Daily Archives: November 16, 2004

A New Path to the Moon

SMART 1

Congratulations to the European Space Agency! Its SMART-1 spacecraft has arrived in orbit around the Moon.

Almost more impressive than reaching its destination was the slow and steady way the SMART-1 craft puttered its way there — flying 13 months in ever expanding circles around the earth using a cutting-edge ion propulsion system.

The spacecraft used only 130 pounds of the 181 pounds of xenon fuel it had aboard, according to European Space Agency spokesman Franco Bonacina in Paris. That translates to more than 5 million miles per gallon.

This is only the second time that Ion propulsion has been used as the primary drive for a probe. NASA’s 1998 Deep Space 1 probe was the first.

The ESA hopes to find water in the dark craters at the Moon’s south pole.

The MSM Gets it Wrong Again

Okay, so here’s the headline:

Peru
Seizes Cocaine Haul Hidden in Giant Squid.

No big deal, just your average everyday news story. It’s not like its alien
fish in Chicago, hobbit
remains discovered in Indonesia, or monkeys
using their brains to control computers. It’s just some cocaine hidden in
a giant squid.

But if you follow the link to the AP/Yahoo slideshow, what do you get? Three
pictures of cops with bricks of cocaine. Um, hello? I had a pretty good
idea of what cops (even Peruvian cops) look like anyway. And we’ve all seen
big bricks of drugs like that on TV. It’s like following one of the links above
and getting a picture of the computer, not the monkey. Or maybe getting a nice
picture of the Sears Tower rather than, say, a snakehead.

So I present here for the edification of my readers a resonable fascimile of
a Pervuian cop removing cocaine from a giant squid.

Jump Start a Heart

heartstart1.jpeg

Heart disease kills many people who had no idea that they were sick. More than 300,000 people die every year in the United States from sudden cardiac arrest. Most of these people had no idea they had heart disease.

For the best chance of survival from SCA caused by VF, a defibrillator should be used within 5 minutes. Yet, less than 1 in 20 people survive largely because a defibrillator does not arrive in time.

That’s the bad news, the good news is that more people will be saved as defibrillators become common.

heart start

This model, the Philips HeartStart, requires no training to operate. The unit itself will prompt you to remove the victim’s shirt, place an electrode on the right upper chest, another electrode on the lower left rib cage, and then the unit will monitor the heart and decide if a shock is necessary.

If the unit determines that CPR is needed, it will walk the user through those steps.

So that you won’t have a dead battery at the worst time, it performs a daily self-test. It doesn’t call 911 for you [note to Philips: it should], but this product is a remarkable advancement in home safety equipment.

The price of $1,500 is still prohibitive for many. But like other technology, prices are coming down while the products improve.

This gadget is the perfect synthesis of two of our mottos at The Speculist: Things are getting “better all the time,” and “live to see it.”

Via Instapundit.