Daily Archives: February 18, 2005

The Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator

Glenn Reynolds reports this afternoon (here and here) that his wife Helen needs an implantable pacemaker/cardioverter. A pacemaker regulates a heart that is beating too slowly. I believe a cardioverter regulates a heart that beats too quickly.

Implantable_Defib.jpgGlenn remarks that it’s bad news she needs the device, but good news that it’s available. Absolutely. A similar device has literally kept my father-in-law alive for four years now, but he wasn’t excited about needing it.

It’s remarkable how routine this procedure has become.

Most often, defibrillators are implanted in a surgical procedure, with an incision made in the upper part of the chest. Local anesthesia is frequently used and the surgery is often an outpatient procedure.

Helen has our prayers and well wishes. Get well soon!

More information here.

Off-Topic: Dogblogging

Here are pictures of my dogs as playing cards that I made for a speech I gave
last night. Aren’t they cute?

 

Energy-Efficient Robots

An interesting breakthrough, robots that expend about the sae amount of energy
getting themselves around as human beings do:

A
trio of androids that amble along with exceptional power efficiency and "instinctive"
co-ordination were unveiled for the first time on Thursday.

The three mechanical bipeds, built by researchers from Cornell University,
the University of Michigan and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the
US and Delft University in the Netherlands, respectively, walked along in
an amiable, if somewhat awkward fashion.

"Our robots demonstrate that utilising the natural dynamics of the body
can make robots much more efficient," says Steve Collins, a member of
the team from the University of Michigan. "For any autonomous robots
to be practical, they must be energetically efficient."

Contrast these energy-efficient droids with Honda’s Asimo they’re about 10
times more efficient. That’s huge. But I imgaine they’re still quite expensive
to build. Still, it won’t be long before somebody finds something useful to
do with these kinds of robots. Then two things will happen:

1. The cost will go way down.

2. They will become much more energy efficient than human beings.

For better or for worse, those developments will mark the beginning of the
end of (what’s left) of the manual labor market. After that, we’re only a few
steps away from a world that Dr.
A. himself would have found strangely familiar.

via Kurzweil AI

It's Personal

Note: Stephen suggested that my comments
on his follow-up
to my entry about
Human Savants would make for a good posting in their own right. What the
hey, who am I to disagree with Stephen?

I like the idea of being able to switch back and forth. There’s a scene in
Star
Trek: First Contact where Data and Picard are about to face down the Borg
for the first time. Data begins to observe his emotions and realizes that he’s
terrified. So he announces that he’s going to "turn off his emotion chip."
Picard tells Data that he envies him sometimes.

The good side of being able to switch back and forth between normal social
interaction and enhanced — or maybe it’s better to say modified — modes of
mental operation is that we would be more functional in some areas and we woldn’t
be distracted by things that normally get in the way.

I wrote a while back that being able to get "in the zone" like that
could prove helpful to sales people. A sales rep who can bump up her ability
to speak and to think on her feet, and tone down her fear of rejection, is going
to have a substantial advantage over the competition. The downside, of course,
is that it could also prove quite helpful to criminals and/or government officials.
How much easier it would be to commit appalling acts of violence if you can
just switch off your capacity to be appalled. Or maybe closer to the lives of
everyday people — think how much easier it would be to dump somebody.

Yikes.

It’s Personal

Note: Stephen suggested that my comments
on his follow-up
to my entry about
Human Savants would make for a good posting in their own right. What the
hey, who am I to disagree with Stephen?

I like the idea of being able to switch back and forth. There’s a scene in
Star
Trek: First Contact where Data and Picard are about to face down the Borg
for the first time. Data begins to observe his emotions and realizes that he’s
terrified. So he announces that he’s going to "turn off his emotion chip."
Picard tells Data that he envies him sometimes.

The good side of being able to switch back and forth between normal social
interaction and enhanced — or maybe it’s better to say modified — modes of
mental operation is that we would be more functional in some areas and we woldn’t
be distracted by things that normally get in the way.

I wrote a while back that being able to get "in the zone" like that
could prove helpful to sales people. A sales rep who can bump up her ability
to speak and to think on her feet, and tone down her fear of rejection, is going
to have a substantial advantage over the competition. The downside, of course,
is that it could also prove quite helpful to criminals and/or government officials.
How much easier it would be to commit appalling acts of violence if you can
just switch off your capacity to be appalled. Or maybe closer to the lives of
everyday people — think how much easier it would be to dump somebody.

Yikes.