Skin cancer has been cured. No joking, it looks like they’ve turned this potentially deadly disease, which strikes millions of families (including my own) into a treatable, curable nuisance. As long as it’s caught early-and you are going to the dermatologist regularly, right?- this new treatment will cure a skin cancer using an at-home device, with no surgery, no pain, and no chemo.
Erin read this story to me while lying in bed this morning and I looked at the ceiling thinking remember where you were when you heard this- this is the crack in the dam that will eventually knock this scourge out of our lives forever. I’d say “it’s a miracle!” but really it’s the result of decades of hard, thankless, anonymous labor by the men and women in the white coats. A heartfelt thanks to them.
What’s the next cancer to fall? As my friend Barry says, we really are living in an age of wonders.
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.
Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.
“I could have died on either of those days,” Mr. Yamaguchi said in an August interview with the Mainichi Daily News. “Everything that follows is a bonus.”
I just saw this incredible flyover of Detriot done in SketchUp. Google holds events and contest for people to model their home towns in SketchUp and then, crazily, we all do a bunch of work for Google for free! Brilliant. Anyway, my prediction is that within three years we start to see makers of flight simulator software licensing Google Maps and SketchUp maps to use as their backgrounds. Given another few years we’ll have near photo-realistic terrain for flight sims, then this huge Matrix version of our planet will get closer and closer to indistinguishable from the real thing. Eventually there will be real-time data all over the place in there.
What Google is building is astounding in its complexity and scope, and nobody else is even going to try and compete. What they are beginning now is the foundation of the next several hundred years of online mapping tech. Who knows where it will go?
I just finished reading a sci fi book where the protagonist had embedded projection technology on her contact lenses, enabling her to see a heads-up display wherever she went. Coupled with this was the ability to run a Google search on whatever she was looking at.
I always thought it would be cool to be able to Google something without knowing what it is that you were looking at. After all, how much use is a dictionary for defining a word if you don’t know what the word even is? However, I put this technology farther down the timeline than the embedded contact lenses.
Well, lookee here:
Pretty impressive, even though it’s in its infancy.
A riveting computer recreation of Cactus flight 1549’s Hudson River ditch last year. After watching this I was impressed again with the Captain and FO’s professionalism and calm in a very stressful situation. Calm under pressure.
I posted a brief excerpt of this interview a few days ago. I finally just got around to watching the whole thing. It’s really good, and worth looking at if you’re interested in science and education (or just like cool stories well told by enthusiastic people).
Gahh… after being busy with Pigskin this past week, I got almost 800 articles behind in my RSS reading. It took me hours tonight to wade through them all. So if you’re wondering why I suddenly had a half dozen or more posts here, it’s because I’ve been drinking from the fire hose.
