2007 October | stimulant - changing things around. . .

echo chamber

posted in politics by Alec on October 31st, 2007 :

From Matt Yglesias, a concise pearl:

This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We’re told we can’t leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren’t really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, they’re just being plopped into the middle of it and exposed to harm, so that when the conflict eventually ends (as conflicts tend to) we can call the results “victory” and stay in Iraq forever. If the violence waxes, that shows the war needs to continue. If it wanes, that shows that we’re winning and need to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, in the real world the civil war and ethnic cleansing we’re supposed to be preventing are things that have already happened.

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

things to look at (October 26th - October 29th)

posted in links by Alec on October 29th, 2007 :

a few, tasty links (October 26th - October 29th):

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LAMP

posted in narrative, slush by Alec on October 29th, 2007 :

My cultural background is lacking.

I saw this advertisement online, recently:

I thought it was kinda cute; I thought it was referring to LAMP:

The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software, usually free software / open-source software, used to run dynamic Web sites or servers. The original expansion is as follows:

Linux, referring to the operating system

Apache, the Web server

MySQL, the database management system (or database server);

PHP, Perl or Python, the programming languages.

The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.

Curious, I clicked on the ad, and was led to see the following page

having the caption:

Now when you’re friends question if you really love the lamp, or if you are just saying it because you saw it, just point to the shirt.

Confused, I Googled the phrase, “really love the lamp” and came up with this page. Turns out, it’s a reference to a quote from the character Ron Burgundy in Anchorman:

Brick Tamland: I love… carpet.
[pause]
Brick Tamland: I love… desk.
Ron Burgundy: Brick, are you just looking at things in the office and saying that you love them?
Brick Tamland: I love lamp.
Ron Burgundy: Do you really love the lamp, or are you just saying it because you saw it?
Brick Tamland: I love lamp. I love lamp.

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first steps toward a distributed health care system: public x-ray machines

posted in slush by Alec on October 29th, 2007 :

I wrote about an idea for a decentralized health care system a while ago, and all the people to whom I’ve pitched it think it’s a good, interesting idea. And it’s needed:

Most American physicians are overworked, which contributes to the widespread burnout within the medical profession. Care-giving and goal-oriented professions, such as medicine have prolonged exposure to critical decision making, trauma and patient complaints as well as overwhelming stressors such as excessive workload, increasing overhead, and night and weekend work.

Centralizing the expertise and material needs for medical care is a bad model. It’s not only given rise to high prices, but overloads a system that could be naturally robust. The top-down bureaucracy inflates prices, degrades care, and has no reason to exist. Even worse,

As a concrete way to take steps toward playing around with this idea, I’m working on making my own x-ray machine. The hope is that I could make and design one cheaply, make the designs available, and figure out a low-cost workflow for production. Then maybe try to get a few, free clinics to test them out. Most excitingly, this will give me a concrete context to start working on a potential software framework to accommodate the implications of a distributed health care system.

The idea of distributed health care has built into it a different approach to managing information, as well. Currently, information is again centralized, residing with the patient’s primary care provider. What if instead, this information were kept in a central, third-party, secure database? And what if the patient could carry around a copy of their own medical history and information? What if when you used a public x-ray machine, the results were uploaded, tagged, and available for analysis and consultation immediately?

I’m excited to play around with these ideas. Initially, I thought I was going to need to blow my tube after reading this account. But then, completely by chance, I was reading the Eyebeam blog and found that:

The EEM functions using a rescued vintage TV as an X-Ray emitter to irradiate waste and sterlize it.

Heading over to Wikipedia, it turns out that

The outer glass allows the light generated by the phosphor out of the monitor, but (for color tubes) it must block dangerous X-rays generated by high energy electrons impacting the inside of the CRT face. For this reason, the glass is leaded. Color tubes require significantly higher anode voltages than monochrome tubes (as high as 32,000 volts in large tubes), partly to compensate for the blockage of some electrons by the aperture mask or grille; the amount of X-rays produced increases with voltage

So now, I guess I’ll just try hooking up a TV CRT tube to high voltages, removing the leaded glass, and exposing something. It’s funny. I don’t quite believe yet that I’ll get to the point of writing the software and giving it to a free clinic. But I find it hard to work on things that I can’t connect to a very generative, powerful potential for change.

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

things to look at (October 24th - October 25th)

posted in links by Alec on October 25th, 2007 :

a few, tasty links (October 24th - October 25th):

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

Socratic Electronics

posted in edumication by Alec on October 25th, 2007 :

Normally, I’d just bookmark this, but I want to draw special attention to it:

The most important thing any educator can impart to a student, in any context, is the ability to teach themselves. When teachers dispense knowledge to students in the traditional lecture format — where students passively watch and listen — they deny students deep interaction with the subject matter. Furthermore, instructor-centered pedagogy assumes and reinforces the debilitating notion that education can only happen in the presence of a superior: You (the student) need me (the teacher) in order to learn.

Socratic Electronics is a collection of questions about electronics that is nicely written, thoroughly indexed, and well-illustrated. Unfortunately, they’re designed as worksheets, currently; however, there’s a wealth of information there — and the teacher has implemented them as a framework for getting students to ask questions of each other¹ and answer them.

via MAKEzine :: Socratic Electronics