Suspended Animation, layman’s research

 Education, Science  1 Response »
Jan 272012
 

I’m in a debate about Hard vs Soft science fiction, in my UCLA X455 English class (World Building for Fiction, Short Stories, by Alyx Dellamonica. While I’ve previously discussed this topic, the conversation forced me to refine my opinions. In the process of researching my position, I came across quite a bit of interesting (nearly current) journalism on the topic of suspended animation (cryogenics, cryostasis).

I, of course, started with Wikipedia (doesn’t everyone?) on the topic of Cryogenics… because honestly, I can’t remember the last story I read where someone was still putting forth the idea of suspended animation. While the science still looks feasible, we continue to run in to a lot of biological issues with attempts to perform suspended animation tests. But progress is being made (albiet slowly). In 2005, Pitts Safar scientists resurrected the hope of cheating death by showing conclusive proof that temperature induced hibernation extended the time doctors had to treat critically injured patients (by doing a series of tests on dogs where they chilled the body to 50 degrees and ex-sanguinated 40% of the dogs blood to simulate traumatic blood loss). In 2007, Dr. Hasan Alam was featured in a digital journal article about the race to be first to ‘hibernate’ human beings. While Dr. Alam‘s work was more focused on extending the time that doctors have to work on critically injured patients (just like Dr. Patrick Kochanek from the 2005 article above), there were scientists from UCLA looking at taking this research in to suspended animation, permitting patients to be placed asleep for extended (possibly indefinite) periods. Hibernation research received a boost in interest because of a Japanese man who reportedly fell down a well and was in hibernation (near death) for 24 days.

Most recently, Dr. Alam has been continuing his research, conducting suspended animation trials on trauma patients in Massachusetts. The article had a catchy conclusion: You’re not dead till your body reaches room temperature. What’s more, when combined with other modern research, it looks more and more likely that mankind will develop some kind of suspended animation technique in the near future. For instance, Mark Roth has a key to suspended animation: Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), normally a toxic substance, in small quantities can bond with oxygen receptors and induce a state that will slow the biological self destruction that occurs at death (specifically it lowers the metabolism and reduces the need for oxygen, at least until it is removed.)

I happen to love TED, so whenever I get a chance to watch a new presentation, it’s a special treat. (I’ve not had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but I’ll watch it soon.)

If Mark Roth, and other scientists/biologists in related fields, are right, we may be looking at more and more clinical trials where trauma patients are put in to a state of suspended animation for transport from the scene of the injury to the hospital where they will be treated. The more common this becomes, the more information scientists/biologists will have about the effects of suspended animation techniques on the human body. The more information we have, the faster research will accelerate towards true suspended animation.

Ultimately, the problem is that no one healthy would voluntarily give up their limited lifespan (even if that total life span was only 70-80 years) to test for long term suspended animation. But, the rapid advances in suspended animation might allow someone to take extended cold-naps, drastically extending their lifespan (or even permit us to place someone in suspended animation for interstellar travel, or to permit a terminal patient to be stored until a cure can be devised.)

Imagine the potential benefit to terminal disease patients (i.e., cancer or HIV). Imagine one of the polar zones becoming home to giant tombs of suspended animation capsules, waiting for the day when they can be revived, their injuries mended, their diseases cured.

 Posted by John Williams at 12:26 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Aeron Chair by Herman Miller

 Work  No Responses »
Jan 252012
 

I had one of these chairs several years ago. I was working for a customer that did quite well (Law Firm) and one of these was included with every desk. I didn’t learn who the manufacturer was at the time, but after leaving the company I learned to miss the comfort of the chair. I’ve been working form home these last four years and finally decided to splurge on a chair upgrade. My new chair arrived today and I couldn’t be happier.

If you need additional lumbar support (and can justify the cost for the ergonomics), or if you’re like me and spend a lot of time in a chair and need that chair to be comfortable, I’d suggest you look in to this chair. With a twelve year warranty and boasting that it is made of 50% (or more) recycled material, this chair beats all competitors. The fabric-mesh design means the chair never gets hot under me, the flexibility means I never get uncomfortable, and the adjustment options means it can be easily tailored to my current wants or needs.

 Posted by John Williams at 5:37 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Jawbone 2 Bluetooth Headset Pairing

 Personal, Telecom  No Responses »
Jan 252012
 

Pairing the Jawbone Prime or Jawbone 2 Bluetooth Headset to Your Cell Phone

Put your phone into pairing mode

This can usually be accomplished by going under settings in your menu and selecting Bluetooth. Follow the prompts to “find a new device.” If you are having problems, refer to your phone’s user guide.

Put your Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset into pairing mode

The first time you turn your Jawbone on it will immediately go into pairing mode. If you need to manually put the Jawbone into pairing mode, start with headset off. Hold down the NoiseAssasin button and power on. Continue to hold down button for 2 seconds. Headset will flash red and white when it is in paring mode.

If you are having trouble with this step, try pushing in the NoiseAssassin button just a half a second before you push in the talk button.

Select device and enter in universal keyYour phone may or may not ask you to enter in a key code. If it does, the code is always four zeros: 0000

You are paired up!

via Jawbone Bluetooth Headset Pairing Guide | Headsets.com – America’s Headset Specialists.

 Posted by John Williams at 10:27 am  Tagged with: , , ,

Solar flares, technical support, pretty pictures

 Photography, Science, Work  1 Response »
Jan 252012
 

The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

Mon Jan 23 at 4:00 UTC (or Sun Jan 22 at 8 PM Pacific), there was a pretty spectacular solar flare. For the next several days we’re going to see an upswing in support tickets at work. In the last 48 hours we’ve had a few systems go down, power & environmental problems, UPSs burn out. This evening I worked on a site where a VPN router went down for no apparent reason. (All signs point to the network, but everything else on the network was working and the VPN router is directly connected to the internet… It was very perplexing.)

Whenever I hear about a solar flare, I’m sure there’s going to be more tickets in the work queue. If you read the FCC guidelines carefully (read the label on the box of every piece of electronics sold in the US), it says that all electronic devices must accept interference (even if it may cause undesired operation).

This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference that may cause undesired operation.

via http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet61/oet61.pdf

And that’s what a solar flare puts out (large bursts of energy that can caused undesired operations.) In Sweden there were reports of the power grid being affected by the solar flare.

The picture is pretty, but it also means work.

 Posted by John Williams at 12:33 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Critique: Cupid’s Literary Connection: Love Triangle Entry #3

 Editorial, Writing  1 Response »
Jan 252012
 

My comments (I didn’t realize how lengthy they’d become until I hit submit. The blogspot comment box is ultra tiny) to Cupid’s Literary Connection: Love Triangle Entry #3.:

Your query could be tightened up.

Your hook is the fourth paragraph: “When Dodge enters the Gamescape”. Most of the first and second paragraph could be eliminated from the query. It’s necessary for your novel, but most isn’t necesssary for the query. I recommend that you replace it with a slimmed down version of the same information and move it after the hook.

The first paragraph could be summerized: “Disadvantaged, seventeen-year-old Dodge Tellman would do anything to win.” Second paragraph could be summerized: “Winning means an escape from the slums and poverty and sixty hour work shifts that are killing his parents. Winning means a trip to a distant colony, a chance to start over and build a better life.”

(and so on)

What is the game? Do people fight? Are there puzzles? Is it like the olympics? Do people die? What are the stakes? What happens in a normal game if you lose? (I don’t understand what the stakes are in a normal game, so I don’t know how much worse it is for Dodge to start feeling homicidal– on a personal level, I get how that’s horrible for Dodge, but what’s the alternative?#

Who are the team? Who are his friends? Why does he care? Why should I care? (The brief treatment in your query gives me the impression that the extras are going to receive “Hunger Games” treatment– that is, they’re going to die fairly quickly, so don’t get invested.)

You end with the proposition that the choice is to keep the Chancer (and the homicidal tendancies) in hopes of winning, but winning might be worse than losing. (If he wins by killing his friends, that’s not much of a win is it?) That’s a great conflict.

But back to the point about the normal stakes of the game: Why can’t he forfeit and re-enter the game later when he’s less of a homicidal Frankenstein?

Your Query seemed longer than your “First 250 words” so I word-counted them (pasted them in to a Word doc and got the word count). The word count for the Query 301 (not counting the final “about the author” paragraph). That probably fine by itself, but when measured against the “first 250 words” it seems a little long.

Your story opens:
The wall buzzes, a friend is calling. Why? To invite him out. What’s the initial conflict in the story?

As the story progresses, I don’t understand what you mean by “pitch”, it seems like a word that is supposed to have subtext, but all I can think of when I see it is baseball–and that’s not helpful. You give an example of Tag pitching extra arms, but the standard definition of the word doesn’t attach to the meaning you’re giving it. (When I reach the end of the first-250 I get that “pitch” means some kind of enhancement, but since I don’t know much about enhancements in your story I’m left confused.)

Your first-250 introduces a potential conflict, but it’s introduced in such a way that it doesn’t seem like much of a conflict. Dodge is poor and comes from the slums, but Tag is rich. Why are these two friends? (I’m not saying they can’t be, but they’d run in different socio-economic circles.) How’d they meet? What makes them compatible? If they’re really friends, and if Tag is really rich, why wouldn’t Tag be willing to help Dodge get what he needed?

The real conflict in your first-250 happens near the end of your 250 words: Tag doesn’t want to talk about what he’s “going to pitch.” He already knows what Tag is pitching (apparently extra arms.) I would recommend re-writing the scene and starting with Dodge emotionally reacting to Tag calling. Bring up the point about avoiding Tag to avoid revealing Dodge’s pitch earlier. Give us more details. Then get in to Tag’s persistance. Give (show) me a reason for why Dodge is avoiding Tag, and why Tag won’t leave Dodge alone. That’s your initial conflict in this scene.

It has the potential to entice me, but it needs work.

This entry made me think of another article I saw recently over at Forever Rewriting (Melodie Wright) where she presented the three essential elements presented in the opening scene are:

  1. Identification. Look for the MC to be in a situation that you’ve been in or can picture yourself in.
  2. Emotions. The MC will react to the situation in an understandable way, a way that illuminates their character and makes you like or pity them in a good way. You need to root for the MC.
  3. Situation foreshadowing. There are clouds on the MC’s horizon. She/he may not know what they are yet but they know change is coming.

 Posted by John Williams at 12:26 am  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Avaya IP phones, registration procedure overview

 Nortel, PBX, Telecom, VoIP, Work  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 

This article provides an overview of the Avaya IP Phone registration procedure (for UNIStim IP Phones)

When the phone is powered up, the following happens:

  1. NVRAM (non-volatile RA) is loaded, including the local configuration information. Any configuration options set to manual on the phone will overwrite automatic configuration information received.
    NOTE
    		If you experience any problems with any part of the process, use the IP Phone Factory Default reset procedure to clear all local configuration settings.

     

  2. Phone then boots and determines if data switch provides LLDP or ADAC. This setting can be disabled manually, via DHCP or via manual provisioning. Unless this is disabled manually, the phone will always check LLDP/ADAC when it first boots.
    NOTE
    		Leaving LLDP/ADAC enabled when it is not supported by the Layer 2 switching equipment installed at the site can extend boot times for IP Phone devices. While LLDP/ADAC is enabled in a factory default configuration, it is recommended that this be disabled unless it is specifically supported by the networking environment.

     

  3. The phone then requests DHCP. If DHCP is available it processes the DHCP information.
  4. If a provisioning server is provided via DHCP Option 66, DHCP or manually configured on the IP Phone, then the the IP Phone requests the system.prv and <TYPE>.cfg from the HTTP or TFTP servers. While there is a lot more available under manual provisioning than just firmware upgrades (and while I will be writing an article to cover those topics later), I have only written the manual firmware upgrade article.
  5. Then the phone attempts to contact the S1 and S2 (primary signaling server and failover signaling server). If the phone cannot make a connection to the signaling server (or that information isn’t provided via any of the configuration methods available: manual, DHCP or provisioning server) then the Phone reboots and tries again.
  6. If a connection is made to either the primary or failover signaling server, then the phone will register and proceed with attempting to connect to External Application Servers (XAS) such as the Application Server 1000. A lot of the functionality that was originally relegated to an External Server (screen savers, backgrounds, some directory functions) have been incorporated in to the base firmware/functionality of the IP Phones. Others still require an XAS. For more information on this, contact an authorized Avaya distributor.

The only information that is critical to an IP phone for the boot process is:

  1. Set IP address, subnet mask and gateway
  2. Primary signaling server (S1) IP address, Port, Action and Retry values
  3. Node and TN

When troubleshooting, eliminate variables by resetting the unit back to factory default and then configure only the minimum number of settings needed to establish connectivity (start with manually configuring the phone, then migrate components of the configuration back to auto to determine where the process fails.)

 Posted by John Williams at 7:56 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Science Fiction vs Science Fantasy, Hard vs Soft Science

 Science, World Building, Writing  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 

Writing Science Fiction is difficult at times. A common complaint is that near-term SciFi might predict that some technological breakthrough will have some social impact, but when the breakthrough happens the impact is minimal (or possibly even more significant than the author originally thought). For long-term SciFi (such as SciFi from the early 1900s, or something more recent like ”2001 Space Odyssey”), when predicting the future you get an increasing number of unknowns. For instance, it was speculated in the late 1960s that within thirty years we’d be building space stations and traveling through our solar system. We have the technology, but not the will (as a species) to make it happen. Charlie Stross’s latest article in the series on world building starts with three categories: Known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns.

  1. Known-knowns are things we know today: special-relativity, smart phones, SUVs, the 80/20 split in the adoption of most current-day products, etc.
  2. Known-unknowns are things like: We know that the three current-day major competitors for the smart phone operating system are: Windows, Android, iOS. (We could mention Blackberry, but they’re a niche player, much like Windows 7 OS for phones seems to be shaping up to be). Which of the major OSs will rule the smart phone industry is something we don’t know, but we know enough to pose the question.
  3. Unknown-unknowns (which is where he seems to spend most of his time in the article) are things we don’t know enough to predict. These aren’t things that are implausibly unknown, but are instead things that we simply cannot predict.

He then mentioned a fourth category, the “implausibly unknown” topics (like tachyons, alien invaders or telepath), about which he had this to say:

(I ought to add a fourth category of unknown called the “implausible unknown” — developments not compatible with the laws of nature as currently understood, or overturning major scientific paradigms. Tachyons, alien invaders, or telepathy all fall into this basket, and if you dumpster-dive it for ideas in fiction you are, at best, writing science fantasy.)

via World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary.

The difference between “soft science fiction” and “hard science fiction” isn’t the same as the difference between “science fantasy” and “science fiction.” Soft science fiction focuses on soft sciences, with the story more concerned with sociological, psychological (etc.) elements than hard sciences such as astronomy, physics, engineering. The difference between Science Fantasy and Science Fiction is a little murkier.

Arthur C. Clarke stated “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and Larry Niven conversely statement that “any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology”.

From this I conclude that the difference between Science Fantasy and Science Fiction is determined by the degree to which the author explains the science. The more detailed the explanations, the more rigorous the laws of science/magic presented within the story, the more the story belongs on the fiction side of the dividing line. I would add an exception that when an author posits a cause-effect scenario which violates a law in a hard science, the story is moved to the Fantasy side of the line.

The rest of Charlie’s article is interesting. It talks about how sociological changes are fractal, or repetitive, as they are based on the same basic building blocks (i.e., people). He predicts that, absent some external factor to upset the cycle, we’re likely to see another Great Depression late in the twenty-first century (2090+). I’d encourage you to give the main article a read, at least.

 Posted by John Williams at 6:04 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

A Tale From Afar by *Gate-To-Nowhere

 Photoshop  No Responses »
Jan 222012
 


A Tale From Afar by *Gate-To-Nowhere on deviantART

This beautiful artwork was brought to my attention by Phil Plait @ Bad Astronomy. This is the piece that Phil liked.

If you like the art, the artist is selling their work via DeviantArt. (I don’t get a commission, sadly.)

 Posted by John Williams at 11:44 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Clear old LogMeIn sessions

 Microsoft, Work  No Responses »
Jan 222012
 

Issue

LogMeIn Rescue services in Computer Management

Solution

https://logmeinsupport.com/kblive/crm/selfservice/displaywh.jsp?DocId=2210&print=1

Microsoft Technet: SC DELETE command.

clean_up_lmi.cmd
—————————————-cut here—————————————-
@:: by John Williams
@:: Jan 4, 2011
@:: Removal of extra LMI services from server, to be used only when all LMI sessions are stopped
@echo Deleting registry keys related to LMI sessions…
@SC DELETE LMIRESCUE
@:: Removal of LMI*.TMP folders from C:\WINDOWS
@echo Deleting LMI temporary files; you may be prompted to confirm file deletion…
@cd:\windows
@del LMI*.TMP
@:: Removal of Local AppData – only applicable to Windows 7 and Windows Vista
@:: Uncomment (replace @:: with @) to enable
@:: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp
@:: del LMI*.TMP
@echo All files deleted, you must now reboot your computer
@echo before beginning any new LMI sessions to complete this procedure.
—————————————-cut here—————————————-

Standard disclaimer for anything posted here: If you use it, and it blows up your computer, cuts power, ends your marriage, summons the ghost of Christmas future, shaves your cat, neuters your dog, burns your taxes unfiled, or even if the stars align it works perfectly– it’s not my fault. You take all responsibility and agree to hold me harmless.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:35 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Review: The Ransom of Red Chief by O Henry

 Books  1 Response »
Jan 222012
 

A (dare I use the word?) cute kidnapping tale from yester-year. Told during a kinder, gentler era where the bad guys had ethics and morals, Bill and Alex don’t even contemplate killing the monster instead of returning him to his father. When you contemplate that the kid tried to (literally) scalp Bill, I’m not sure I follow the thinking. If the father wouldn’t pay to get his kid back, he clearly didn’t want him that badly and everyone would have probably been happier if Red Chief had ended up in a ditch.

My wife purchased a copy of the book for my Kindle as a(n early) Christmas present. The voice of the story is very strong and a lot of the dialogue says “itinerant criminal” and “minimal education.” They also use words that are intended to make them seem more educated than they are (which only further emphasizes how uneducated they are.) The best part of the writing is how self contained it is. The best part of the story is how it makes you feel sorry for the kidnappers (who you shouldn’t like, or feel sorry for.) It’s short and to the point, and amusing for the entire ride.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:26 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
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