Chaudywogbaaga

A friend of mine’s dog died just recently. She was an older dog, almost 13 but she was a good dog. The thing is, we don’t think she died of “natural causes". She seemed to have the symptoms of salmonella poisoning. My friend had just opened a new bag of a national brand of dog food. They remembered that there was a recall on peanut butter and that dog food sometimes has peanut butter in it to up it’s protein. They went online and looked up the bag of dog food that they had just purchased and found that the manufacturer had put out a recall on it! It looks like the manufacturer did the responsible thing. The only thing is, they had issued the recall in November and the dog food was purchased in January!

My friend called up the Wally Mart that he got the food at because there was a big stock of the stuff at the store and he wanted to keep anything bad from happening to someone else’s dog. Their response was to the tune of “We get recalls every day.” While that statement is no doubt fact, it implies that they ignore those recalls. It’s dog food now, what if it were cookies?

I already avoided Wally Mart because a ex co-worker used to work in their distribution warehouse and told me horror stories of abuse and dishonesty. Now they are a direct threat to the health of my family. I will not shop there.

The Great Experiment has begun! And it’s off to a rather dull and slow start. I’ve written down lists and lists of projects to start and what steps that I need to take to make them happen but I’ve hit some timing problems and I didn’t finish my workshop this fall like I wanted to. That makes the dusty dirty work that I want to do not easily accomplished.

So I’m re-arranging my projects in order of the ones I can do now. The problem is that they were my fallback plans, the ones I wasn’t going to focus on right away.

Hack A Day had a post about this suit being developed for farmers. Farmers? Now I have nothing but respect for the profession of supplying food to the rest of us but when were farmers ever supposed to get super human strength?

Lets see what my comics knowledge tells me. . . Lab workers, check. Military experiments, check. Aliens, check. Billionaires, check.

Nope no farmers. Do you mean that the hours and hours of me researching superpowers has been wasted? I don’t believe it!

Actualites EFPL had a press release that talked about using carbon nanotubes as a way to connect to neurons. The interesting thing is that you can connect neurons to neurons or neurons to other devices. The nanotubes connect better than the metal probes that have been used in the past because they bind tightly to cell membranes. To the best of my understanding they bind to the cell and because they are electrically conductive they send the neuron’s electrical messages like a wire.

Some “simple” applications might be dumping a lot of them into a damaged spinal cord, they bind to the nerve cells and create a bridge past the damaged section of the spine. I would think that it would still take quite a bit of rehabilitation to get the brain to rewire itself to take the new circuits, but it would make a fuller recovery possible in theory.

The press release even talks about “enhancing” your brain with them. I can understand that they may make sending signals in between brain cells easier and therefore “enhance” it’s ability to signal, but how would you do this in a controlled fashion? You don’t really want to completely rewire your brain by maybe having one (or millions of) neuron connect in ways they didn’t before? I could see that being a brain boosting drug with some side effects.

The other thing this enables prosthetic makers to do is to more easily embed probes into nerve bundles and get some more control out of artificial limbs. Steve Austin here we come! (No I don’t mean this guy. I mean this guy!)

It seems another sense organ is being emulated with the help of carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes, what can’t they do? Seriously, this is another highly complex organ that I thought would not be able to be easily fabricated. There is a technical article on it at Medgadget.

A team of Korean scientist, lead by a Dr. Seunghun Hong are developing this technology. That usually means that any product using it is ten to fifteen years away. (I’m still waiting for my cavity vaccine that you reported on in 1996 Discover magazine!) And it the end product usually isn’t as impressive as what is described by the lab. Still it would be great to have a little artificial nose built into my cellphone that could detect chemicals that I can’t smell. If the device was sensitive enough it could do things like detect melanoma by passing over the skin or lung cancer by breathing on it. Pie in the sky for this device would actually be a device like a tricorder that would be able to tell you a lot of the reactive chemicals in a compound just by getting near it. It’s funny, but even the way they pass the tricorder over the object to “scan” it would prove accurate!

I posted earlier on this, but didn’t have the time to flesh the idea out. I’d like to write a book that discussed how to get by without a job on a nuts and bolts DIY level in a comfortable manner. This is a tall order but I’ve been researching this recently and I think that most of the information is available but not in one place or is not presented in the right context.

There are several very good books on frontier living and country living that do very thorough jobs detailing how to feed and cloth a family with little or no budget. The pocket that I would like to fill is doing this in an urban or suburban environment. Being self sufficient is different when you have a tractor and a barn and even ten acres of land than if you’re on a quarter acre to an apartment that is not owned by you. The idea is to use the principals of DIY to make getting by on next to nothing feasible for the rest of us.

Initial organizational thoughts by clicking the link.

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Haemair Ltd. is working on a compact artificial lung. Something I never thought I would see, a organ like the lung being built artificially. I always imagined that the lung was something too complex to replicate. What’s next? The stomach? Imagine never having an upset stomach, or knowing when you were hungry. . . okay not such a good idea.

What are the hardest organs to manufacture then? The heart has been built artificially, there are replacement limbs (not very good ones), there is an artificial ear and various attempts at an eye. The brain is not replaceable. The liver would be tough to simulate in a human sized torso. I wonder about the intestines, I would have put their difficulty up there with the lung, but that seems to be a moot point. Muscle seems to be one of the really hard ones to replicate.

It will be interesting to see what kind of quality of life a person with this device has.

On January 15th I am going to start an experiment that may change how I look at living in the current age. If anything if will either affirm what I have come to suspect is true or dash my carefully constructed theory.

The experiment is to see if it is better to work for myself or for someone else. Better may not be strictly defined as “more money". In truth I don’t need more money, as long as I manage it. I do however need some money, mostly to pay the mortgage (electricity and some utilities could be acquired in different ways). I’m all for growing food and processing it myself, making my own tools, cutting my own lumber etc. The question is, how many of these things can I do on my own with the resources that I have? Is it enough to survive?

80% of office workers say they are unhappy with their jobs. I wonder if the same could be said about Entrepreneurs? I think you’d have to include those who’s businesses fail, what Entrepreneur would be unhappy with their job if it was working well?

It occurred to me today that it may be possible to put together a book about how to keep yourself alive during this economic depression. The reason that I thought of that is because I’ve been frequenting websites like instructables and Make which are great and all but they tend to be very random. After a while they have accumulated a lot of data and that makes it hard to go to them, pick a skill and start doing it. They also tend to be geared to one off projects. I would like to see a more cohesive set of how to’s that are set up like building blocks. One block for how to handle electricity and another for water etc.

The end result that I would like to see is a book that was a how to Lego set that could be put together in any way the reader desired, with the end result being that the reader would be able to do whatever they needed to survive even without a job.

Can it be done? I’m already doing the research, I may as well start putting the data into manageable bits and then I’ll see where it gets me. I’ll update with my progress as I go.

As I was looking at a message board the other day I realized that there is a absolutely massive amount of data out there on them that is relatively difficult to read through but could have huge benefits to people doing research on the subject of the board. What is needed is a more easily read format for these message boards. I think a better format would be some kind of PDF or even print book.

This would be an excellent source of income for people running the boards. I don’t entirely know how copyright law would work in this case since the original posts were freely given and freely available to the public. You could offer a free download of a book in the spirit of the original poster and charge for the service and materials of printing the book. This would be akin to how Linux is sold.

More thoughts on this by clicking the link.

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