For various reasons lately I've thought about my career. So here is a quick summary post ( Read more... )

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Here is our design modification to the hospital bed control that raises and lowers the head minimizing the chance of erroneously hitting the staff call button. The existing panels have very little contours or ridges that can be felt to determine which button will be touched. For people who can't see because a wide range restrictions this can be ( Read more... )

My status and a bunch issues one encounters when in in some amount of disarray ( Read more... )

The Supreme Court just issued a unanimous decision disallowing the patenting of human genes. It's about time; the idea of patenting something discovered in nature is so ridiculous ( Read more... )

Several weeks ago I read about a future expedition to colonize Mars. This made me request from the library Farmer in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein, a tale about colonizing Ganymede. I read lots of Heinlein's kids books then; this was one of my favorite books.

On the trip out on the Mayflower, Bill the youth and first-person in the book, writes ( Read more... )

While reading The Statues that Walked* by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo I saw this quote at the beginning of the conclusion chapter.
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly ( Read more... )

Last weekend we went on our usual Labor Day camping trip with a bunch of friends. It was in Vermont - at a State Park on the Connecticut river which had not much damage. The river had been up almost 25 feet, but most of the camp site was about 50 above river level ( Read more... )

No, not me collapsing. I'm reading a fantastically interesting book: Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA. (He won the Pulitzer for another book: Guns, Germs and Steel which I'll read as some point ( Read more... )

There are an awful lot of things wrong with the medical care system in the US, some of which may be repaired by Congress this year. One of the oddest things is the variation of prices for drugs. In the AARP magazine they published the following data for the purchase of 30 days of 80 mg Simvastatin (an anti-cholesterol drug - a pretty high dose at ( Read more... )