Gadgetopia

Girl’s heart heals itself 10 years after transplant: There are two things in this story that are fairly amazing.

1. Doctors can apparently do a heart transplant without removing the original heart.  So, you have two hearts – the new one, doing the work, and the old one, just hangin’ out.
2. In this girl’s case, the new heart rejected 11 years later.  But, by that time, her original heart was strong enough to come back “online,” so they pulled the new one out and hooked her back up to the original one.

Nearly 11 years after receiving the extra heart, there was more bad news: The immuno-suppression drugs were no longer working. Hannah’s body was rejecting the donor heart.

In February 2006, her doctors tried something that had never been done before: They took out the donor heart. Doctors theorized that the donor heart had allowed Hannah’s heart to rest, recover and grow back stronger.

[…] The doctors were right. Three years later, Hannah has no need for any drugs and has been given a clean bill of health. The operation was a success.

Low-tech Magazine: Small windmills put to the test: This is kind of a bummer. A Dutch group put up nine of the smaller, single-home style windmills for a year and measured their results. Sadly, they sucked.

An average Dutch household consumes 3,400 kWh/year. Listed below is the amount of windmills required, and their total cost, to power a Dutch household entirely using wind energy [results range from 2 windmills to 47]

[…] An average American household consumes almost 3 times more electricity than a Dutch household. Simply multiply the above figures by three.

At first sight, the results seem to indicate that the design of the windmill matters. However, if you combine these figures with the rotor diameter, it becomes clear that the concept of small windmills is fundamentally flawed. The turbines that score best, are simply the largest ones.

They weren’t writing off wind power as a whole, however:

Close to the test site stands a (relatively) large windmill with a rotor diameter of 18 meters. It delivers 143,000 kWh per year, or an average power output of 16,324 watts. It can power 42 Dutch households.

[…] Wind power rules, but small windmills are a swindle. Bigger is, in this case, better.

H2Office - a compact, luxury floating office for use in marinas: This is brilliant.

We’re currently developing a design for a “floating office” - we call it the H2Office. We are looking to develop “mini floating business parks” in suitable areas of marinas (or other water areas).

The floating unit’s main function is as a “work space” but we are also going to incorporate some features to allow recreational activities and the option to use it as an overnight lodging.

Via Boyink’s tweet.

This is a seriously cool bridge, located in Leeuwarden, Netherlands (where else?) You’ve got to love how the roadway has a cutout for the arm to drop into; clever!

One thing I’d like to know is, since there are so many Dutchmen in northwest Iowa, why we don’t have a bridge like this near Sioux Falls. Granted, they’re mostly a generation or two removed from the Old Country, and we don’t have much for canals or boat traffic… But still, what’s the hold up?

Google Maps Link

via Jalopnik (image gallery)

This year will be just a second longer: 2008 will be one second longer. So, get something extra productive done in that time.

[…] a “leap second” is added on to our clocks every so often to keep them in synch with the somewhat unpredictable nature of our planet’s rotation, the roughly 24-hour whirl that brings the sun into the sky each morning

The underground houses of Coober Pedy: This is wicked cool. I want to go there.

Coober Pedy is a town located in northern South Australia and is known as the opal capital of the world, as nearly 95 percent of the world’s opal supply comes from the local mines. This small town with a population of around 3000 has a unique way of life – nearly half of them live underground.

Global Astroid Protection Society: These guys get my vote for most awesome domain name ever.

The Global Asteroid Protection Society is a group of individuals and corporations who wish to protect their assets from possible asteroid impacts.

[…] We strive to use modern and advance technologies to keep our properties safe because we believe that after investing much capital into our properties we must protect those properties to the best of our ability, no matter what is thrown at them.

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library: Jay Walker is living the dream. My entire home is 2,800 sq. ft., and he has a 3,600 sq. ft. library inside his.

Walker’s house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library. To create the space, which was constructed in 2002, Walker and architect Mark Finlay first built a 7-foot-long model. Then they used miniature cameras to help visualize what it would be like to move around inside.

My dream room. Hands down.

The last house standing: To all those people rebuilding after Ike, please take a cue from these people.

Pam and Warren Adams rebuilt their home in February 2006 after Hurricane Rita destroyed it the previous year. Hudspeth said that the couple hired a contractor to build a home that could withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Warren Adams watched over every step of the construction to make sure it was done correctly.

Or build a concrete dome house. We blogged about that years ago, and it’s still going strong.

Last night, Sioux Falls, SD, experienced a rather weird and rare weather phenomenon. It’s called a Convective Heat Burst.

My wife and I woke up at about 4 a.m. this morning to the sound of high winds and tree branches hitting the roof. I looked out the back window & saw that a large branch had fallen, so I went out to check to see if there was any damage. Stepping out the back door was like walking into a sauna — hot!

Thankfully, there wasn’t any damage to our house — the large branch had fallen between our house and the neighbor’s garage — but there were small branches everywhere. The wind died down shortly afterward, and I could feel the temperature dropping while I was out there. It was strange; really strange.

Today I went digging around on the Internet to see what I could find out; the local news station had a blurb on their website about it, and Wikipedia has a page on it (even updated with last night’s event; how about that!)

Meteorologists don’t know exactly what causes a heat burst; they theorize that rain hits a pocket of dry air at about 10-20,000 feet and quickly evaporates. The evaporating moisture causes the air to become more dense than the surrounding air, which causes it to descend rapidly, compressing that air mass, and the compression causes the temperature of the air mass to rise. When that mass of air hits the ground, you get high winds and hot, dry air.

How hot? Last night, the air temperature went from 72°F to 101°F in a matter of minutes, then back down just as quickly. According to the Wikipedia entry, a heat burst occurred in Brazil in 1949 causing the temp to jump from 100°F to 158°F in two minutes!

I had never even heard of a heat burst before, much less experienced one, so in a way I’m glad for the large branch laying in my yard; if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been outside at 4a.m. to experience the heat; if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been curious enough to go looking for the reason behind that and the wind accompanying it.

Awake patient reads aloud during brain surgery: An amazing account of brain surgery done like the patient is awake and reading a book. The doctors do this to “map” regions on the brain. They stimulate areas one-by-one with an electric probe, and if the patient’s reading falters, that tells them something.

The mapping alone took a couple of hours. Based on the information entered into a computer during mapping, the “hot spots” or risky areas, were displayed on a monitor. Once mapping was complete, Cohen took a paper list of groups of letters that represented basic brain functions, such as expression and movement.

With a pair of scissors, a nurse cut out the letters that corresponded to Mather-Licht’s “hot spots.” Cohen then placed the lettered pieces of paper directly on Mather-Licht’s brain, distinctly identifying the areas of risk. Once those were marked, he opened the brain’s outer membrane and, layer by layer, removed the tumor. Mather-Licht felt no pain — the brain itself has no pain receptors.

What happens when you crap in outer space?: This is a two-minute video by a guy from the Canadian Space Agency discussing how you go to the bathroom in outer space. It ends with an explanation of what shooing stars might be that’s worth knowing

Up and Then Down: This is a fascinating article about all aspects of elevators. It’s set amid the story of a guy who got stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, but it touches on things like elevator phobias, the social aspects of elevators, and — more interestingly — the logistical aspects of how elevators work.

Elevator logistics, it turns out, have some serious theoretical issues to resolve.

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

Having elevators work well is not a trivial thing:

The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Even more interesting is the psychology of how humans place themselves in elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

This makes me remember a really funny SNL skit with David Schwimmer that I thought was subtly brilliant (pictured at top).

Schwimmer was in an elevator, and people kept coming in and standing…oddly. For instance, he stood in the middle when he was by himself, then dutifully moved to the corner when other people got in. But those people didn’t stand in the opposite corner as expected — they stood right next to him in his corner. In another instance, the only other passenger turned around and faced the back of the car. Schwimmer hesitated for a moment, then did the same.

It was fascinating in that it revealed some of the ingrained psychological and social frameworks we deal with daily and don’t even realize. I can’t find a video of it, but here’s a transcript of the skit, which includes the picture from this post.

New in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye: Don’t read this before lunch.

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

[…] The coffee-colored liquid has the consistency of motor oil and a strong ammonia smell. But proponents say it is sterile and can, in most cases, be safely poured down the drain, provided the operation has the necessary permits.

I think it would be weird to not exist like that. With burial, you have a body. With cremation you have ashes. With this, you have…nothing. You get turned into liquid then spread throughout the sewer system.

It was like you never existed. There is no physical record of you left.

Dubai Architecture-: We’ve talked before about the insanity that is Dubai. This is a simple page of captioned images of the things currently going in and planned for Dubai. It’s astonishing.

I’m waiting for a bubble to burst over there. You can’t sustain this level of development forever.