I am of Polish descent, and have read all of Lem's books in Polish, and most in English. The originals are of course better -- he was a master of inventive wordplay which just doesn't translate very well into other languages. He shaped my appreciation of SciFi forever -- I could never understand why people liked Star Trek for example, which seemed so simplistic in comparison. He's very well known in the East, but hard to find in the West, even now.
Oops, forgot the point of that previous story: the first thing that Klapaucjusz (Klapaucius) has the machine make is Nature: and instead the machine makes what sounds like Science. In this case, the joke doesn't work so well: in Polish, the word for Science is Nauka, but the translator, to keep some of the original joke, had to change it to Nature, which doesn't come off so well. The machine makes a perfect replica of academic science, which is a clear joke in Polish, but a little clumsy in the English translation.
I'm a Polish-American, having come to the US at the age of 12. Lem was my favorite author even before we left Poland.
I've read almost all of his books in the original Polish and in English. Both good and bad translations. For example, the only English translation of Solaris was translated from French, making it a dull read in English, though it's much better in Polish.
The majority of his books, esp. those translated by Kandel, are very faithful to the original. Not the details, of course, but in the sense of wordplay and humor. For example, in the Polish version of the story "How the World was Saved" from the Cyberiad, the machine can make anything that starts with the letter "N". The joke is, the machine is asked to make Natrium (Latin for Sodium), but it refuses, saying that it's not the machine that can make anything starting with N in any conceivable language, since every word has some equivalent that starts with N in another language, and so therefore it would be equivalent to a machine that can make anything starting with any letter, but that's not what it is. Anyhow, you can see the English version for yourself:
In Polish, the made-up words are different, but the spirit, and the joke are very much the same in this instance.
In other stories, which rely too much on wordplay and puns, the translation has to be different to work, but Michael Kandel does an excellent job of that. It's certainly an art--though I'm fluent in both Polish and English, I couldn't come close to making such faithful translations.
The converse is also interesting to ask about USAIr 1549: is it likely that the spectacular water landing with two dead engines was only possible because a computer was really in charge? I.e. would a human have screwed it up at the last minute with the computer's intervention? I wondered that once I found out that USAir 1549 was an AirBus 320.
I'm an MD with an IT background. I'm a Radiologist now (you can take the nerd away from the computer....), but I was a med student in the late 90's and intern for a year in the early 2000's, and personally witnessed the days of the paper charts. I worked in a large university institution in California, which has since converted to an electronic record.
Here's how an admission would go in the middle of a typical call night: I'd get called at, say, midnight to admit a patient from the ER. I'd go down there to examine the patient and admit them, which means find out what's wrong, formulate a plan of action, and stabilize them for the night.
We actually did have a primitive EMR, which held any recently (within a year or so) dictated discharge summaries -- those are a lengthy summary of what brought the patient in last time, how it was handled, what meds the patient was sent home with. Those were available to us about 1/4 of the time, and were a goldmine of information.
The remaining 3/4 of the time, we had nothing except the patient's memory (they're ill, it's the middle of the night, majority of patients don't keep track of their long lists of meds and dosages). So I'd request the patient's chart to be found. Usually, I'd hear the following from medical records:
A) The chart will be here in the morning: they're understaffed right now (they'd have 1 clerk in there at night)
B) The chart is off to some doctor's clinic from a recent visit, and hasn't come back yet. It'll be a couple of days
C) We have no idea where the chart is.
So I'd have to rely on the patient's recollection of what meds they are taking, what their medical history is, what their allergies are, etc, etc. If you've ever had to go to the ER in the middle of the night, you know how hard it is to remember that stuff about yourself, and how annoying it is to be asked the same questions by the clueless medical staff over and over again.
When I saw patients in my own clinic, it was just as bad. The records were often gone -- to the hospital for a recent admission and still being processed, to another doc or clinic, etc.
I bought a Vaio subnotebook and as an intern kept my own notes on my patients, and carried the notebook with me everywhere. I was ridiculed a lot, but I always had critical info about my patients at my fingertips.
Then I went to another hospital system for residency, and spent some time at the VA, which had an early EMR called VISTA. It was just fantastic! It had usability problems, and required a lot of typing, but it was amazing to see a patient's current medications, list of major problems, past history, etc, all instantly, integrated over hospital and clinic visits, and even across different VA systems across the country if the patient recently moved. It revolutionized care, in my opinion.
So no, it's not a panacea, but a damn sight better than what we have now in many instances!
I'm an MD with an IT background. I've used the VA's VISTA system from about 2000 to 2006, with a very positive impression. I second the parent's recommendation: VISTA was solid, useful, and a huge change from the paper records I'd used before.
point-to-register and jump-to-register: allows you to define a 'jump-to' point. Very useful in you need to switch back and forth between two points in a file, or just jump to the same place you were before after roaming, searching, etc. I define these shortcuts:
Now, to save your current location, type C-x-/-X , where X is a number or letter. To jump back to the same point, type C-x-j-X. You can of course have many such points within a file, and it even works across buffers.
Can't live without it.
Also, time-stamp mode:
in your.emacs, add:
(add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
At the top of your files, put
# Time-stamp: <>
The timestamp is automatically inserted each time you save.
Fears about developing resistance are probably misplaced: no bacterium is resistant to chlorine, and we don't worry about it happening. The environment in the paint described in the article would be similar.
The reason antibiotic resistance develops is because antibiotics are highly targeted to a certain bacterial mechanism, usually one enzyme or protein, or a complex of enzymes working together. For obvious reasons, these have to be enzymatic mechanisms and proteins unique to bacteria, and not found in humans, primates, mammals, etc.
On the other hand, chlorine kills everything, regardless of details of underlying biology. Presumably, this paint would do the same, unless they evolve some complex way of dealing with titanium dioxide, which is highly unlikely IMHO.
I've often thought it would be viable to use volunteers from death row for a one-way trip to Mars. Why not? They'd get a chance to redeem themselves, contribute to human knowledge, become famous, survive as long as possible, control their destiny for a time (which might be short), and then end it all at a suitable time with supplied euthanasia pills. This would be strictly voluntary, but I'd bet you would get hundreds of volunteers! I'd certainly do it if I had to choose a trip to Mars vs. spending the rest of my life in solitary and then facing the lethal injection.
Where I work, we use PowerScribe, a Dragon-based medical transcription service. The following was dictated using it:
"I am using PowerScribe, which is a radiology speech dictation system. It is fairly accurate in the doming [domain] of medical transcription, and particularly in the doming of radiology, but it not very useful for free pexed [text] speech.
For example, there [here] is a sample of the typical chest report: Hazy groundglass opacities noted with both lungs, particularly the right middle lobe as well as the left lower lobe, with no evidence of effusion, pneumothorax, or consolidation. [this is pretty much verbatim what I said].
[But here's a free text example:]
However, if a Type II right a regular letter to a friend, [if I try to type a regular...]
for example setting the following, [for example, saying the following...]
Yesterday was a very nice state [day]. The clots [clouds are] gone, and only a little brain [rain] remains.
Today it is supposed to be even warmer outside, I think elbow [I'll go] injected [and check]
with the right knob. [the weather right now]"
The biggest problem with this system, particularly for medical transcription purposes, is that it only gets about 95-97% right. That means, it's wrong at least 3% of the time. Worse yet, whenever it's not sure, it just inserts random garbage! Whatever the closest match is, which is often wrong, and sometimes fundamentally changes the meaning of what I intended.
Human transcriptionists, on the other hand, will insert a blank if they're not sure, to alert the dictating physician. This fscking system has no clue when it's wrong, which makes it very dangerous in my opinion!
...are the movie and TV studios. I can't help but think that the leak of these keys, as well as the other AACS cracks out there, makes the whole DRM scheme look like a bad investment to any independent movie studio wanting to release a movie. Why would they want to subject themselves to such bad press and customer backlash when new movies fail to work on old players? That seems to me to be the real end of the DRM scheme.
On the other hand, wasn't the key discovered in WinDVD, a software player? That might lead to a short-term crackdown on software players in general, which would hurt many customers in the short term.
From the article:
"On Oct. 10, for 3 hours and 24 minutes, doctors and nurses in several facilities were unable to retrieve critical medical information to treat patients."
I'm a doctor, (not at Kaiser) and at most hospitals I've worked in (University, private, non-profit), it would be a minor miracle if we actually could HAVE instant access to critical patient info at all! Most of the medical world still uses hand-scribbled paper notes about critical patient info, which are in some basement storage, often just plain lost, never mind having it available in an emergency. Even if you can find the actual chart, the info you need is often buried under reams of useless garbage that can take hours to wade through to find the results of some obscure test done long ago.
So having access to this info for only 21 hrs and 36 minutes a day would be a huge boon to medicine in many places!
I'm a radiologist (and a geek of course). I've been witnessing the shift from film to digital over the years of my practice. While the OP is correct in pointing out that the standard radiographic film posted on a bright backlight source has a terrific dynamic range, newer black and white medical monitors approach that quite nicely.
One huge advantage of digital imaging is that it's quite easy to adjust the window and level (analogous to brightness and contrast) of any image to look at deep shadows and bright highlights. Since digital imaging usually captures more dynamic range information than can be displayed even on film, it's enabled us to see much more than we have been before. Most modern practices use digital for xrays, CT, MR, ultrasound, etc.
Interestingly, one area that hasn't seen much digital technology is mammography (unlike what another poster mentioned). The existing digital mammo setups are very expensive and slow -- to achieve maximal resolution, the images are huge (20MP and above), and manipulating them is much slower than working with film, hindering rather than improving our productivity. The diagnostic benefits are questionable -- a recent NEJM article saw some slight benefit in women with dense breasts, but the clinical importance is questionable. So many clinics still use the old technology of high-resolution photographic film, which currently still has many benefits.
I first read Lem as a boy growing up in Communist Poland in the 70's, and was blown away by the mastery of language and ideas. Later, when I came to the US, I re-read all of his books in English. While the translations are excellent, esp. Kandel, they still can't touch the cleverness of the original writing, especially in the little verses he wrote, or the stories such as the one about the Machine that could make everything that starts with the letter N in the Cyberiad.
Still, the underlying ideas and vision come through very well even accounting for the language barrier. I hope his books will continue to resonate with young people everywhere.
I think the best SF is really just like the best literature in general -- it's about the "human condition", i.e. it reflects and exposes truths about ourselves that we might not see plainly otherwise.
The difference is that SF often uses an extrapolation of current scientific knowledge to achieve an interesting setting or situation to further that goal. And in the process, it asks the reader to suspend disbelief about some detail that is relevant to the story.
I'm OK with suspending disbelief once or twice--suppose that faster-than-light travel is possible (Star Wars), or that there's a spice that makes you omniscient (Dune), or that intelligent synthetic beings will once exist (any Asimov story), or that a human can be raised by Martians and come back to earth (Stranger in a Strange Land). Just think how much poorer we'd be without those wonderful stories, no matter how improbable their premises on a strictly scientific basis.
But I hate SF that makes you suspend disbelief not once or twice, but continuously throughout the story, introducing one artificial element after another to cover up a bad storyline, or to use the fantastic stuff as an end in itself rather than a conceit to tell an insightful story.
There are 2 issues involved: energy and power. You have to supply enough energy to get a load out of Earth's gravity well. But the rate at which you supply that energy, i.e. power, is very different comparing rockets and the space elevator. It could take days to weeks to ratchet up the elevator slowly, utilizing much less power than flinging a load into space in minutes the way we currently do it. The slower rate could accomodate solar cells or other low-power energy supplies, provided you take long enough to get up there.
As a radiologist, I've been following the development of this technology with interest. Capsule endoscopy, as it's currently known, is already in fairly widespread use in clinical practice at many centers. It's currently considered a good investigative technique for the small bowel (the part of the bowel approximately from the stomach to the colon), and it rivals other standard methods of imaging for this segment of the GI tract (see this article for example). Briefly, a capsule the size of a large pill takes flash photos and sends them wirelessly to a device worn on the patient's belt.
However, there are two important caveats:
First, the current technology takes snapshots at intervals during its descent through the bowel, which can take hours or days. Necessarily, this skips regions of bowel since the shots are not contiguous, and are randomly oriented. This is fine for diffuse (i.e. widespread) bowel disease, since you'll catch most of what you need to see. But scarce, discrete lesions like cancers and polyps may get missed.
This could be solved by a maneuverable camera proposed in the OP, but this leads to the second limitation: since the bowel is actually fairly long (a few meters), there is a TON of images to review, which typically takes several hours by trained personnell. This is OK for a few studies per week, but doesn't scale well. What's more, having a maneuverable camera would make this worse, since a real-time review would have to take as long as the transit time through bowel, which can be very long. I pity the person who has to sit there and steer the camera around for dozens of hours.
A few posts are hopeful this will replace the colonoscopy, but for the reasons mentioned above, this is unlikely, at least not in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
I am of Polish descent, and have read all of Lem's books in Polish, and most in English. The originals are of course better -- he was a master of inventive wordplay which just doesn't translate very well into other languages. He shaped my appreciation of SciFi forever -- I could never understand why people liked Star Trek for example, which seemed so simplistic in comparison. He's very well known in the East, but hard to find in the West, even now.
Oops, forgot the point of that previous story: the first thing that Klapaucjusz (Klapaucius) has the machine make is Nature: and instead the machine makes what sounds like Science. In this case, the joke doesn't work so well: in Polish, the word for Science is Nauka, but the translator, to keep some of the original joke, had to change it to Nature, which doesn't come off so well. The machine makes a perfect replica of academic science, which is a clear joke in Polish, but a little clumsy in the English translation.
I've read almost all of his books in the original Polish and in English. Both good and bad translations. For example, the only English translation of Solaris was translated from French, making it a dull read in English, though it's much better in Polish.
The majority of his books, esp. those translated by Kandel, are very faithful to the original. Not the details, of course, but in the sense of wordplay and humor. For example, in the Polish version of the story "How the World was Saved" from the Cyberiad, the machine can make anything that starts with the letter "N". The joke is, the machine is asked to make Natrium (Latin for Sodium), but it refuses, saying that it's not the machine that can make anything starting with N in any conceivable language, since every word has some equivalent that starts with N in another language, and so therefore it would be equivalent to a machine that can make anything starting with any letter, but that's not what it is. Anyhow, you can see the English version for yourself:
http://english.lem.pl/index.php/home/bookshelf/how-the-word-was-saved
In Polish, the made-up words are different, but the spirit, and the joke are very much the same in this instance.
In other stories, which rely too much on wordplay and puns, the translation has to be different to work, but Michael Kandel does an excellent job of that. It's certainly an art--though I'm fluent in both Polish and English, I couldn't come close to making such faithful translations.
The converse is also interesting to ask about USAIr 1549: is it likely that the spectacular water landing with two dead engines was only possible because a computer was really in charge? I.e. would a human have screwed it up at the last minute with the computer's intervention? I wondered that once I found out that USAir 1549 was an AirBus 320.
Here's how an admission would go in the middle of a typical call night: I'd get called at, say, midnight to admit a patient from the ER. I'd go down there to examine the patient and admit them, which means find out what's wrong, formulate a plan of action, and stabilize them for the night.
We actually did have a primitive EMR, which held any recently (within a year or so) dictated discharge summaries -- those are a lengthy summary of what brought the patient in last time, how it was handled, what meds the patient was sent home with. Those were available to us about 1/4 of the time, and were a goldmine of information.
The remaining 3/4 of the time, we had nothing except the patient's memory (they're ill, it's the middle of the night, majority of patients don't keep track of their long lists of meds and dosages). So I'd request the patient's chart to be found. Usually, I'd hear the following from medical records:
A) The chart will be here in the morning: they're understaffed right now (they'd have 1 clerk in there at night)
B) The chart is off to some doctor's clinic from a recent visit, and hasn't come back yet. It'll be a couple of days
C) We have no idea where the chart is.
So I'd have to rely on the patient's recollection of what meds they are taking, what their medical history is, what their allergies are, etc, etc. If you've ever had to go to the ER in the middle of the night, you know how hard it is to remember that stuff about yourself, and how annoying it is to be asked the same questions by the clueless medical staff over and over again.
When I saw patients in my own clinic, it was just as bad. The records were often gone -- to the hospital for a recent admission and still being processed, to another doc or clinic, etc.
I bought a Vaio subnotebook and as an intern kept my own notes on my patients, and carried the notebook with me everywhere. I was ridiculed a lot, but I always had critical info about my patients at my fingertips.
Then I went to another hospital system for residency, and spent some time at the VA, which had an early EMR called VISTA. It was just fantastic! It had usability problems, and required a lot of typing, but it was amazing to see a patient's current medications, list of major problems, past history, etc, all instantly, integrated over hospital and clinic visits, and even across different VA systems across the country if the patient recently moved. It revolutionized care, in my opinion.
So no, it's not a panacea, but a damn sight better than what we have now in many instances!
I'm an MD with an IT background. I've used the VA's VISTA system from about 2000 to 2006, with a very positive impression. I second the parent's recommendation: VISTA was solid, useful, and a huge change from the paper records I'd used before.
(global-set-key "\C-x/" 'point-to-register)
(global-set-key "\C-xj" 'jump-to-register)
Now, to save your current location, type C-x-/-X , where X is a number or letter. To jump back to the same point, type C-x-j-X. You can of course have many such points within a file, and it even works across buffers. Can't live without it.
Also, time-stamp mode:
in your .emacs, add:
(add-hook 'write-file-hooks 'time-stamp)
At the top of your files, put
# Time-stamp: <>
The timestamp is automatically inserted each time you save.
He meant 400 Knots, not Kelvin or kilometers. That's the common unit of airspeed in aircraft.
Doctor!
C=MD
The reason antibiotic resistance develops is because antibiotics are highly targeted to a certain bacterial mechanism, usually one enzyme or protein, or a complex of enzymes working together. For obvious reasons, these have to be enzymatic mechanisms and proteins unique to bacteria, and not found in humans, primates, mammals, etc.
On the other hand, chlorine kills everything, regardless of details of underlying biology. Presumably, this paint would do the same, unless they evolve some complex way of dealing with titanium dioxide, which is highly unlikely IMHO.
I've often thought it would be viable to use volunteers from death row for a one-way trip to Mars. Why not? They'd get a chance to redeem themselves, contribute to human knowledge, become famous, survive as long as possible, control their destiny for a time (which might be short), and then end it all at a suitable time with supplied euthanasia pills. This would be strictly voluntary, but I'd bet you would get hundreds of volunteers! I'd certainly do it if I had to choose a trip to Mars vs. spending the rest of my life in solitary and then facing the lethal injection.
"I am using PowerScribe, which is a radiology speech dictation system. It is fairly accurate in the doming [domain] of medical transcription, and particularly in the doming of radiology, but it not very useful for free pexed [text] speech.
For example, there [here] is a sample of the typical chest report: Hazy groundglass opacities noted with both lungs, particularly the right middle lobe as well as the left lower lobe, with no evidence of effusion, pneumothorax, or consolidation. [this is pretty much verbatim what I said].
[But here's a free text example:] However, if a Type II right a regular letter to a friend, [if I try to type a regular...] for example setting the following, [for example, saying the following...] Yesterday was a very nice state [day]. The clots [clouds are] gone, and only a little brain [rain] remains. Today it is supposed to be even warmer outside, I think elbow [I'll go] injected [and check] with the right knob. [the weather right now]"
The biggest problem with this system, particularly for medical transcription purposes, is that it only gets about 95-97% right. That means, it's wrong at least 3% of the time. Worse yet, whenever it's not sure, it just inserts random garbage! Whatever the closest match is, which is often wrong, and sometimes fundamentally changes the meaning of what I intended.
Human transcriptionists, on the other hand, will insert a blank if they're not sure, to alert the dictating physician. This fscking system has no clue when it's wrong, which makes it very dangerous in my opinion!
...are the movie and TV studios. I can't help but think that the leak of these keys, as well as the other AACS cracks out there, makes the whole DRM scheme look like a bad investment to any independent movie studio wanting to release a movie. Why would they want to subject themselves to such bad press and customer backlash when new movies fail to work on old players? That seems to me to be the real end of the DRM scheme. On the other hand, wasn't the key discovered in WinDVD, a software player? That might lead to a short-term crackdown on software players in general, which would hurt many customers in the short term.
From the article: "On Oct. 10, for 3 hours and 24 minutes, doctors and nurses in several facilities were unable to retrieve critical medical information to treat patients." I'm a doctor, (not at Kaiser) and at most hospitals I've worked in (University, private, non-profit), it would be a minor miracle if we actually could HAVE instant access to critical patient info at all! Most of the medical world still uses hand-scribbled paper notes about critical patient info, which are in some basement storage, often just plain lost, never mind having it available in an emergency. Even if you can find the actual chart, the info you need is often buried under reams of useless garbage that can take hours to wade through to find the results of some obscure test done long ago. So having access to this info for only 21 hrs and 36 minutes a day would be a huge boon to medicine in many places!
I'm a radiologist (and a geek of course). I've been witnessing the shift from film to digital over the years of my practice. While the OP is correct in pointing out that the standard radiographic film posted on a bright backlight source has a terrific dynamic range, newer black and white medical monitors approach that quite nicely.
One huge advantage of digital imaging is that it's quite easy to adjust the window and level (analogous to brightness and contrast) of any image to look at deep shadows and bright highlights. Since digital imaging usually captures more dynamic range information than can be displayed even on film, it's enabled us to see much more than we have been before. Most modern practices use digital for xrays, CT, MR, ultrasound, etc.
Interestingly, one area that hasn't seen much digital technology is mammography (unlike what another poster mentioned). The existing digital mammo setups are very expensive and slow -- to achieve maximal resolution, the images are huge (20MP and above), and manipulating them is much slower than working with film, hindering rather than improving our productivity. The diagnostic benefits are questionable -- a recent NEJM article saw some slight benefit in women with dense breasts, but the clinical importance is questionable. So many clinics still use the old technology of high-resolution photographic film, which currently still has many benefits.
I first read Lem as a boy growing up in Communist Poland in the 70's, and was blown away by the mastery of language and ideas. Later, when I came to the US, I re-read all of his books in English. While the translations are excellent, esp. Kandel, they still can't touch the cleverness of the original writing, especially in the little verses he wrote, or the stories such as the one about the Machine that could make everything that starts with the letter N in the Cyberiad.
Still, the underlying ideas and vision come through very well even accounting for the language barrier. I hope his books will continue to resonate with young people everywhere.
I think the best SF is really just like the best literature in general -- it's about the "human condition", i.e. it reflects and exposes truths about ourselves that we might not see plainly otherwise. The difference is that SF often uses an extrapolation of current scientific knowledge to achieve an interesting setting or situation to further that goal. And in the process, it asks the reader to suspend disbelief about some detail that is relevant to the story. I'm OK with suspending disbelief once or twice--suppose that faster-than-light travel is possible (Star Wars), or that there's a spice that makes you omniscient (Dune), or that intelligent synthetic beings will once exist (any Asimov story), or that a human can be raised by Martians and come back to earth (Stranger in a Strange Land). Just think how much poorer we'd be without those wonderful stories, no matter how improbable their premises on a strictly scientific basis. But I hate SF that makes you suspend disbelief not once or twice, but continuously throughout the story, introducing one artificial element after another to cover up a bad storyline, or to use the fantastic stuff as an end in itself rather than a conceit to tell an insightful story.
There are 2 issues involved: energy and power. You have to supply enough energy to get a load out of Earth's gravity well. But the rate at which you supply that energy, i.e. power, is very different comparing rockets and the space elevator. It could take days to weeks to ratchet up the elevator slowly, utilizing much less power than flinging a load into space in minutes the way we currently do it. The slower rate could accomodate solar cells or other low-power energy supplies, provided you take long enough to get up there.
However, there are two important caveats:
First, the current technology takes snapshots at intervals during its descent through the bowel, which can take hours or days. Necessarily, this skips regions of bowel since the shots are not contiguous, and are randomly oriented. This is fine for diffuse (i.e. widespread) bowel disease, since you'll catch most of what you need to see. But scarce, discrete lesions like cancers and polyps may get missed.
This could be solved by a maneuverable camera proposed in the OP, but this leads to the second limitation: since the bowel is actually fairly long (a few meters), there is a TON of images to review, which typically takes several hours by trained personnell. This is OK for a few studies per week, but doesn't scale well. What's more, having a maneuverable camera would make this worse, since a real-time review would have to take as long as the transit time through bowel, which can be very long. I pity the person who has to sit there and steer the camera around for dozens of hours.
A few posts are hopeful this will replace the colonoscopy, but for the reasons mentioned above, this is unlikely, at least not in the near future.