How a TV Opened My Scalp Like a Banana Peel [Killer Tvs]

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Yesterday I published an article on how kids are dying because of old CRT TVs falling onto them. Today, reader Russell Warren sent to us this scary photo, and the terrifying story about how a Magnavox set almost killed him:

I read your story on falling TVs yesterday, and I wanted to show you this picture of me, age four. That's when a TV tried to kill me.

I was simply trying to put the remote back on top of our 27" wood console Magnavox television, when I slipped while climbing onto the TV cabinet.

Instead of just falling to the ground, I grabbed the top edge of the Magnavox as I tumbled down to the ground. I hit the ground first, then the TV followed with one of the corners squarely landing on my forehead. The television slid off my head, taking about a quarter of my scalp with it.

The babysitter—my parents were at the movies—described it as "if someone had opened my scalp like they would open a banana peel." I ran around the house screaming in shock, but the babysitter—who later became my mother's best friend—did everything right, kept her calm, and called 911.

One hundred and forty-four stitches later, and enough hospital ice cream to please any 4-year-old boy, I was on my way to a steady recovery. I had some temporary nerve and muscle damage that affected things like my eyebrows, but I was lucky enough to have no long-lasting damage that I'm aware of. I'm obviously incredibly lucky that I've been left unscathed short of a very large scar across my forehead. As you know, there are many other people that haven't been as lucky.

I would love it if you could post my story and my picture in Gizmodo. It would be great if my story can help make other people aware of the significant dangers of untethered CRTs or flat screen TVs.

Thanks Russell. Hopefully, this will make more people aware of this problem.



Link dump: 2009.12.15

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From the four corners of the web:

  • When robots have feelings their rights will need protection, too | Peter Singer and Agata Sagan
    If, as seems likely, we develop super-intelligent machines, their rights will need protection, too
  • "The Most Important Number in the World" | Ronald Bailey
    "The most important number in the world," Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldive Islands, told an audience of hundreds of climate activists in downtown Copenhagen, "is 350." Why 350? That's the threshold for parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that will cause dangerous anthropogenic interference with the world's climate.
  • Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good | Marginal Revolution
    In Modern Principles we use asteroid deflection as our example of a public good. Aside from memorability, the example has two virtues as a teaching tool. First, asteroid deflection is a true public good for all of humanity which raises free riding issues on a worldwide scale. Second, asteroid deflection is an example of a public good that is currently provided neither by the market nor by government. Thus the example underlines the fact that public goods are defined by their characteristics--nonexcludability and nonrivalry--and not by whether they are publicly provided, a point of confusion for many students.
  • 21st-Century Babies - Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules | NYTimes.com
    Surrogacy is largely without regulation, creating an emerging commercial market for babies that raises vexing ethical questions.
  • A Cold War Over Warming | Open the Future
    There is, I believe, a non-zero chance that an extended period of climate instability could induce a state that believes itself to be better able to adapt to global warming to slow its efforts to decarbonize in order to gain a lead over its more vulnerable rivals.

The Great Google Phone Conspiracy [Android]

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I don't know if it's the same-y hardware, the absurd expectations, or general inconsistencies, but something about the Google Phone just feels...off. And depending on how credulous you're feeling today, I can explain: We've been tricked! By Apple! Or something.

These doubtful little seeds come from Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review, a guy you may not have heard of, but who's known for being well-connected i the mobile industry—though his beat tends more toward the Nokias and Sony Ericssons of the world, with occasional reaches for Apple scoops. Anyway, he's been on a Twitter rampage, as captured by Phandroid, and he has a theeeoorryyy:

First, English isn't his first language, so ignore the weird phrasing. Second, what the hell does that mean? It's actually pretty simple.

You know, given how similar the Nexus One concept is to prior Android development phones like the Ion or the Dev Phone One—hardware by HTC, software experience controlled by Google, unlocked, handed out to Google employees—I could easily believe that this phone is just the next Dev phone, designed to give developers something roughly comparable to the next generation of Snapdragon-powered Android phones to develop on. And I'd even believe that they're going to sell it to the public unlocked, and put a little marketing muscle behind it. That actually makes more sense than rumors of a Google plan to either revolutionize, rape, pillage or save the wireless industry. (Pick one!) And it'd explain many people's general unease about assuming this phone revolutionary before we know anything about it. So, Eldar, I'll bite: This is a mass delusion. What else?

Intrigue! But who? TELL US WHO!

This is just a ploy to get the internet to talk about you, isn't it? Dammit, Eldar! You got me. You can judge his theorizing on your own—I don't buy it, because I don't really see what Apple would have to gain here—but either way: we all need to calm the hell down about this phone. The rumors about it are fascinating, sure, but the with every actual fact we uncover, this thing gets a little more boring. [Phandroid]



Who Are You? | Cosmic Variance

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Last week I Twittered/Facebooked some provocative results from a poll of philosophers. In particular, this little tidbit:

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival337 / 931 (36.1%)
Other304 / 931 (32.6%)
Accept or lean toward: death290 / 931 (31.1%)

Yes, that’s all the detail presented in the question: “Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?” As a professional philosopher, you’re supposed to be familiar with the issue, which I reconstruct as follows. Imagine that someone has invented a working teleportation device. You step in the box, lights flash and sparks fly, and “you” rematerialize in another box, exactly the same in every way, but constructed out of a completely new collection of atoms. The original version of you is destroyed. Did you die? (And then, what if a million years passed in between the two events?)

It would probably be annoying to real philosophers, but I personally put this question in the category of “Not that hard.” And I would phrase my answer as: “Who cares?” What we should care about is how well the teleporter actually works — is the reconstructed person really in exactly the same quantum state as the original one was in? Same memories, feelings, etc? That’s an interesting technology question.

But there’s no interesting question associated with “Did you really die when you were teleported?”, or “Are you really the same person after being teleported?” These are just bad questions. They assume a certain way of looking at the world that ceases to be useful once we’ve invented teleportation. Namely, they assume that there’s a certain “essence of you-ness” that is (somehow) associated with your physical body and continues through time. That’s a perfectly sensible way of talking in the real world, where we don’t have access to duplicator devices or transporter machines. But if we did, that conception would no longer be very useful. There is a person who stepped into the first box, and a person who stepped out of the second box, and obviously they have a lot in common. But to sit down and demand that we decide whether they are “really” the same person is just a waste of time — there is no such “really.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t interesting questions along these lines, but they are operational questions — how should I actually act, or what should I actually expect to happen, in these situations? — rather than arid metaphysical ones. What if you murdered someone, and then teleported — would the reconstructed person still be guilty of murder? That’s not quite the right question, because it still relies on the slippery essence of continuous personhood, but there’s a closely related sensible question — should we treat the reconstructed person as if they had committed murder? And it seems to me that the answer is clearly “yes” — whatever good reasons we had for treating the pre-teleportation person in a certain way, those reasons should still apply to the post-teleportation person.

The issue of duplication seems much thornier to me than the issue of teleportation. If someone made an exact copy of a known murderer, should we treat both the original and the copy as murderers? (I vote “yes.”) Fine, but what about the view from the inside? Let’s say you have an offer to get paid $100 if you let yourself be copied, with the proviso that after being copied one of the two of you will randomly be chosen for immediate painless execution. Do you take that deal?

I think problems like that are legitimately interesting, although to a great extent their mystery relies on the inadequacy of our conceptions of death. Most of us don’t want to die, at least not right away. But if we did die, we’d be gone, and wouldn’t have any wants or desires any more — but it’s very hard to consistently reason that way. Note that if we replaced “immediate painless execution” with “prolonged torture,” it seems like a much more straightforward question.

This showed up in our long-ago discussion of the quantum suicide experiment. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you can make measurements that split the wave function of the universe into distinct branches. In some sense, then, you really do have a duplicator machine — it’s just that the whole universe gets duplicated, not just you. Some folks have tried to argue against this idea by pushing adherents into a logical cul de sac. You shouldn’t (to make a long story short) be averse to bargains that leave you dead with large probability, as long as there exist branches of the wave function where you are alive and flourishing — after all, in the branches where you are dead you don’t care any more, right?

My point in that earlier post — a point I somehow managed to completely obscure — was that these are misleading thought experiments, because very few of us would take seriously the corresponding classical suicide experiment. “Here, I’ll flip a coin, and give you $100 if it’s heads and shoot you instantly dead if it’s tails. Deal?” Very little temptation to take that offer. But the logic is essentially the same — if you’re dead you don’t care, right? (For purposes of these thought experiments we always assume you have no friends or loved ones who would miss you; it’s just part of the philosophical game, not a comment on your actual social situation.)

At some point in thinking about the many-worlds interpretation, issues like this inevitably do come up. That’s what David Albert and I talked about a bit on Bloggingheads. There might be a certain measurement that yields result A 10% of the time, and result B 90% of the time. But in the MWI, the measurement splits the universe into two branches, and you end up either in the branch where you saw A or the branch where you saw B. What does it mean to say that you had a “10% chance of measuring A”? You either did or you didn’t — there is no ensemble of millions of you all doing the same experiment. People have made progress on these questions — here’s a talk by David Wallace on his work with David Deutsch in attacking this problem. (Don’t ask me why everyone who thinks about these issues is named “David.”) I haven’t ever looked at this work closely enough to have an informed opinion.

All I know is that being able to teleport around would be really cool.


Energy and Electromagnetism

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If experimentally, we suspend a rare earth magnet and an electromagnet from strings attached to the ceiling. We then tie strings directly underneath them to the floor, with steel ball bearings attached. The distance between the magnets and the ball bearings is 1/8" when the objects are stretched to

Darwin May’ve Had “Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome.” (It’s as Much Fun as It Sounds.) | Discoblog

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darwinCharles Darwin lived to the ripe old age of 73 (which was pretty darn good for the 19th century), but despite his longevity, he spent many of the years of his life famously dogged by ill health. Today’s doctors have tried to apply what medical science has learned since Darwin’s time to diagnose the famous naturalist, and now another researcher has tossed out a suggestion: Darwin had cyclical vomiting syndrome (CVS).

Writing in the British Medical Journal, physician John Hayman argues that CVS was most likely responsible for Darwin’s intermittent malaise. The disease, caused by a mitochondrial DNA mutation, shows up mainly in children, Hayman says, but can persist into adulthood. Its symptoms, including headaches, anxiety, and abdominal problems, match many of Darwin’s. From the Los Angeles Times:

In addition to the match in symptoms, research shows that Darwin’s mother, Susannah, suffered vomiting and boils and motion sickness as a child, as well as excessive sickness during pregnancies. She died with abdominal pain when Charles was 8. Her younger brother, Tom, had similar symptoms, and a sister, Sarah, said that Tom and Charles had the same illness. That is consistent with a mitochondrial genetic defect, which is passed down through the maternal line.

CVS now joins Chagas disease (which Darwin could have acquired in the tropics), repressed anger and guilt, panic attacks, hypochondria, and other possibilities put forth as candidates for Darwin’s mystery ailment. Here’s guessing that researchers will keep playing Dr. House with Darwin, who saw his 200th birthday this year.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week: The “Dark Side” of Darwin
Discoblog: Sneak Preview of Darwin: The Musical
DISCOVER: On the Origin of Darwin’s Ills
80beats: Diagnosing the Illness That Killed Mozart, 218 Years Later
80beats: Scientist Wants to Test Abraham Lincoln’s Bloodstained Pillow for Cancer

Image: Wiki Commons


Another Death Knell for Science Journalism–From Natalie Angier | The Intersection

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angierI just saw this story–it reads very consistently, if also disturbingly, with yesterday’s Andrew Revkin news. Natalie Angier, the celebrated science writer and author of The Canon, among other works, now opines that newspaper science reporting is “basically going out of business.” She ought to know–having reported at the New York Times for nearly two decades. Plus, she ought to know because her husband, Rick Weiss (whose story is discussed in Unscientific America) last year left the Washington Post.

It is a tough world out there for those who produce the content that we here care about. And it is getting tougher. And so far, I have not seen the media-economic model that can save us….


RFID Tags for Electrical Conduits

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Do you know of any manufacturer that has developed an Rfid tags system for electrical conduits and for cables as well

Typically a conduit system may have many large and small sized conduits emerging from a duct bank ,running in parallel within a room or entering/leaving through the wall

Calculating Gear Ratios

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I have a machine which has 4 cog wheels in constant mesh. The largest cog wheel has 165 teeth and the others 45, 40 and 32 respectively. How many revolutions must the largest cog wheel make before each of the cog wheels is back in its starting position ?

Tiny Soot Particles May Be Melting Mighty Himalayan Glaciers | 80beats

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Himalayas425Global warming typically takes the rap for melting glaciers, but in the case of the Himalayan mountain range’s dwindling ice, it could have a co-conspirator: soot. Today, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists said that the black carbon spewed out as industrial pollution from the heavily populated areas nearby could be a much larger contributor to glacier melt than previously thought.

First, NASA’s William Lau says, atmospheric circulation leaves a layer of soot at the base of the Himalayas, and that soot then combines with dust and forms an opaque cloud that absorbs energy. As this layer heats up in the Himalayan foothills, it rises and enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the majestic mountain range. As these particles rise on the warm, overturning air masses, they produce more rain over northern India, which further warms the atmosphere and fuels this “heat pump” that draws even more warm air to the region [LiveScience].

Half of Tibetan glaciers were shrinking between 1950 and 1980, Chinese scientists say, but the total has shot up to 95 percent in this century. NASA’s James Hansen was a member of one of the two study teams that tackled this problem, and said black carbon could account for as much as half of the glacial retreat, with climate change representing the remainder. “The science suggests that we’ve got to better monitor the flue on our ‘rooftop to the world,’” Lau said. [LiveScience].

Beyond the cultural loss and climate change worries, the Himalayas bind the two most populous countries in the world and provide water for a huge chunk of the world’s people. One of the persistent worries in Asia remains a deepening water crisis as high mountain glaciers shrink. Three northern states in India have lost 17.7 cubic kilometers a year for the past decade [GreenTech Media].

Related Content:
80beats: The Snows of Kilimanjaro Could Be Gone By 2022
80beats: Why Warmer Weather Makes Big Mountains: Snow is the Enemy
80beats: From 300 Miles Up, Satellites See Water Crisis in India’s Future
DISCOVER: The Easiest Way to Fight Global Warming? Why cleaning up soot would do wonders
DISCOVER: The Coming Himalayan Catastrophe

Image: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences


Bad Experience With OpLink

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I just had a bad experience with OpLink, a test equipment service outfit in Georgia, and I wanted to share it.

I have a LeCroy WS454 scope which needs service, to the tune of $1500 from the factory. When I checked with OpLink they showed that they service that scope and that I needed to ship

Dire Reports from Copenhagen…About Conference Access | The Intersection

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Photo: Australian Science Media Center

Photo: Australian Science Media Center

Man. The stories out of here about how hard it is to get into the Bella Center–home to the COP15 meetings–are enough to convince anybody not to try it. That includes me–even though media credentials are waiting for me inside the building.

But listen to Catherine Brahic of New Scientist describe her experience of the lines outside:

Five hours, zero degrees centigrade, no food, no water. Snow flurries. Dozens of large (very large) Danish police manhandling the crowds, arms linked to form human walls and cordon off the hundreds of waiting people, who teetered between hilarity and fury.

The scene was repeated at the various gates to the Copenhagen climate conference, from 7 am this morning to when the doors closed at 6 pm. I waited five hours in the blistering cold to get in, and I was among the lucky ones. My colleague, Fred Pearce, waited nine before the gates were shut before his nose. Above him a digital sign fastidiously counted the growing number of climate refugees around the world. He’ll have to do it all again tomorrow.

Brahic continues, hilariously:

What was behind the monumental screw-up? A staggering inability to do maths.

The conference centre has a maximum capacity of 15,000, yet NGOs alone were allowed to register 20,000 delegates. That’s not counting the 5000 members of the media, nor the 7000 staffers who are running the place, totalling 32,000 before you even get to the people who are meant to be doing the real work here: the negotiators. There were ministers hopelessly waving their diplomatic passes in the queues outside. They weren’t let in any faster than anyone else.

Amanda Little of Grist adds to the depictions of utter misery:

On my first day in Copenhagen, after a sleepless red eye, I and thousands of others—including delegates, business leaders, and other accredited journalists—were prevented from entering the conference center because the event has been way overbooked. Word is that more than 45,000 people have registered to attend, but only 15,000 can actually fit into the event location. You do the math. Many of us had paid thousands of dollars and traveled thousands of miles to get here. Despite the miserable weather, lack of food and toilets, and obvious mismanagement of the proceedings, U.N. officials seemed unable or unwilling to deal with the problem.

My co-sufferers had some choice words to describe the situation: “Profoundly miserable.” “The day of the living dead.” “The slowest torture imaginable.” I arrived at 1:30 p.m. and left at 5:30; there were plenty of people who had come at 8:00 a.m. and were still there at 5:00 p.m., blue lips angrily curled.

So, here I am in a cozy coffeehouse, a short walk from Tivoli Gardens, about to go out to dinner in Christiana, and I’m wondering: Is this insanity really worth it? Just so I can add to the genre of griping-waiting-in-line articles? Just to penetrate the inner sanctum?

I don’t think so. My reporting from Copenhagen will simply have to take a different angle–as did my geoengineering piece yesterday for Mother Jones. Because with just a few days in this beautiful town, I am not at all sure I want to spend one of them freezing in a nightmarish line…..