the need... NOW.
This is what dreams are made of. This is why we go to work. To make things like this.
I hate to go on as AC, but I feel I am dealing with a hot moderator here...and I have enough enemies already, thank you, and I do not need another.
But I do think Chaotic Coyote made a good point, that the name URU is already in use. Given our present litigious environment spawned off by a Congress easily swayed against their own populace by a team of suit-wearing corporate-sponsored lobbyists, what sort of ramifications can we expect in the courtrooms by their use of the phrase "uru". After all, look what a fuss is being stirred up over the non-unique usage of the common word: "Windows".
If I had a mod point available right now, I would have used it to bump ChaoticCoyote up one as interesting, at least.
A few years ago, I would not have given it a second thought, but with today's mouse-trap style litigation environment?
It may be the processing of those silicates that may be of value.
Consider a robotic IC plant, possibly running without the toxic waste problems we have here on earth with the weather inadvertantly redistributing our waste. Also, we won't have to work so hard trying to keep "air" and "airborne contaminants" out of the works.
That is a really neat site, Jaysyn. Its gonna take me some time to mull over everything they have there.
Thanks for the link.
I wonder though if I was really off topic? I kinda thought that the whole idea of building your own laptop was to customize it for whatever it is you wanted... in my case, a PVR/data logger.
But, that link was well worth the karma hit:-) .
I was looking to see if there was any way for me to make a small, highly transportable, device that had network connectivity for file transfer, S-Video in and out, as well as being able to use its local display for monitoring what was being recorded/playback. I just do not want a mess of associated boxes - I would like to build it all-in-one so I can get the thing to the site, plug the signal source in ( its often the camera on a robot ), run it for a few hours or so, then go analyze what I got.
Does it have anything to do with right and wrong? Or is it just a mechanism used by the powerful to penalize the weaker?
Does a farmer have a right to say you have to drink the milk you bought directly from the carton? Can it be made illegal to pour the milk into a glass before drinking it?
Does a producer have a right to say you have to watch their content in a specified player?
Is it wrong to take something legally purchased and bend it to suit your needs? If so, God help us that buy wire!
Is it wrong for design and sell equipment for breaking access codes? For spam filters? For telephone telemarketer blocks?
What I am getting it is just what *is* right or wrong? "Justice" just seems to be selective enforcement so that the forces of society can be directed at the weaker party, not the wronged party.
Is the wielding of money to any different than the wielding of technology?
No-one is going to be able to pay Jon back for all this frustration he has been pestered with, yet the same force of "American Justice" that is used to pester Jon looks the other way when its the stronger ( financially speaking ) party doing the thing that someone else does not like them to do.
This whole sordid affair to me is just a demonstration of just how "unjust" our system has become. My immediate idea is to determine the resources of both parties - If Jon loses, RIAA gets the resources of Jon, if RIAA loses, Jon gets possession of the assets of those who are bringing on all this pesterance. In a Norwegian Court - as he, after all, *is* a Norwegian citizen. Now, that the element of who has the most money is nulled out, see if they still want to pester Jon.
Personally, I am sick of this whole sordid affair - I can't for the life of me see what Jon did wrong. No more than I would see it that someone figured a way to get my computer to dump its video signal onto a big-screen projector.
I had no idea that plug-in clocks worked this way! Am I just reading all these posts incorrectly or what? You mess with the input electrical power of a
digital clock and 'time' speeds up or slows down???
They are probably still using the old magnetic technology. Not "digital" per se, but they do keep track of time by mechanically accumulating the phase reversals of the power line.
Lowering the frequency is puzzling to me too.. but then I do not know how they are set up.
Conventional sense tells me that if you lower the frequency, you will also lower the inductive reactance, which will increase current, which will increase load power, which will make things go from bad to worse fast.
Drop the frequency down too low and you may start to saturate the magnetic cores of the main power distribution transformers.. That will do [really bad] wonders for a system already struggling to supply enough power.
Running a "starved" power grid is quit hard to do - as once you start dropping voltage, motors, especially large synchronous ones, start drawing more current as the phase difference between shaft position and power source increases, with the resulting increase in current demand causing the voltage to drop even further. The inevitable result is the motor overheats with possible and sometimes likely destruction of the motor.
When we had this problem of insufficient power in Southern California, we handled it through three remedies..
1) We paid whatever the "generators" asked. The state is now billions of dollars in debt. I can't quote exact prices per KWH, maybe others know this, but it was outrageous. This did not help the finances of California one bit.
2) We had rolling blackouts. Certain service areas ( sans critical facilities ) were placed on a list, and as power dropped below the ability of the grid to support it, we dropped areas for a period of one hour. At which time, either demand had diminished, or another area would have to be blacked out.
3) An intensive campaign to get people to conserve... lots of ads, and incentives for people to put remote load controlling boxes on air conditioners, so that the power company could shut them down remotely when a crunch was going on.
The "brown-outs" are very destructive. And these days, its even worse, as electronic stuff is apt to do all sorts of unpredictable things when it is not supplied with the proper voltage. So, we did not have any "brown outs" this go around. Just as good as far as I am concerned... I would rather be without power for an hour at the time, and when I get power, its the correct power. Otherwise I get to replace the refrigerator compressor.
The main Pacific Intertie the West Coast runs on means all the generators and loads are running together. If that puppy goes down, I understand its quite tricky to get it back up.
Yeh, over the short term, they can vary. But I know they do try to make up for lost time, as they do count every cycle and make up for lost cycles. The concept of using power lines as a timing source was popularized back - in the 1910 time frame, by the Telechron company.
These are extremely reliable clocks. I still have one. Mine was made in Ashland, Massachusetts (USA) in 1941. Its still running. Keeps good time. I did have to change the line cord though.. the old one's insulation got so brittle that just bending the wire would shatter the plastic. They did not make decent flexible insulation in those days.. but the motor itself is still fine.. its alternating layers of winding and wax paper. No brushes.
Internally, they are shaded-pole induction motors, which use the reversals of the incoming power to generate a rotating magnetic field, upon which a magnetized rotor follows in exact sync. If the power goes off for an hour, the clock loses an hour. It restarts when it sees power again. Its not the most efficient clock though, it uses about 10 watts of power.
About every appliance clock that had hands or those little digital "flappers" used this design.
For what its worth, a lot of the old record players used a larger version of the same motor that drives the clocks - and it was used as a cheap means of spinning the turntable at 33, 45, or 78 RPM by means of selecting a different radius on the mechanical friction-drive transmission that drove the turntable from the motor spindle. It was a simple thing - basically a little moveable rubber-rimmed wheel that rested on one of three different radius areas of the motor spindle, then drove the inside of the turntable from that. Very inexpensive, yet robust. ( but a bit noisy - a little drive noise always was present, and we used "wow" and "flutter" to describe the low and high speed mechanical aberrations of turntable rotation).
Probably more than you wanted to know about these things.. but I thought I would toss it in for anyone interested.
They are going in together with YAHOO. It seems that PacBell has a customer base in place as an ISP, and YAHOO would like to rape it. I have been with SBC for about five years as a PPP customer.. but now they are constantly sending me emails under the heading "action required" that direct me to the Yahoo download page.
Note this has to be downloaded to a Microsoft machine.
No linux support.
I do not like it at all that they insist me download software on my end that their end will talk to. I have no idea of any hidden agenda what the software on my end is doing, nor, under DMCA, is there really any way for me to even legally discuss whats going on.
So, it looks like I may have to change ISP only because Yahoo wants me held captive.
Does anybody have ideas for a good ISP? I am looking at www.copper.net.
Ouch! I am an order of magnitude off. One of the other posters mentioned Oprah Winfrey's 50M house.. that's probably what I recall seeing on the supermarket tabloid. I only remembered it seemed insane to me, but then, when I see the Forbes list of people worth billions, I see my resources about like a flea on the rump end of a horse. For a guy who first "came online" when really nice houses were going for $20,000, but you could pick up an average one for under $10,000, *all* real estate today seems to me to be priced insanely high. I see those tabloids at the supermarket detailing how much money people have to spend on something like a house, and it frightens me to no end, as I, as an engineer, do not have near the amount of currency to compete with that. Those figures are astronomical, as far as I am concerned.
But still, I should have researched that one before posting.. I do not take pride in being an order of magnitude off.
This is a little off-topic, but when I first got into engineering, it was my hope that through the efforts of applied science, we could better the situation for the people at large, by eliminating drudgery ( keeping things clean, building things, etc. ) and put an end once and for all to this insane 40 hour weeks where humans toil from dawn to dusk, most of us doing nothing really useful.
So, now we live in a day where our clothes are mass-manufactured and washed for us, our meals are pre-prepared and microwaved at the precise moment our delivered entertainment arrives, all of this at a rock-bottom price made possible through mass replication. But did this help us? Much to my dismay, it did not seem like it did... we just find more ways to entrap ourselves in busywork so we can come up with more and more money to support the non-producers in exhorbitant lifestyles.
We still work those 40 hour weeks... By my estimate, this should have been knocked down to 8-hour weeks by now. Earth is a paradise - we should be enjoying life - not working from dawn to dusk doing something we would rather not be doing every day. We have our needs taken care of. But now we have insane prices for taxes and just somewhere to live. I keep seeing individuals aggregating billions of dollars in the tabloids, yet seeing how difficult it is for me to even generate an retirement account because every time I earn anything at all, it gets reported to the government and taxed away. The government has shown me time and time again that its futile to try to earn anything over a certain subsistence level.
Please excuse the rant, if it taken as such, this is just the musings of an old disappointed engineer who thought the way to make life better for all was through design. One who is very disappointed with how we are filling the landfills of earth with junk that never was supposed to have been, only in the name of ever increasing consumption designed in the name of economics - and keeping the populace busy buying the same stuff over and over and over.
When you are looking at something as incredibly complex as a space flight - 500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.
I understand NASA was fighting the concept because they felt the money would be better spent on shuttle studies and Mars activity. Not that they did not want the money, they just did not want to earmark it onto a mission to Pluto.
Consider though the design and launch of such a thing will train another group of engineers in the art of spacecraft design. There are still many of us, now in our 50's and 60's that originally designed a lot of the missions when they were popular in the late 70's, but we are aging. We won't be around forever. And, due to budget cutbacks, a lot of us that have designed spacefaring circuitry are no longer in the industry. As I type this, I pulled a couple of old references I had, reviewing just for the heck of it an Energy Detector design for studying the Van Allen belts and the multiplexer design for the Explorer VII spacecraft launched in the 60's.
But not many of us lived through that heyday. If a new cadre of engineers are not trained on an unmanned exploratory mission, they get to train on a manned one. I would kinda like them to train and hone their skills on something like this. Back in the old days, we had very little to build our stuff with.. most of it was pre-integrated circuit... like we made them with individual transistors. And we were very concerned with how the transistors degraded with respect to radiation dosages - as nearly all circuits were linear. Today we have much better parts - lower power too- but there are other problems involved that the later parts today are far more sensitive to radiation than those big clunky ones we used. Even before that, our vacuum tubes were immune, for all practical purposes, to EMP - such as static discharges or , God forbid - nuclear artifact. I still use a vacuum-tube oscilloscope when I repair vacuum-tube guitar amps for friends because its front end is immune to the several hundred volt potentials I encounter on the plates of the vacuum tubes.
I know we just about could tell you how many electrons were in the battery, and we had to make such miserly usage of them. You would probably be surprised at all the tricks those guys went through to conserve every last electron of the flow of current.
Even our early receivers are works of art. Cryogenic tuners. By building resonators out of superconductors, we could get the "Q" sensitivity high enough to still see our birds as they transmitted on miniscule amounts of energy. The trick was in integration and probability analyses. Stuff like that takes time to learn. And it just about has to be hands-on too. Kinda like learning to walk. You fall a few times.. ( or you set a few rockets back on the ground a few feet from the launch point, launch things into useless trajectories, or launch things that don't work).
The phrase that went around during that time was "launching a Maytag"... because the satellites of the day were about the size of a washing machine, and were just about as useful as one if they did not fulfill their intended function.
It saddens me a lot to see the things that so impressed me as a child now fading into oblivion... but yet knowing they are not destroyed.. they are just on a very very very long voyage.
I only wish I were as elegant in wording as Carl Sagan:
Reflections on a Mote of Dust
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out
their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How
frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness--there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
It's been said that Astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
You can see the image referred to in the article here.
(In all honesty, I believe this image was from Voyager, but Pioneer had the same view and I felt it only appropriate.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like this technology might be useful for communicating to scuba divers and underwater equipment.
I get the idea nothing is going to replace the genuine cadaver ( once you get over the smell ). We have one over at our college, and when I saw it and got a whiff, I got a whole new respect for the class of pre-med students. I don't recall having a thing in my engineering training that smelled quite like that.
I would think the simulator would mostly be for training how to apply the surgical knowledge through the telesurgical robot. There would be advantages and disadvantages to using the bot. Having an assortment of tools all ready to go, with macros in place so that repetitive things such as stitching could be automated, but there is also the drawbacks of latency and use of unfamiliar tools. I noted in another post how important I feel it is to standardize the interface if we expect surgeons worldwide to be able to use it. Hopefully, as we engineers and robotocists hone our skills to produce better products, doctors hopefully will find these products more useful in the OR. The idea being to make a surgical assistant that contains all the tools a surgeon needs and can perform under the direction of the surgeon what has to be done. Hopefully, the idea is that the surgeon will find the robots to be a useful aid in the OR so that the surgeons will be comfortable working through them. When the surgeons can see through the robot's eyes and work through the robot's hands, the distance between surgeon and robot falls out of the equation. And if the robots are standardized - then it does not make any difference which robot the surgeon works through, just as I have several identical tools I use, it does not make any difference which oscilloscope I get, they all work the same. Same concept - just extended.
Because the robot is not as constrained as we humans are, I get the idea a lot of work may be done out the end of catheter-style tools so we can minimize invasive surgery. Advances in miniaturization of cameras, optics, light sources, and actuators could make for some dandy tiny yet powerful operating tools.
But then, if we have telesurgical robots, it only follows that interactive simulation would be the only way to go. Kinda like a videogame. It would make videotapes obsolete , as nobody wants to learn how to play a videogame by watching instructional tapes!
For review though, the images and the action taken by the surgeon could be stored so it could be reviewed and used for demonstration, it would probably become part of the patient record. Hopefully it would replace that long essay my surgeon had to prepare when I had surgery once. Surgeons should not have to spend their time messing with all that paper.
I definitely side with you about elective and convenience surgeries. I feel as you about the bot being primarily for when time is of the essence. I do not think we are quite there yet, and I'll hold off for the Doctor's opinion on what they feel right with. I would expect no less.
Please consider I am not referring to elective or "convenience" surgery - there is no way I would want to go under a telesurgical knife for that. That is something I could travel in person and be in the immediate presence of my caregiver for.
I think we are talking about that hope when there was no hope. A telesurgical robot can begin work immediately during a crisis situation. The blood and life fluids are draining from the patient every second that care is delayed. Its not the best care in the world, but its the best care that can be provided under the circumstances. I do not see these machines as really being astronomical in cost once they are standardized and mass produced.. Note they will have to be standardized and mass produced if you expect interoperability amongst teams of surgeons. Kinda like a piano keyboard is going to have to be a standard if pianists worldwide are going to be able to play it.
As you indicated, the main problem is indeed latency.
I note many corporations use live video teleconferencing over the net... so the idea of streaming video back to the surgeon does not seem all that off. Motor control has much less need of bandwidth than video. Packet loss can be handled by redundant packet technologies. I am very confident that suitable compression/encryption/data integrity assurance can be implemented to mitigate disruption or eavesdropping of the surgical procedures. I am afraid nothing can be done about DDoS or critical router failures, but consider the alternatives are no help at all.
In a time of need, I am willing to grab for any help I can find. Consider how reliable the net is and how little it is really crippled from technical issues such as this.. its something I am willing to bet my life on, given what the alternative is.
Thanks for the reply.
Good consideration and caution. Nicest to err on the side of safety if at all possible.
Consider I am driving down some back woods road and have my accident. I am tore up bad. They run me into the hospital. No-body there is really up to doing open-heart surgery to fix where the steering column tore into me. But they do have a robot in the OR. I am bleeding to death NOW. Sure, I would love to have qualified staff on hand standing by to see to it my needs are met, but that is just not an option here. Inside of two minutes, they can probably connect to somebody in some time zone somewhere in the world who knows what to do. Wheel me in and let the guy over in Australia fix me up while I lay bleeding to death in Kansas at 2AM. If the system goes down while I am under the knife, I am really still no worse off than if I did not have the option of telesurgical care in the first place. There is maybe a 0.1% chance of system failure, but there is 99.9% chance there won't be technical problems. Its that probability I am betting my life on.
And, as noted, the whole operation, being digitized, is a movie record of what happened so it can be later reviewed for doing it better next time and training students.
Can't you imagine the simulation software we can come up with so students can run simulations until they feel comfortable with the real thing? Kinda like flight simulators for pilots, so you can crash a few times without getting all the next of kin on your tail.
We already use micro-manipulators to do things so fine that we humans find it hard to control our own hands to do. There are many things a machine just does much better than we can.. things like zoom vision, ability to see from angles where we can not get our heads to, and doing precision tasks. Ever tried to make stitches as precise as a sewing machine?
The business end of the machines can be much smaller than our fingers, and tools on the machine are designed expressly for needed things. None of this "hand me the scapel, nurse" stuff. The machine can have as many arms and tools as the designers deem necessary.
And the machines can be made absolutely sterile. It is really hard to sterilize a human, and still have us functional.
It is really a tiny, very tiny, step from going to having a surgeon sitting next to a patient doing the surgery, to having one on the other side of the world doing it... ( the main problem is latency ).
The biggest advantage to the patient is that his need of surgical services may happen at any time - what it means is there is a world-wide pool of surgeons available to help - right now. They do not need to get scrubbed. If they are a critical care surgeon, by golly, they may have their end right in their den at their personal residence. Even if the surgeon was in a most unsanitary condition at the time of need, that would not be a factor. Time is. And that is what this technology gives us. Who is best equipped to meet the need... NOW.
This is what dreams are made of. This is why we go to work. To make things like this.
This is why we need technology.
But I do think Chaotic Coyote made a good point, that the name URU is already in use. Given our present litigious environment spawned off by a Congress easily swayed against their own populace by a team of suit-wearing corporate-sponsored lobbyists, what sort of ramifications can we expect in the courtrooms by their use of the phrase "uru". After all, look what a fuss is being stirred up over the non-unique usage of the common word: "Windows".
If I had a mod point available right now, I would have used it to bump ChaoticCoyote up one as interesting, at least.
A few years ago, I would not have given it a second thought, but with today's mouse-trap style litigation environment?
What I would worry about though is the air contamination caused by the rocket residue from all the launches involved.
Consider a robotic IC plant, possibly running without the toxic waste problems we have here on earth with the weather inadvertantly redistributing our waste. Also, we won't have to work so hard trying to keep "air" and "airborne contaminants" out of the works.
If you can use it, feel free to do so.
Thanks for the link.
I wonder though if I was really off topic? I kinda thought that the whole idea of building your own laptop was to customize it for whatever it is you wanted... in my case, a PVR/data logger. But, that link was well worth the karma hit :-) .
I was looking to see if there was any way for me to make a small, highly transportable, device that had network connectivity for file transfer, S-Video in and out, as well as being able to use its local display for monitoring what was being recorded/playback. I just do not want a mess of associated boxes - I would like to build it all-in-one so I can get the thing to the site, plug the signal source in ( its often the camera on a robot ), run it for a few hours or so, then go analyze what I got.
Does it have anything to do with right and wrong? Or is it just a mechanism used by the powerful to penalize the weaker?
What I am getting it is just what *is* right or wrong? "Justice" just seems to be selective enforcement so that the forces of society can be directed at the weaker party, not the wronged party.Is the wielding of money to any different than the wielding of technology?
No-one is going to be able to pay Jon back for all this frustration he has been pestered with, yet the same force of "American Justice" that is used to pester Jon looks the other way when its the stronger ( financially speaking ) party doing the thing that someone else does not like them to do.
This whole sordid affair to me is just a demonstration of just how "unjust" our system has become. My immediate idea is to determine the resources of both parties - If Jon loses, RIAA gets the resources of Jon, if RIAA loses, Jon gets possession of the assets of those who are bringing on all this pesterance. In a Norwegian Court - as he, after all, *is* a Norwegian citizen. Now, that the element of who has the most money is nulled out, see if they still want to pester Jon.
Personally, I am sick of this whole sordid affair - I can't for the life of me see what Jon did wrong. No more than I would see it that someone figured a way to get my computer to dump its video signal onto a big-screen projector.
They are probably still using the old magnetic technology. Not "digital" per se, but they do keep track of time by mechanically accumulating the phase reversals of the power line.
Telechron Line Operated Clocks
They were quite popular in the States a decade ago.. they are extremely robust. I have one made in 1941 thats still working fine.
Conventional sense tells me that if you lower the frequency, you will also lower the inductive reactance, which will increase current, which will increase load power, which will make things go from bad to worse fast.
Drop the frequency down too low and you may start to saturate the magnetic cores of the main power distribution transformers.. That will do [really bad] wonders for a system already struggling to supply enough power. Running a "starved" power grid is quit hard to do - as once you start dropping voltage, motors, especially large synchronous ones, start drawing more current as the phase difference between shaft position and power source increases, with the resulting increase in current demand causing the voltage to drop even further. The inevitable result is the motor overheats with possible and sometimes likely destruction of the motor.
When we had this problem of insufficient power in Southern California, we handled it through three remedies..
1) We paid whatever the "generators" asked. The state is now billions of dollars in debt. I can't quote exact prices per KWH, maybe others know this, but it was outrageous. This did not help the finances of California one bit.
2) We had rolling blackouts. Certain service areas ( sans critical facilities ) were placed on a list, and as power dropped below the ability of the grid to support it, we dropped areas for a period of one hour. At which time, either demand had diminished, or another area would have to be blacked out.
3) An intensive campaign to get people to conserve... lots of ads, and incentives for people to put remote load controlling boxes on air conditioners, so that the power company could shut them down remotely when a crunch was going on.
The "brown-outs" are very destructive. And these days, its even worse, as electronic stuff is apt to do all sorts of unpredictable things when it is not supplied with the proper voltage. So, we did not have any "brown outs" this go around. Just as good as far as I am concerned... I would rather be without power for an hour at the time, and when I get power, its the correct power. Otherwise I get to replace the refrigerator compressor.
The main Pacific Intertie the West Coast runs on means all the generators and loads are running together. If that puppy goes down, I understand its quite tricky to get it back up.
These are extremely reliable clocks. I still have one. Mine was made in Ashland, Massachusetts (USA) in 1941. Its still running. Keeps good time. I did have to change the line cord though.. the old one's insulation got so brittle that just bending the wire would shatter the plastic. They did not make decent flexible insulation in those days.. but the motor itself is still fine.. its alternating layers of winding and wax paper. No brushes.
Internally, they are shaded-pole induction motors, which use the reversals of the incoming power to generate a rotating magnetic field, upon which a magnetized rotor follows in exact sync. If the power goes off for an hour, the clock loses an hour. It restarts when it sees power again. Its not the most efficient clock though, it uses about 10 watts of power.
About every appliance clock that had hands or those little digital "flappers" used this design.
For what its worth, a lot of the old record players used a larger version of the same motor that drives the clocks - and it was used as a cheap means of spinning the turntable at 33, 45, or 78 RPM by means of selecting a different radius on the mechanical friction-drive transmission that drove the turntable from the motor spindle. It was a simple thing - basically a little moveable rubber-rimmed wheel that rested on one of three different radius areas of the motor spindle, then drove the inside of the turntable from that. Very inexpensive, yet robust. ( but a bit noisy - a little drive noise always was present, and we used "wow" and "flutter" to describe the low and high speed mechanical aberrations of turntable rotation).
Probably more than you wanted to know about these things.. but I thought I would toss it in for anyone interested.
They are going in together with YAHOO. It seems that PacBell has a customer base in place as an ISP, and YAHOO would like to rape it. I have been with SBC for about five years as a PPP customer.. but now they are constantly sending me emails under the heading "action required" that direct me to the Yahoo download page .
Note this has to be downloaded to a Microsoft machine.
No linux support.
I do not like it at all that they insist me download software on my end that their end will talk to. I have no idea of any hidden agenda what the software on my end is doing, nor, under DMCA, is there really any way for me to even legally discuss whats going on.
So, it looks like I may have to change ISP only because Yahoo wants me held captive.
Does anybody have ideas for a good ISP? I am looking at www.copper.net .
Or is it only illegal if I do it?
Ouch! I am an order of magnitude off. One of the other posters mentioned Oprah Winfrey's 50M house.. that's probably what I recall seeing on the supermarket tabloid. I only remembered it seemed insane to me, but then, when I see the Forbes list of people worth billions, I see my resources about like a flea on the rump end of a horse. For a guy who first "came online" when really nice houses were going for $20,000, but you could pick up an average one for under $10,000, *all* real estate today seems to me to be priced insanely high. I see those tabloids at the supermarket detailing how much money people have to spend on something like a house, and it frightens me to no end, as I, as an engineer, do not have near the amount of currency to compete with that. Those figures are astronomical, as far as I am concerned.
But still, I should have researched that one before posting.. I do not take pride in being an order of magnitude off.
This is a little off-topic, but when I first got into engineering, it was my hope that through the efforts of applied science, we could better the situation for the people at large, by eliminating drudgery ( keeping things clean, building things, etc. ) and put an end once and for all to this insane 40 hour weeks where humans toil from dawn to dusk, most of us doing nothing really useful.
So, now we live in a day where our clothes are mass-manufactured and washed for us, our meals are pre-prepared and microwaved at the precise moment our delivered entertainment arrives, all of this at a rock-bottom price made possible through mass replication. But did this help us? Much to my dismay, it did not seem like it did... we just find more ways to entrap ourselves in busywork so we can come up with more and more money to support the non-producers in exhorbitant lifestyles.
We still work those 40 hour weeks... By my estimate, this should have been knocked down to 8-hour weeks by now. Earth is a paradise - we should be enjoying life - not working from dawn to dusk doing something we would rather not be doing every day. We have our needs taken care of. But now we have insane prices for taxes and just somewhere to live. I keep seeing individuals aggregating billions of dollars in the tabloids, yet seeing how difficult it is for me to even generate an retirement account because every time I earn anything at all, it gets reported to the government and taxed away. The government has shown me time and time again that its futile to try to earn anything over a certain subsistence level.
Please excuse the rant, if it taken as such, this is just the musings of an old disappointed engineer who thought the way to make life better for all was through design. One who is very disappointed with how we are filling the landfills of earth with junk that never was supposed to have been, only in the name of ever increasing consumption designed in the name of economics - and keeping the populace busy buying the same stuff over and over and over.
I understand NASA was fighting the concept because they felt the money would be better spent on shuttle studies and Mars activity. Not that they did not want the money, they just did not want to earmark it onto a mission to Pluto.
Consider though the design and launch of such a thing will train another group of engineers in the art of spacecraft design. There are still many of us, now in our 50's and 60's that originally designed a lot of the missions when they were popular in the late 70's, but we are aging. We won't be around forever. And, due to budget cutbacks, a lot of us that have designed spacefaring circuitry are no longer in the industry. As I type this, I pulled a couple of old references I had, reviewing just for the heck of it an Energy Detector design for studying the Van Allen belts and the multiplexer design for the Explorer VII spacecraft launched in the 60's.
But not many of us lived through that heyday. If a new cadre of engineers are not trained on an unmanned exploratory mission, they get to train on a manned one. I would kinda like them to train and hone their skills on something like this. Back in the old days, we had very little to build our stuff with.. most of it was pre-integrated circuit... like we made them with individual transistors. And we were very concerned with how the transistors degraded with respect to radiation dosages - as nearly all circuits were linear. Today we have much better parts - lower power too- but there are other problems involved that the later parts today are far more sensitive to radiation than those big clunky ones we used. Even before that, our vacuum tubes were immune, for all practical purposes, to EMP - such as static discharges or , God forbid - nuclear artifact. I still use a vacuum-tube oscilloscope when I repair vacuum-tube guitar amps for friends because its front end is immune to the several hundred volt potentials I encounter on the plates of the vacuum tubes.
I know we just about could tell you how many electrons were in the battery, and we had to make such miserly usage of them. You would probably be surprised at all the tricks those guys went through to conserve every last electron of the flow of current.
Even our early receivers are works of art. Cryogenic tuners. By building resonators out of superconductors, we could get the "Q" sensitivity high enough to still see our birds as they transmitted on miniscule amounts of energy. The trick was in integration and probability analyses. Stuff like that takes time to learn. And it just about has to be hands-on too. Kinda like learning to walk. You fall a few times.. ( or you set a few rockets back on the ground a few feet from the launch point, launch things into useless trajectories, or launch things that don't work). The phrase that went around during that time was "launching a Maytag"... because the satellites of the day were about the size of a washing machine, and were just about as useful as one if they did not fulfill their intended function.
Now, if they could make underwear responsive to intestinal gas. Old men all over the world need this.
I only wish I were as elegant in wording as Carl Sagan:
Reflections on a Mote of Dust
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness--there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
It's been said that Astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
You can see the image referred to in the article here .
(In all honesty, I believe this image was from Voyager, but Pioneer had the same view and I felt it only appropriate.)
Fare well, Pioneer.
It sure beats the piles of toxic crap we generate now.