As is often the case, I agree with Glenn. They can have my land line when they pull the phone from my cold dead fingers.
Cells are simply not reliable enough for me to use them for everything, though I put up with it on a trip (when we were with T-Mobile, my cell phone didn’t even work in the house). I wonder how many kids who have grown up with cell phones for voice and texting take their idiosyncrasies and unreliability for granted, because they don’t have that much experience with a reliable and clean line? Plus, during the hurricanes, when all else failed, including power, cell service was out, but I always had phone service plus DSL on my land line. It allowed me to stay on line, by using a laptop and a voltage inverter plugged into the car.
The technology may continue to improve to the point at which I no longer feel the need for a land line, but we’re nowhere near it yet, in my opinion.
The latest installment of “Better All The Time” is up at The Speculist. It’s all pretty good (I found sensation in a bionic arm without sensors fascinating), but I liked this:
Hey, did you notice? The world didn’t end! We get so used to the world not ending that sometimes we take it for granted. But in honor of our not being sucked into a giant black hole or blasted back in time to when our entire universe was nothing but diffuse particles, the Times Online has compiled a list of 30 other time the world didn’t end.
If you like that sort of list, keep this in mind: those thirty days are just a tiny, tiny subset of the total number of days in which the world has not ended. In fact, we are (and I hope I don’t jinx it or anything by pointing this out) batting a perfect 1000 on that score.
Yeah, every day, they tell us the world won’t end, and it doesn’t until one day it does. Which sucks. And there’s no one around to say “I told you so.”
… Patients who come into the hospital with suspected pneumonia now get an antibiotic within six hours, instead of four hours previously, to allow more time to assess the need for drugs.
One controversial strategy: fecal transplants. For one patient with recurrent C. diff, Kettering suggested a stool transplant from a relative, to help restore good bacteria in the gut. But Jeffrey Weinstein, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital, says the patient “refused to consider it because it was so aesthetically displeasing.”
To say the least. Though some kinky folks might get off on it. It’s certainly a simple procedure compared to a heart or a kidney.
Some might argue that a lot of folks in Congress have already had the procedure done, except it was transplanted to the wrong location, considerably north of where it was supposed to go.
…of course the reason you’re not allowed to go super-fast is that it isn’t safe. A large proportion of car accidents are related to people driving too quickly. Thus, via Ezra Klein comes Kent Sepkowitz’s suggestion that we design cars so as to make it impossible for them to drive over, say, 75 miles per hour.
Clearly spoken as someone woefully ignorant of the cause of accidents, and who probably doesn’t drive much, at least outside a city, or in the west, or in mountains, or on curvy roads where rapid passing is occasionally necessary. Or someone to whom time (at least other peoples’ time) has no value. I suspect that he agrees with Al Gore that cars are intrinsically evil, and wishes that everyone would ride a train, like those enlightened Europeans. It’s similar to the idiocy (and yes, there’s no other word for it) of a double nickel speed limit (something to which even Charles Krauthammer, who doesn’t drive at all) has fallen prey.
Fortunately, most of his commenters take him to school.
A list of items that have a higher value density than gold. This is a characteristic of any viable product of space manufacturing, at least one that will have a market on earth, because transportation costs are so high.
There’s an interesting discussion in comments between Clark Lindsey and Dwayne Day (and others, though those are less interesting) on how much progress we have made in achieving the goals of the new private space industry over at Space Transport News.
Clark tends to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. Dr. Day thinks there are a few drops in the bottom, and they’re poisoned.
Dwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.
One other point of coming convergence–the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We’ll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.