Ode to NASA's LCROSS Mission
At Cabeus did NASA geeks,
A swifty Centaur rocket hurl,
Where dust, and mayhap water reeks,
‘Pon craters numberless, and peaks,
Under the cosmic whirl.
Sent a metric ton of massy metal,
To feel out lunar soil’s fettle.
And cunning careful cameras set,
To record impact on lunar rill,
Ensure the wants of public met,
Make time long record of the thrill,
Assure balmy days for budget till.
But, oh! When stopwatch ended countdown,
To indicate the mighty crashdown,
Appeared no hint of fiery flash down,
There on Selene’s apparition.
Were the cameras to be faulted,
For missing flash on Moon assaulted?
Or had some Lunar Politician,
Told Ace, a junior lab technician,
"Strip down that leftover techy thing,
From building that new Saturn ring,
Set a force field strong and watchful,
To stop this arrogant man tossed missile. "
"Include a grokking gizmo, Ace,
To do that thing of the Martian race.
Twist that racing Terran thing,
Clear outa this here four D space.
Enough of taking human guff!
Teach those Earthlings right enough,
That they're not really red hot stuff!"
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
A neat new technology, especially for Star Trek fans
This two and half minute video illustrates how a Japanese researcher has made it possible to "touch" and "feel" and otherwise interact with a hologram. He's still a bit of a ways from building the equivalent of a Star Trek holodeck; but he's demonstrated one way in which doing such a thing is theoretically possible. Very neat! The video doesn't seem to have sound, so it is safe to open at work.
Scroll down once after going to the link below to find the video:
http://www.physorg.com/news168797748.html
Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who posted this on The Corner where he periodically presents a list of weird and interesting links.
Scroll down once after going to the link below to find the video:
http://www.physorg.com/news168797748.html
Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who posted this on The Corner where he periodically presents a list of weird and interesting links.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
When IPods attack
It was bad enough when vultures were swooping down on walkers in England, and rabid foxes were attacking old ladies in Massachusetts, and mountain lions were dragging down bikers in California; but now even cute little IPods can't be trusted. This one tried to immolate its soccer mom mistress in Washington State.
http://www.kirotv.com/money/20089894/detail.html
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I especially liked the part where she said that all her kids have IPods, some of them multiple Ipods, and that they listen to them in bed. Turns out her kids might have been safer if she had been letting them take Michael Jackson to bed with them.
In related news: The government just released the results of the latest visa lottery. The visa lottery is a special federal government homeland security program that randomly admits 50,000 potential terrorists into the country each year because its a well known fact that we don't have enough potential killers already living here. Your federal government at work, building a better, safer, more prosperous, America.
http://cis.org/Vaughan/VisaLottery2010
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain, a Biography
http://www.kirotv.com/money/20089894/detail.html
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I especially liked the part where she said that all her kids have IPods, some of them multiple Ipods, and that they listen to them in bed. Turns out her kids might have been safer if she had been letting them take Michael Jackson to bed with them.
In related news: The government just released the results of the latest visa lottery. The visa lottery is a special federal government homeland security program that randomly admits 50,000 potential terrorists into the country each year because its a well known fact that we don't have enough potential killers already living here. Your federal government at work, building a better, safer, more prosperous, America.
http://cis.org/Vaughan/VisaLottery2010
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain, a Biography
Saturday, May 30, 2009
We live in an age of marvels
What will they think of next. Here's a new product that will help kids get their homework done.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5343111/Ball-and-chain-to-force-children-to-study.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5343111/Ball-and-chain-to-force-children-to-study.html
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Always look on the bright side of life
There has been a lot of doom and gloom talk lately. It's useful to be reminded periodically that we're living in magical times.
The big heads at this site ( http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_print.html ) consider the question of what coming technologies and social developments may change everything the way electricity and penicillin have. I haven't read all the way down yet; and I may never read all the way down; but the selection I've pasted below struck me as a useful curative for all the negativity we've been suffering because of these trivial economic problems.
JUAN ENRIQUEZCEO, Biotechonomy; Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author, The Untied States of America
Speciation is coming. Fast. We keep forgetting that we are but one of several hominids that have walked the Earth (erectus, habilis,neanderthalis, heidelbergensis, ergaster, australopithecus). We keep thinking we are the one and only, the special. But we easily could not have been a dominant species. Or even a species anymore. We blissfully ignore the fact that we came within about 2,000 specimens of going extinct (which is why human DNA is virtually identical).
There is not much evidence, historically, that we are the be all and end all, or that we will remain the dominant species. The fossil history of the planet tells tales of at least six mass extinctions. In each cycle, most life was toast as DNA/RNA hit a reboot key. New species emerged to adapt to new conditions. Asteroid hits? Do away with oceans of slime. World freezes to the Equator? Microbes dominate. Atmosphere fills with poisonous oxygen? no worries, life eventually blurts out obnoxious mammals.
Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it.
There are at least three parallel tracks on which this change is running towards us. The easiest to see and comprehend is taking place among the "handicapped." As we build better prostheses, we begin to see equality. Legless Oscar Pistorious attempting to put aside the Special Olympics and run against able bodied Olympians is but one example. In Beijing he came very close, but did not meet the qualifying times. However, as materials science, engineering, and design advance, by next Olympics he and his disciples will be competitive. And one Olympics after that the "handicapped" could be unbeatable.
It's not just limbs, what started out as large cones for the hard of hearing eventually became pesky, malfunctioning hearing aids. Then came discrete, effective, miniaturized buds. Now internally implanted cochlear implants allow the deaf to hear. But unlike natural evolution, which requires centuries, digital technologies double in power and halve in price every few months. Soon those with implants will hear as well as we do, and, a few months after that, their hearing may be more acute than ours. Likely the devices will span a broad and adjustable tonal range, including that of species like dogs, bats, or dolphins. Wearers will be able to adapt to various environments at will. Perhaps those with natural hearing will file discrimination lawsuits because they were not hired by symphony orchestras…
Speciation does not have to be mechanical, there is a second parallel, fast moving, track in stem cell and tissue engineering. While the global economy melted down this year, a series of extraordinary discoveries opened interesting options that will be remembered far longer that the current NASDAQ index. Labs in Japan and Wisconsin rebooted skin cells and turned them into stem cells. We are now closer to a point where any cell in our body can be rebooted back to its original factory settings (pluripotent stem cell) and can rebuild any part of our body. At the same time, a Harvard team stripped a mouse heart of all its cells, leaving only cartilage. The cartilage was covered in mouse stem cells, which self organized into a beating heart. A Wake Forest group was regrowing human bladders and implanting them into accident and cancer victims. By year end, a European team had taken a trachea from a dead donor, taken the cells off, and then covered the sinew with bone marrow cells taken from a patient dying of tuberculosis. These cells self organized and regrew a fully functional trachea which was implanted into the patient. There was no need for immunosuppressants; her body recognized the cells covering the new organ as her own…
Again, this is an instance where treating the sick and the needy can quickly expand into a "normal" population with elective procedures. The global proliferation of plastic surgery shows how many are willing to undergo great expense, pain, and inconvenience to enhance their bodies. Between 1996 and 2002 elective cosmetic surgery increased 297%, minimally invasive procedures increased 4146%. As artificial limbs, eyes, ears, cartilage begin to provide significant advantages, procedures developed to enhance the quality of life for the handicapped may become common.
After the daughter of one of my friends tore her tendons horseback riding, doctors told her they would have to harvest parts of her own tendons and hamstrings to rebuild her leg. Because she was so young, the crippling procedure would have to be repeated three times as her body grew. But her parents knew tissue engineers were growing tendons in a lab, so she was one of the first recipients of a procedure that allows natural growth and no harvesting. Today she is a successful ski racer, but her coach feels her "damaged" knee is far stronger and has asked whether the same procedure could be done on the undamaged knee…
As we regrow or engineer more body parts we will likely significantly increase average life span and run into a third track of speciation. Those with access to Google already have an extraordinary evolutionary advantage over the digitally illiterate. Next decade we will be able to store everything we see, read, and hear in our lifetime. The question is can we re-upload and upgrade this data as the basic storage organ deteriorates? And can we enhance this organ's cognitive capacity internally and externally? MIT has already brought together many of those interested in cognition — neuroscientists, surgeons, radiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists — to begin to understand this black box. But rebooting other body parts will likely be easier than rebooting the brain, so this will likely be the slowest track but, over the long term, the one with the greatest speciation impact.
Speciation will not be a deliberate, programmed event. Instead it will involve an ever faster accumulation of small, useful improvements that eventually turn homo sapiens into a new hominid. We will likely see glimpses of this long-lived, partly mechanical, partly regrown creature that continues to rapidly drive its own evolution. As the branches of the tree of life, and of hominids, continue to grow and spread, many of our grandchildren will likely engineer themselves into what we would consider a new species, one with extraordinary capabilities, a homo evolutis.
The big heads at this site ( http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_print.html ) consider the question of what coming technologies and social developments may change everything the way electricity and penicillin have. I haven't read all the way down yet; and I may never read all the way down; but the selection I've pasted below struck me as a useful curative for all the negativity we've been suffering because of these trivial economic problems.
JUAN ENRIQUEZCEO, Biotechonomy; Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author, The Untied States of America
Speciation is coming. Fast. We keep forgetting that we are but one of several hominids that have walked the Earth (erectus, habilis,neanderthalis, heidelbergensis, ergaster, australopithecus). We keep thinking we are the one and only, the special. But we easily could not have been a dominant species. Or even a species anymore. We blissfully ignore the fact that we came within about 2,000 specimens of going extinct (which is why human DNA is virtually identical).
There is not much evidence, historically, that we are the be all and end all, or that we will remain the dominant species. The fossil history of the planet tells tales of at least six mass extinctions. In each cycle, most life was toast as DNA/RNA hit a reboot key. New species emerged to adapt to new conditions. Asteroid hits? Do away with oceans of slime. World freezes to the Equator? Microbes dominate. Atmosphere fills with poisonous oxygen? no worries, life eventually blurts out obnoxious mammals.
Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it.
There are at least three parallel tracks on which this change is running towards us. The easiest to see and comprehend is taking place among the "handicapped." As we build better prostheses, we begin to see equality. Legless Oscar Pistorious attempting to put aside the Special Olympics and run against able bodied Olympians is but one example. In Beijing he came very close, but did not meet the qualifying times. However, as materials science, engineering, and design advance, by next Olympics he and his disciples will be competitive. And one Olympics after that the "handicapped" could be unbeatable.
It's not just limbs, what started out as large cones for the hard of hearing eventually became pesky, malfunctioning hearing aids. Then came discrete, effective, miniaturized buds. Now internally implanted cochlear implants allow the deaf to hear. But unlike natural evolution, which requires centuries, digital technologies double in power and halve in price every few months. Soon those with implants will hear as well as we do, and, a few months after that, their hearing may be more acute than ours. Likely the devices will span a broad and adjustable tonal range, including that of species like dogs, bats, or dolphins. Wearers will be able to adapt to various environments at will. Perhaps those with natural hearing will file discrimination lawsuits because they were not hired by symphony orchestras…
Speciation does not have to be mechanical, there is a second parallel, fast moving, track in stem cell and tissue engineering. While the global economy melted down this year, a series of extraordinary discoveries opened interesting options that will be remembered far longer that the current NASDAQ index. Labs in Japan and Wisconsin rebooted skin cells and turned them into stem cells. We are now closer to a point where any cell in our body can be rebooted back to its original factory settings (pluripotent stem cell) and can rebuild any part of our body. At the same time, a Harvard team stripped a mouse heart of all its cells, leaving only cartilage. The cartilage was covered in mouse stem cells, which self organized into a beating heart. A Wake Forest group was regrowing human bladders and implanting them into accident and cancer victims. By year end, a European team had taken a trachea from a dead donor, taken the cells off, and then covered the sinew with bone marrow cells taken from a patient dying of tuberculosis. These cells self organized and regrew a fully functional trachea which was implanted into the patient. There was no need for immunosuppressants; her body recognized the cells covering the new organ as her own…
Again, this is an instance where treating the sick and the needy can quickly expand into a "normal" population with elective procedures. The global proliferation of plastic surgery shows how many are willing to undergo great expense, pain, and inconvenience to enhance their bodies. Between 1996 and 2002 elective cosmetic surgery increased 297%, minimally invasive procedures increased 4146%. As artificial limbs, eyes, ears, cartilage begin to provide significant advantages, procedures developed to enhance the quality of life for the handicapped may become common.
After the daughter of one of my friends tore her tendons horseback riding, doctors told her they would have to harvest parts of her own tendons and hamstrings to rebuild her leg. Because she was so young, the crippling procedure would have to be repeated three times as her body grew. But her parents knew tissue engineers were growing tendons in a lab, so she was one of the first recipients of a procedure that allows natural growth and no harvesting. Today she is a successful ski racer, but her coach feels her "damaged" knee is far stronger and has asked whether the same procedure could be done on the undamaged knee…
As we regrow or engineer more body parts we will likely significantly increase average life span and run into a third track of speciation. Those with access to Google already have an extraordinary evolutionary advantage over the digitally illiterate. Next decade we will be able to store everything we see, read, and hear in our lifetime. The question is can we re-upload and upgrade this data as the basic storage organ deteriorates? And can we enhance this organ's cognitive capacity internally and externally? MIT has already brought together many of those interested in cognition — neuroscientists, surgeons, radiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists — to begin to understand this black box. But rebooting other body parts will likely be easier than rebooting the brain, so this will likely be the slowest track but, over the long term, the one with the greatest speciation impact.
Speciation will not be a deliberate, programmed event. Instead it will involve an ever faster accumulation of small, useful improvements that eventually turn homo sapiens into a new hominid. We will likely see glimpses of this long-lived, partly mechanical, partly regrown creature that continues to rapidly drive its own evolution. As the branches of the tree of life, and of hominids, continue to grow and spread, many of our grandchildren will likely engineer themselves into what we would consider a new species, one with extraordinary capabilities, a homo evolutis.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
When is helpful tech support not useful tech support
I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with a very pleasant and helpful seeming fellow at Verizon, in who knows where, trying to find out why our home internet service has been intermittent. He led me through all manner of technical stuff on both our home desktop computer and then on my company laptop.
The end result was that he tried to give me to a paid service or connect me with the manufacturers of the computers to try to figure out why he was seeing internet coming to our wireless modem, and our home computer was seeing the wireless modem, but neither of the computers was seeing the internet. I declined those two options because the two computers are from different manufacturers and they run different versions of windows. Also, I told him it's hard to see how our computers can be at fault if both of them see the internet intermittently and we have not made any changes to their settings. In fact, I can't make changes to the settings of the company laptop, so its literally impossible for me to have screwed it up.
After I got off the phone with the pleasant support guy, I cut power to the wireless modem and then powered it up again, figuring that maybe that would knock some sense into its little brain. This was, by the way, something the tech support guy did not suggest that I do. Well, here I am on the internet again with the laptop. Go figure. I haven't tried yet with the home computer because I also cut its power and it takes forever for that desktop to reboot. I'll try that tonight. And then, assuming everything works, I'm going to have to call Verizon again because as part of his procedure the fellow changed our account password since I couldn't remember the original one. Who can remember such passwords over a gap of years? Who even knows that the little modem with its five green eyes requires a password?
If you are having internet connectivity problems you may want to try cutting off power to the modem and then giving it back its power as a first step.
I'm skeptical that this is a final fix because we've had some odd internet on and off issues for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I left the very helpful and patient Verizon fellow with the word that I'm not going to be paying their bill if the problem continues, so we'll see what, if anything Verizon does.
Update: I didn't mention above that, after remaining polite with the seemingly helpful human who failed to help, I also spent a couple of minute cursing the little modem, and Verizon, and the internet, and the gods of technology, before I cut off the power. If you have ccasion to try this you may need to say to the modem, "Take this you faithless little bastard, starve in the dark for a while," just before you cut off its power. And then, after its confused little green eyes have finished with their blinking once you have restored the power, it may be necessary to say to it, "The next time I'll cut you off for a few hours or I may just rip you out of there and throw you on a fire to see how you like that."
Update 2: Tonight at 6:00 the DSL was working. At about 8:00 it was no longer working. I had other stuff to do on this computer so I let it alone. A little while ago I checked and it still wasn't working; so I unplugged the modem and sure enough the DSL was working again after I plugged it back in. Does this mean I have to unplug the thing ever few hours? I think it means that I call Verizon's billing office tomorrow and tell them to cut off the DSL service. Hopefully that will cause them to put me in touch with someone who will authorize a new modem, which is clearly what's needed. Of course they may play it tough, in which case modern technology may retreat from this little piece of Collegeville.
Update 3: 84 82 45 82 54 84 87 59 86 :<(
Update 4 on 11/8: I got in touch with a different technical services human in wherever they are after I called billing. This tech services person spoke with a bit more of an accent than the first one above. I'm failing to resist the urge to believe that he was hired more for his technical competence than for his English language skills. He fairly quickly went into a mode of replacing the "firmware" in my internet connection gizmo after telling me that it's an older model whose "firmware" sometimes gets corrupted. Since then no problems. Someday I have to do a post about the tradeoffs inherent in recruiting and hiring, a subject about which I'm pretty knowledgeable.
The end result was that he tried to give me to a paid service or connect me with the manufacturers of the computers to try to figure out why he was seeing internet coming to our wireless modem, and our home computer was seeing the wireless modem, but neither of the computers was seeing the internet. I declined those two options because the two computers are from different manufacturers and they run different versions of windows. Also, I told him it's hard to see how our computers can be at fault if both of them see the internet intermittently and we have not made any changes to their settings. In fact, I can't make changes to the settings of the company laptop, so its literally impossible for me to have screwed it up.
After I got off the phone with the pleasant support guy, I cut power to the wireless modem and then powered it up again, figuring that maybe that would knock some sense into its little brain. This was, by the way, something the tech support guy did not suggest that I do. Well, here I am on the internet again with the laptop. Go figure. I haven't tried yet with the home computer because I also cut its power and it takes forever for that desktop to reboot. I'll try that tonight. And then, assuming everything works, I'm going to have to call Verizon again because as part of his procedure the fellow changed our account password since I couldn't remember the original one. Who can remember such passwords over a gap of years? Who even knows that the little modem with its five green eyes requires a password?
If you are having internet connectivity problems you may want to try cutting off power to the modem and then giving it back its power as a first step.
I'm skeptical that this is a final fix because we've had some odd internet on and off issues for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I left the very helpful and patient Verizon fellow with the word that I'm not going to be paying their bill if the problem continues, so we'll see what, if anything Verizon does.
Update: I didn't mention above that, after remaining polite with the seemingly helpful human who failed to help, I also spent a couple of minute cursing the little modem, and Verizon, and the internet, and the gods of technology, before I cut off the power. If you have ccasion to try this you may need to say to the modem, "Take this you faithless little bastard, starve in the dark for a while," just before you cut off its power. And then, after its confused little green eyes have finished with their blinking once you have restored the power, it may be necessary to say to it, "The next time I'll cut you off for a few hours or I may just rip you out of there and throw you on a fire to see how you like that."
Update 2: Tonight at 6:00 the DSL was working. At about 8:00 it was no longer working. I had other stuff to do on this computer so I let it alone. A little while ago I checked and it still wasn't working; so I unplugged the modem and sure enough the DSL was working again after I plugged it back in. Does this mean I have to unplug the thing ever few hours? I think it means that I call Verizon's billing office tomorrow and tell them to cut off the DSL service. Hopefully that will cause them to put me in touch with someone who will authorize a new modem, which is clearly what's needed. Of course they may play it tough, in which case modern technology may retreat from this little piece of Collegeville.
Update 3: 84 82 45 82 54 84 87 59 86 :<(
Update 4 on 11/8: I got in touch with a different technical services human in wherever they are after I called billing. This tech services person spoke with a bit more of an accent than the first one above. I'm failing to resist the urge to believe that he was hired more for his technical competence than for his English language skills. He fairly quickly went into a mode of replacing the "firmware" in my internet connection gizmo after telling me that it's an older model whose "firmware" sometimes gets corrupted. Since then no problems. Someday I have to do a post about the tradeoffs inherent in recruiting and hiring, a subject about which I'm pretty knowledgeable.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Practical magic
It should be no secret to anyone reading this that I'm beginning to get a bit long in the tooth. If I were a horse I'd be well along toward the point where the driver of the glue factory truck would start slowing down to see if I'm ready for pickup each time as he goes by my pasture.
But I'm not a horse; so today I paid a visit to Dr. Mindicino down in Trooper for some practical magic. I've been going to Dr. M for almost thirty years and I still have in my mouth every tooth I had when I started seeing him every few months for a cleaning and check-up. He's drilled and filled three or four of them, and he's capped one that cracked, and he's even excavated one out so an associate could root canal it. But he has never removed one. And he's done all that with a minimum of fuss and an amazing minimum of pain. If there's a Hall of Fame for dentists Dr. Mindicino will deserve a place in it when he retires, which will hopefully not be soon.
None of those other things he has done impressed me as much as today's magic. Today he tuck-pointed the sides of two of my teeth where the gum had pulled away. He numbed one side of my mouth, then he roughed up the surface of the teeth, then he plastered on a nice neat covering of new fake enamel to protect the area where the gums would be if I weren't getting especially long in those two particular teeth. He finished by using a star warsy sort of ultraviolet light gun to harden the plaster, and then he smoothed it out so the enamel on the two teeth looks just like was always been an eight of an inch longer from crown to gum.
Setting aside the matter of fact sculptural artistry with which Dr. M shaped the new fake surfaces of the teeth, and the no-nonsense way Dr. M and his assistant did all of that work within a bare hour from the time I walked into his office, the chemistry and physics of what he did is astounding.
Somebody had to think up how to formulate that plaster so that it could be spread on easy like clay and then harden super hard like tooth enamel under the influence of a light pen that has to be safe to shoot around in somebodies mouth. That now hard plaster has to bind to the sides of those teeth strongly enough so the forces I'm going to unleash on it when I crunch hard pretzels tonight won't break it loose. And it has to expand and contract at the same rate as the natural tooth material under it when I slurp some too hot soup despite Linda's warning and then quench the burn with a quick draught of cold water or ice cold diet Mountain Dew.
Somebody else had to do all the improving that has occurred over the years around the unpleasant subject of the numbing that has to happen for such dental work to be feasible. I can't quantify this but I remember some pretty big and pretty painful needles being used by the dentist when I was a kid. That's all in the past. Dr. M now puts a couple of peppermint flavored sticks next to the tooth and lets then sit a couple of minutes to numb things up. Then he uses a little needle which barely pinches going in, and he must numb things up with little squirts as he advances that needle, because the whole process is nothing, nothing like I remember from long ago.
We live in magical times.
But I'm not a horse; so today I paid a visit to Dr. Mindicino down in Trooper for some practical magic. I've been going to Dr. M for almost thirty years and I still have in my mouth every tooth I had when I started seeing him every few months for a cleaning and check-up. He's drilled and filled three or four of them, and he's capped one that cracked, and he's even excavated one out so an associate could root canal it. But he has never removed one. And he's done all that with a minimum of fuss and an amazing minimum of pain. If there's a Hall of Fame for dentists Dr. Mindicino will deserve a place in it when he retires, which will hopefully not be soon.
None of those other things he has done impressed me as much as today's magic. Today he tuck-pointed the sides of two of my teeth where the gum had pulled away. He numbed one side of my mouth, then he roughed up the surface of the teeth, then he plastered on a nice neat covering of new fake enamel to protect the area where the gums would be if I weren't getting especially long in those two particular teeth. He finished by using a star warsy sort of ultraviolet light gun to harden the plaster, and then he smoothed it out so the enamel on the two teeth looks just like was always been an eight of an inch longer from crown to gum.
Setting aside the matter of fact sculptural artistry with which Dr. M shaped the new fake surfaces of the teeth, and the no-nonsense way Dr. M and his assistant did all of that work within a bare hour from the time I walked into his office, the chemistry and physics of what he did is astounding.
Somebody had to think up how to formulate that plaster so that it could be spread on easy like clay and then harden super hard like tooth enamel under the influence of a light pen that has to be safe to shoot around in somebodies mouth. That now hard plaster has to bind to the sides of those teeth strongly enough so the forces I'm going to unleash on it when I crunch hard pretzels tonight won't break it loose. And it has to expand and contract at the same rate as the natural tooth material under it when I slurp some too hot soup despite Linda's warning and then quench the burn with a quick draught of cold water or ice cold diet Mountain Dew.
Somebody else had to do all the improving that has occurred over the years around the unpleasant subject of the numbing that has to happen for such dental work to be feasible. I can't quantify this but I remember some pretty big and pretty painful needles being used by the dentist when I was a kid. That's all in the past. Dr. M now puts a couple of peppermint flavored sticks next to the tooth and lets then sit a couple of minutes to numb things up. Then he uses a little needle which barely pinches going in, and he must numb things up with little squirts as he advances that needle, because the whole process is nothing, nothing like I remember from long ago.
We live in magical times.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Now they can come for us quickly
Technology proceeds by slow stages but then it all adds up to a stunning change.
The bad news is the robots will be able to get to us quickly with the nets if they ever decide to come and take us away.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080902171117.htm
The good news is it can't be long before we can sit back and enjoy a movie while we're being driven somewhere by our car.
The bad news is the robots will be able to get to us quickly with the nets if they ever decide to come and take us away.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080902171117.htm
The good news is it can't be long before we can sit back and enjoy a movie while we're being driven somewhere by our car.
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