DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My wife uses the occasion of travel to nurture a latent addiction to logic puzzles. Apparently, figuring out whether Chet sits across from the person who ordered french fries, and whether Arnold paid less than the person in the red shirt, is an excellent way to occupy one’s mind while cooped up on an airplane for twelve hours.

So we’re sitting there on the airplane. My wife has immersed herself a page of clues (with critical facts circled and underlined) and scribbled grids and cross-marks, and I am deep into #3 of the four page-turners I’ve stowed in my carry-on. My subconscious mind processes the various sounds of 200 people pursuing 200 varieties of in-flight entertainment: Game Boys bleat, children fidget, vectors of infectious disease perform grotesque rituals of personal hygiene. Through this, a stewardess happens down the aisle. She stops, briefly contemplates my wife’s mad pursuit of the seating order, shirt size, and dessert choice of five people whose names invariably begin with A, B, C, D, and E, and asks: “Is that the MENSES test?”

As a person who travels with some frequency, I’ve come to admire the peculiar behaviors of stewardesses. I have no doubt that the thin air and overexposure to solar radiation have affected the neural density, if not the DNA, of the people who spend most of their waking hours in the stratosphere. And although I do not believe that this exposure has turned the brains of all airborn courtesy personnel to jelly, it should suffice to say that one of the prerequisites for joining MENSA is the ability to pronounce its name.

Buried in today’s Chronicle was a column by Mike Weiss that contains an idea so profound it could literally change the world.

Weiss reports on the work of Mark Murray, a physician who figured out how to fix one of the most annoying aspects of modern healthcare — the fact that, unless you’re bleeding profusely from a recent stab wound, you can’t see your doctor for 2-3 weeks.

Murray’s solution is as fascinating as it is simple.

His company conducts workshops to teach the implementation of the “open access scheduling” system, but it appears an overview is available online, for free.

I wish my doctor would take the time to read this. [insert joke about my doctor’s 2-week backlog here]

As reported in Grok (Education - 10/00), the Industry Standard’s “special reports” magazine, the Center for Disease Control has come up with a novel way to teach kids about health risks: Infectious Diseases Trading Cards

According to the article, the CDC pulled the cards off its site last year to “tweak the design” — but we note that five months have gone by and the CDC’s site says the cards are unavailable at this time.

But wait — there is a light (albeit sickly and, if we had to guess, contagious) at the end of this tunnel. The CDC merely commented out its directory of PDF files, making the retrieval of the trading cards a trivial matter.

CDC Infectious Diseases Trading Cards:
Anthrax, Antibiotic Resistance, Avian Flu, Cryptosporidiosis, Cyclospora, Dengue, Ebola, E. Coli, Hantavirus, Hepatitis B, HIV, Lyme Disease, Meningitis, Mumps, Pinkeye, Plague, Salmonella, Rabies, Smallpox, Strep A

Big news in orgasm research (now that’s an interesting specialty) — Dr. T. Stuart Meloy reports that by implanting electrodes in a female’s spine, he can induce orgasm via remote control.

The description is ghastly: The device is made up of three parts: the set of electrodes which are implanted inside the spinal canal, a connecting cable and a pulse generator, which is about the size of a beeper. The generator is implanted in the upper buttocks, so all three pieces are under the skin. (ABC News)

But none of these worthy reporters explored the technological implications of such an invention. Leno and Letterman probably exhausted the garage-door-opener jokes… but what about the X-10 jokes? What about the bluetooth jokes? There’s such a rich field of possibilities here. Will the pulse generator have an HTTP server built-in, so patients enjoying frequent wireless orgasm can report their status to the web like so many coffee machines and refrigerators?

Also: if the hardware is mounted in your buttocks, where do they put the batteries? Heh, sorry, I couldn’t resist.

There is a dangerous precedent to this research, by the way. When I studied psychology I learned about an experiment in which researchers inserted electrodes in the pleasure centers of rats’ brains, and then provided the rats with a lever connected to the electrodes. Pressing the lever would induce (essentially) orgasm. The rats starved to death. [1, 2, 3]

This item is of little interest to Bill Gates’ minions (who comprise, I regret to say, about 90% of the web’s population), but Apple aficionados may be saddened to learn that Apple has removed Clarus the Dogcow from OS X.

The dogcow has an only-at-Apple sort of creation myth and has since been documented in an Apple technote, A Nest of Dogcattle.

And now that you are overcome with sadness, you can do your part to save the dogcow! Sign a petition to reinstate Clarus to her (?) rightful place in the MacOS.