Hi can you help me? what is the standard limits & the reference Number of the ff:
1. Insulation resistance Test
2. Polarization Index
3. Winding Resistance Test
4. Insulation Power Factor Test
5.Excitation Current Test
6. Bushing Hot Collar Test
7. Oil Dielectr
I'm surprised nobody did this before: Here is the Nexus One compared to the iPhone, side by side. And if that wasn't enough, check it compared to the HTC Hero:
The bodies' physical size is pretty much the same, but the screen in the Nexus One seems longer and thinner than the iPhone. More pics at [HTC Nexus One]
Headline from Public Policy Polling PPP:
Bachmann on solid ground
Raleigh, N.C. – Michele Bachmann may constantly be generating controversy in the national news, but back at home she finds herself in a solid position politically. 53% of her constituents approve of the job Bachmann is doing to 41% who disapprove.
Even more encouraging, PPP poll tested the Congresswoman against two likely Democrat opponents:
Bachmann leads Maureen Reed 53-37 and Tarryl Clark 55-37.
Bachman is a heroine of the Tea Party movement, and recently organized a Code Red rally at the Capitol in DC to help Stop the Democrats' Health Care legislation.
Her Congressional District is located in Southeastern Minnesota and includes St. Cloud.
(H/t Hedgehog)
Here's something beautiful: a mechanical garden that responds to your step. It makes me feel like I'm in Wonderland.
Dynamic Ground is a kinetic floor developed by Adam Lassy and Adi Marom for NYU's ITP Winter Show. Each interconnected hexagon is operated by a central motor connected to a light censor. When someone walks on the platform and covers the sensor, the design underneath either expands or contracts, depending on its resting state. It's not walking on sunshine so much as stepping on snowflakes. [ITP Winter Show]
Headline from PPP:
Paul takes big lead in GOP primary
In the contest to be the Republican Senate nominee from Kentucky antiestablishment
candidate Rand Paul holds a large lead over Secretary of State Trey
Grayson in Public Policy Polling’s first look at the race.
US SENATE – KENTUCKY – GOP PRIMARY (PPP)
Rand Paul 44%
Trey Grayson 255
Paul is running for the Senate seat of retiring Republican Sen. Jim Bunning. Kentucky has been moving to solid Republican in recent years.
Paul is the former State Chairman of the KY Taxpayers Association, and is an activist in the State's Tea Party movement.
There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.
That time is now.
To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.
So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.
This story is actually a sequel. Back in 2007, I wrote in the New York Times about the work of Patricia Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale, and her colleagues on the weirdness of duck genitals. The full story is here. (Brennan also appeared in a Nature documentary, starting at about minute 38:35.)
In brief, Brennan wanted to understand why some ducks have such extravagant penises. Why are they cork-screw shaped? Why do they get so ridiculously long–some cases as long as the duck’s entire body? As Brennan dissected duck penises, she began to wonder what the female sexual anatomy looked like. If you have a car like this, she said, what kind of garage do you park it in?
Brennan discovered that female ducks have equally weird reproductive tracts (called oviducts). In many species, they are ornamented with lots of outpockets. And like duck penises, duck oviducts are corkscrew-shaped. But while male duck penises twist clockwise, the female oviduct twists counterclockwise.
Brennan speculated that all this bizarre anatomy is the result of a peculiar form of evolution known as sexual conflict. A strategy that allows females to reproduce the most offspring may not be so good for males, and vice versa. For example, male fruit flies inject their mates with lots of chemicals during sex, and those chemicals make her less receptive to other males, thereby boosting his chances of fathering her eggs. But those chemicals are harsh and will make female flies sick. Females, in turn, have evolved defenses against those chemicals, blunting their effects.
With many examples of sexual conflict in nature, Brennan wondered if sexual conflict between male and female ducks was giving rise to their weird genitals. Female ducks pair off with male partners for the breeding season, but they also get harrassed by other males, sometimes being forced to have sex (and sometimes dying from the attacks). A third of all duck matings are forced.
And yet only 3 percent of the ducklings that female ducks produce come from such forced matings. Brennan speculated that the female ducks can block forced copulations with their mismatched spirals. And they might also be controlling which drake got to fertilize their eggs by socking away the sperm of different mates in different pockets. And the extravagant penises of males might be the result of an evolution around those defenses.
As I reported in 2007, Brennan discovered a pattern that supported this hypothesis. Among 16 species of water fowl, species in which the males grew long phalluses also had females with more turns in their oviduct and more side pockets. The ducks were escalating an arms race, genital for genital.
But Brennan didn’t actually know how duck penises actually moved through the labirynthine oviduct, and how the oviduct’s shape might affect the drake’s delivery of sperm. So she traded calipers and rulers for high-speed video.
Brennan and her colleagues traveled to a California duck farm, where workers are expert at collecting sperm from drakes. The first step in the collection is to get a drake excited by putting a female duck in his cage. The drake climbs on top, and then the penis emerges. Before its emergence, a drake’s penis is usually completely hidden from view, tucked inside his body like an inside-out sock. Drakes unfurl their pensises differently than male mammals. In mammals, the penis becomes erect as blood flows into the spongy tissue. Ducks pump lymph fluid instead. And as the fluid enters the penis, it does not simply become engorged. It flips rightside-out.
Here’s how it happens, in slow motion. A Muscovy drake everts his penis in about a third of a second, at speeds of 1.6 meters per second.
Of course, drakes don’t mate with the air. Having made this video, Brennan still needed a way to see how a duck penis actually performs its appointed task. Unable to film duck penises in a real female oviduct, she built a fake oviduct out of silcone. She then managed to get a drake to mate with it. But the overwhelming force of the explosive penus broke the fake oviduct.
So Brennan turned to glass. Her new fake oviducts were strong enough to handle the drakes, and she started filming. Here’s what she saw.
As Brennan had predicted, the counterclockwise turns of an oviduct slow down the expansion of the duck penis, compared to a straight tube or a clockwise one. Brennan suspects that female ducks slow down males trying to force a mating, but they can also let their partner’s penis move faster through the oviduct. They have been observed to relax and contract their muscles arond the oviduct.
Female ducks can’t stop an unwanted male from delivering his sperm, but the obstacles in their oviducts may give them control over what happens to that sperm. The female ducks may use their oviducts to slow down the expanation of the penis, so that by the time the drake ejaculates, the sperm are delivered in the lower reaches of the oviduct. A female ducks’s partner, with her cooperation, can deliver sperm further up the oviduct. With the wanted and unwanted sperm delivered to different places in the oviduct, a female duck may be able to store the sperm in different pockets. And then she can choose which drake will father her duckling. For all the explosiveness male ducks may display, it’s the female ducks that get the final say.
[Postscript: I tell Brennan's story in more detail in my new book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. It opens the chapter on sex--where I show how the same processes that explain these strange genitalia explain many other things in the natural world.]
Reference: Patricia L. R. Brennan et al, “Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2139
[Update: 12/23--a couple misspellings fixed]
Great science fiction films are few and far between, so it was with great anticipation that I went to see Avatar on opening night.
I had been looking forward to this film since 2006 when James Cameron began working on the script. My expectations were significantly heightened after learning that Cameron, the director of Aliens, the first two Terminator movies and Titantic, was drawing inspiration from Japan -- namely through such directors as Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away).
I was particularly interested to see if Cameron could pull of the Miyazaki. As fans of his films know, there's nothing quite like a Miyazaki picture; they are as delightful, provocative and as imaginative as they come. Not since the early days of Disney have animated films been so good. Miyazaki weaves a magical touch that has eluded Hollywood since their Golden Age (think Pinocchio and Snow White).
After watching Avatar, I can honestly say that Cameron gave it a good shot. The Pandoran jungle was as atmospheric and alive as anything that Miyazaki has ever produced. The 3D element added an immersive and visceral component that was particularly powerful; there were times when I truly felt lost in the jungle alongside Jake and Neytiri. The bioluminescent forest was truly jaw dropping.
Further, the tastefulness and care with which Cameron added the CG elements is unparalleled (with a tip of the hat to Lord of the Rings). This is the kind of film that George Lucas could watch but not have the slightest clue as to why Cameron's CG works and his does not. Cameron, unlike Lucas, has learned to weave the fabric of all on-screen elements into context such that nothing is superfluous and everything adds to the entire composition and story. Where Lucas works to bash viewers over the head with a 'look what I can do!' approach to movie making, Cameron has taken a more thoughtful and artistic course.
Take, for example, the floating seeds that land on Jake when he first meets Neytiri. I was genuinely moved by the delicacy and beauty of each tiny seedling as it floated through the air. Moreover, my feelings were heightened after learning about the sacred status of the seeds and the implication to the story. This is exactly the kind of aesthetic moment I imagined when I thought about the potential for CGI back when it was first introduced so many years ago.
Spoilers follow.
In addition to the visual elements borrowed from Japan, Cameron also dipped heavily into one of Miyazaki's most famous films, Princess Mononoke. Indeed, one could say that he borrowed perhaps a bit too greedily. Rarely does imitation of this sort lead to anything deeper or superior than what was provided by the original.
Specifically, both films feature a majestic and beautiful forest teeming with a life that's intimately interconnected with itself and an ethereal spiritual realm. And both feature a nature that is under threat. The balance of the natural worlds are in jeopardy from greedy miners who are consuming its resources at an alarming rate. The miners are in turn threatened by an outsider who, after learning the ways of the forest, has come to protect and preserve it at all costs. Ultimately, the creatures of the natural world are forced to band together and deal directly with the parasitic elements. Even the character of Neytiri is a close parallel to San; both are deeply connected to the natural world, borderline feral and ride on the backs of wolves.
Interestingly, Princess Mononoke was Japan's top grossing movie until Cameron's Titanic usurped it from that position in 1999. This certainly looks like a case where if you can beat them, you should still join them.
Princess Mononoke wasn't the only story co-opted by Cameron; aside from the Miyazaki touches (both graphically and narratively), Avatar closely resembles another classic story, Frank Herbert's Dune. In fact, Avatar is essentially Dune -- Cameron simply replaced the desert planet with a jungle and removed all the depth, complexity and profundity that made Dune the classic science fiction story that it is.
Again, the comparisons: A young man arrives on a strange and inhospitable planet occupied by hostile natives -- natives who are perfectly adapted to the planet and live in harmony with it. The young man's civilization is there to exploit the planet for a precious resource and at the expense of the planet's ecological balance. Our hero, awkward at first, learns the ways of the locals and eventually 'goes native.' He finds a girlfriend among his new clan and is accepted and revered by the natives on account of signs that point to his unique purpose and status. The hero-messiah then starts to exceed the abilities of his new comrades -- there's even a test of manhood involving the taming and riding of a dangerous animal. In the end, the hero leads a charge against the outsiders by banding together natural resources and the local population. They eventually win and drive the outsiders out.
Now, while this certainly describes the general plot of both stories, Herbert's universe is filled with intelligent and provocative commentary that touches upon such themes as ecology, evolution, commerce, politics, religion, technological advancement and even social Darwinism. The best that can be said of Cameron's adaptation is that he got the environmental message across. But where Herbert's discourse on the environment was treated with subtly and complexity (including the issue of terraforming), Cameron chose to bang his audience over the head with a blatantly overt, simplistic and ridiculously biased sledge hammer.
In Avatar, Cameron rekindled the tired and cliched "noble savage" myth and set it in space. It was an effort that seemingly attempted to romanticize Stone Age culture and promote a Gainist agenda. The film was anti-technology, anti-corporatist, anti-progress, and dare I say anti-human.
Gainism in space? Really, Cameron? That was the best story you could come up with on a $237,000,000 budget?
Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gainist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na'vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet (a nice interplay on the high-tech/lo-tech theme knowing that the humans were also dabbling in mind transfer). I also liked how the humans could not breath the air of the planet, a strong hint that they truly had no business being on Pandora. The natives, on the other hand, were at complete peace with their environment.
So, overall some very mixed feelings about Avatar. The graphical and aesthetic achievements were certainly impressive, and for that it's a must-see film. And for those with a pronounced environmentalist bent, you will likely swoon over this movie. But if you're looking for a story with depth, complex characters and some challenging commentary, you're going to have to look elsewhere. And in this sense, the movie is a significant let down. One that I'll gladly watch over and over again.
Less than a day under his new Party registration, and REPUBLICAN Congressman Parker Griffith of Alabama has already received a hearty welcome from America's top libertarian-conservative - Sarah Palin.
From Sarah Palin's Twitter:
Congratulations Alabama! And all Americans concerned about Capitol Hill's current agenda;Rep Parker Griffith just did the right thing. Welcome
The WSJ already said most of this stuff yesterday, but the Financial Times has a few more tidbits on the situation that seems interesting—namely, Apple's relationship with network giants, and a plan to launch the fabled tablet soon.
The relevant passage from the FT:
Apple has contacted other broadcast and cable networks, including Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System and Viacom, which have so far been unconvinced by Apple's proposal. The computer maker has also courted the book publishing industry, sector executives say.
Cooperation with Time Warner and Viacom would be essential if Apple wants to get this cable replacement off the ground—they own a plurality of basic cable channels between them. As far as the tablet is concerned:
Apple is preparing an announcement next month that many anticipate will be the official unveiling of its tablet, but the company has so far declined to confirm the existence of the device. Wall Street analysts expect mass production of an Apple tablet to begin as early as February.
That's some serious confidence right there, but it lines up with what we heard yesterday. This is all speculation at this juncture, but the WSJ and FT are big dogs who can (for the most part) be trusted; we'll have to see whether 2010 really is the year of the tablet. [Financial Times]
From Kristofer Lorreli, Race42008.com:
December 2009
Linda McMahon 37%
Rob Simmons 35%
Peter Schiff 4%
Undecided 25%
Poll conducted by Moore Information Opinion Research.
Also from Quinnipiac:
• Linda McMahon 43%
• Chris Dodd 41%
And Rasmussen:
• Linda McMahon (R) 44%
• Chris Dodd (D) 38%
Though, Simmons polls slightly better against Dodd in the general in both polls.
I have a 1991 Isuzu PU and it is not getting fuel. I checked back at the tank No fire to plug for fuel pump. all fuses are good.the manual states there is a fuel pump relay between the fuse box and fuel pump. I cant find it. while I was checking I pulled the first two plugs thet where black with car
Engage the x drive: Ten ways to traverse deep space, New Scientist
"Apart from the mundane problems of budgets and political will, the major roadblock is that our dominant space-flight technology - chemically fuelled rockets - just isn't up to the distances involved. We can send robot probes to the outer planets, but they take years to get there. And as for visiting other stars, forget it. As an example of why, the Apollo 10 moon probe is currently listed as the fastest manned vehicle in history, having reached a maximum speed of 39,895 kilometres per hour. At this speed, it would take 120,000 years to cover the 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system."
Thirty thousand years is a long time to hang out in any one place, much less stuck inside a tiny salt crystal. But microbiologist Brian Schubert says he found just that in a crystal from sediments in Death Valley—bacteria-like archaeans that have lived inside the tiny enclosure for all those years.
The researchers announced in a paper in Geology that they could culture the archaeans in the liquid from inside the crystal, liquid they estimate to be 22,000 to 34,000 years old. Previous studies suggesting even longer lives for microbes stuck in salt crystals (one even getting up to an insane-sounding 250 million years) have been met with skepticism. But even doubters of those studies say Schubert’s could have more validity, as the Death Valley area wouldn’t have allowed recrystallization (which would permit the liquid to escape and fresh microbes to get in) for 10,000 years at the least.
From New Scientist:
Moreover, Schubert thinks he can explain how his microbes managed to stay alive so long. Every crystal that contained live archaeans also contained dead cells from a salt-lake alga known as Dunaliella, which contain high concentrations of glycerol. The team suggest that the glycerol had seeped out of the cells, and that the archaeans lived off this.
Dunaliella cells are such good fodder that the microbes could live much longer than 30,000 years, says Schubert. He calculates that a single Dunaliella cell contains enough glycerol to meet an archaean’s minimal needs for 12 million years. “We have inclusions with dozens of these algal cells inside and just a couple of archaeans, so they have basically a limitless supply,” he says.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Glowing Green Bacteria vs Deadly Hidden Land Mines
80beats: Better Than a Battery? Here’s a Microbe That Could Help Store Clean Energy
DISCOVER: Triumph of the Archaea
DISCOVER: Archae Tells All
Image: flickr / Shayan (USA)
– Nick Bostrom, Letter from Utopia.
Why should you care about the singularity when studies show that material possessions and technology beyond a certain point don’t actually make people any happier? Two weeks ago, I spoke about the possibility of giving a superintelligent AI the goal of doing whatever the human race would, after careful consideration, decide was best. This is known as the CEV algorithm. The outcome of this process would be very much unlike the technology, gadgets, and consumerism of today.
As Nick Bostrom has so eloquently reminded us, humanity’s biggest problems aren’t what we think they are: the most insidious and hard to notice, according to Bostrom, is that life is not nearly as good as it could be. This problem is really difficult for us to see; what could possibly be substantially better about our lives, even here in the developed world?
To start with, one has to realize that we’re not built for our own good. Evolution built us caring only about our ability to pass our genes on. We are easier to hurt than to pleasure, and we have been built with happiness set-points that are near impossible to significantly move away from without altering our biology. Studies have shown that giving a person $1,000,000 doesn’t actually make them happier in the long run, because of the hedonic treadmill effect: The human brain gets “used to” your circumstances, so that if your circumstances improve, your happiness goes up at first, but then returns to average. Our genes “calculate” that our bodies are worth keeping in good shape for 50 or so years, but after that, we are of little use, so our genes allow us to fall apart.
The society around us is also not built entirely for our benefit; it is a set of self-sustaining institutions that are, to a lesser or greater degree, influenced by the whims of a capricious electorate. Corporations can survive by hiring marketing departments to make us want things that we don‘t really need, and by hiring lobbying departments to make sure that the democratic process doesn‘t get in the way (see, for example, the tobacco industry). The challenges that work presents to us are often stifling and tedious; working in an office is not the natural human environment, which is why so many people ask for (and never get) a job that involves being outdoors.
Perhaps most importantly, the social dynamics that emerge from the interaction of many people who are each individually seeking status, power, and happiness often results in zero and negative-sum interactions. People are mean to each other, argue, fight, cheat, lie, and frequently make each others’ lives a misery—and this is ultimately a result of our evolved psychology, which was designed to deal with situations in which humans were forced by scarcity to kill each other in order to survive.
A world fashioned by the CEV algorithm would, at the very least, fix all of these fairly obvious flaws. Human psychology and biology could be altered to make us kinder, happier, healthier, and free from involuntary death or aging, and to remove the hedonic treadmill effect. New and better institutions could be developed from the ground up, and complex yet nourishing intellectual and physical challenges could be designed to replace what we today call “work.”
Iain Banks has described such a world in his science-fiction books about a future society called “The Culture”: enhanced humans live for thousands of years, and do exactly what they want with their time; they create art and science, they socialize, they enjoy a selection of customized virtual reality and real-world experiences and safe recreational drugs. They are all permanently young and attractive, with bodies and brains that have been altered in beneficial ways, they rarely argue with each other or have significant or prolonged negative interactions, and they have lots of sex.
If we consider all the possible ways that the universe could be arranged, and rank them in terms of how good they would be, Banks’ utopia certainly gets a very high rank. But it seems unlikely that it is the very best—or even close to the best. Banks’ utopia represents the limit of good experiences that we can currently think of and realize are good according to our complex values. Just how much better could it get?
In order to really make an accurate guess about the limits of goodness of the world, one must think about the problem indirectly or by analogy, because there are some states that are both so good and so complex that we cannot even imagine them yet. For example, what are the limits of goodness of subjective experience? What is the limit of the level and degree of mutual respect, friendship, passion or love that is possible?
At the risk of severely embarrassing myself forever over the internet, I’ll illustrate this with a personal example. Before I had ever kissed anyone, I didn’t actually know that the subjective experience of a passionate kiss was possible. I knew that kissing was possible, but not what it would feel like, or even that feelings that good were possible. Not only was I missing out, but I was unaware that I was missing out.
Humanity as a whole may have the same problem. We haven’t realized that a level of life that far surpasses what we currently experience might be possible. Imagine a human raised by animals who did not have the ability to speak, or the very real South American Indian tribe who are unable to learn, even when given food incentives, to count up to 10. Imagine a person who spent their entire life without experiencing romantic love, imagine a human who had neither hearing nor sight. These impoverished human beings are to us as we are to humans living in a post-positive singularity world: There are very probably intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional enhancements that would put their recipients as far beyond the citizens of The Culture as we are beyond a blind, solitary ignoramus.
A benevolent superintelligent AI would drastically and precisely alter the world, but do so in a direction that was dictated by your preferences. It would be like a new physical force that consistently pushed life towards our wisest utopian ideal. This ideal, or something very close to it, really is attainable. The laws of physics do not forbid it. It is attainable whether we feel that it is “unreasonable” that life could get that good, whether we shy away from it for fear of sounding religious, whether we want to close our eyes to the possibility because it scares us to believe that there is something greater out there, but we might let it slip through our fingers.
And indeed we might. As Carl Sagan puts it, “Our descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the solar system and beyond, will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was, how perilous our infancy”
DEMOCRAT SWITCHES TO REPUBLICANALABAMA DISTRICT GOES GOP FIRST TIME IN 150 YEARS
GRIFFITH CITES HEALTH CARE TAKE OVER AS MAIN REASON FOR SWITCH
First term Democrat Congressman from Alabama's 1st District Rep. Parker Griffith made it official today. In a press conference in Huntsville, he formally announced that he was switching his party registration to Republican, and would be running for reelection under the GOP banner. The move caught many Washington insiders by surprise, due to the timing. However, Griffith has been hinting at such a move since the summer. Back in July he gained some minor media coverage for vowing not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker next time. In November, after the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, he quietly told Washington media not to list him as a Democrat, but rather as a "Blue Dog Independent."
According to Politico: Griffith will become the first Republican [ever] to hold the historically Democratic, Huntsville-based district [in history].
The reasons for Griffith's switch?
In his press conference he "blast[ed] the Democratic health care bill as a prime reason for his decision to switch parties." Griffith is a radiation oncologist.
Politico also notes that Griffith was 1 of only 11 Dem Congressmen to vote against the Stimulus. Also, Griffith, who is strong on Military issues, was very displeased with the Obama administration's decision in October to pull the missile sheild out of Eastern Europe.
Griffith's district has been trending Republican, and his reelection now seems assured.
One again I have had to talk to an operator/sales person and had to get the spelling and numbers correct. Overseas operators seem to have been schooled in the correct form, that which is used by ship and airline captains for international communications.
Herewith: Predicated by; "I Spell"
We've been living in our house for nearly 40 years. I built it when I was a kid in my 20s. We didn't have (grid) electricity and couldn't afford to get it run 1/2 mile through the woods to our house. So, I built a 12 volt DC system for all our lights. We are using 12 volt incandescent standard h
What if waiting for treatment in the emergency room was like waiting for your toaster to ding, and you knew exactly how long you were going to wait? Many healthcare providers are hopeful that by banding together to coordinate information about how congested their waiting rooms are they can help people make the best decision about where to seek medical attention, according to the Los Angeles Times:
In part to ease the minds of those seeking emergency care — or at least disclose how bad the wait will be — a growing number of suburban emergency rooms around the country are advertising wait times.
Some post the times on their websites. Others tweet, send text messages or display the times on huge highway billboards. A few are testing a service by a start-up company, InQuickER, that allows patients to register online, pay a small fee and hold their place in line while they wait at home.
But what seems like a good bit of pubic service has some doctors concerned that the posted wait times will be misleading. For example, a patient suffering ominous chest pains might be persuaded to drive to a hospital further away for a shorter wait even though he may have been bumped to the front of a longer line closer to home.
So while it may be useful for someone with a minor condition to seek out a shorter wait time, doctors in the article say that people with serious injuries should get to the closest help possible — and fast.
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Discoblog: The Creepy World Of Old-School Medicine
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The battered moon Rhea. Click for a larger version (~96k) Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This Cassini image highlights just how battered the Saturn moon Rhea really is. There is more than what I thought. Clicking the image will bring up a larger version and shows some nice detail.
From the Cassini site:
Craters imprinted upon other craters record the long history of impacts endured by Saturn’s moon Rhea.
This view looks toward the mid-southern latitudes of the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up.The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 262 meters (860 feet) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
We knew that not even Clark Kent in his blue and red underpants could save them, but it still impresses me how fast newspapers' circulation has declined in this decade. Sad, unless you're a tree. [
