DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

OK, so this is the most gruesome thing I’ve read all day:

The infamous transorbital lobotomy was a “blind” operation in that the surgeon did not know for certain if he had severed the nerves or not. A sharp, ice-pick like object would be inserted through the eye socket between the upper lid and eye. When the doctor thought he was at about the right spot, he would hit the end of the instrument with a hammer.

The lobotomy is in the news this week; the LA Times interviews a lobotomy survivor in Psyche’s Torn Curtain: Now seen as misguided butchery, lobotomies were once the treatment of choice for mental illness. Doctors, patients confront a dark past. (local mirror)

He was 12 when a “psychosurgeon” hammered ice picks into his eye sockets. His parents took him to the hospital “for testing;” he woke up with a “massive headache,” spent 5 days in the hospital, vomiting, and only later found out what had happened. He appears to have been a troubled kid, but the treatment does not fit the disease. Then again, I don’t have a medical degree, so I’m not really qualified to say when hammering ice picks into people’s brains is an appropriate course of treatment.

The history of the procedure is interesting, in that it went from cutting-edge to mainstream to butchery in 40 years. I wonder what trends of present-day society will be viewed as misguided or, at the extreme, horrific, 40 years from now: LASIK? Low-carb diets? Celebrity? Earth-trashing, gas-guzzling personal armored vehicles masquerading as passenger cars?

Speaking of vehicles of destruction, don’t miss the story about Dr. Walter Freeman’s “lobotomobile.” What a unique co-marketing opportunity for Hummer — were Freeman alive today, Hummer could sponsor his mobile brain-damage operation. Freeman could perform the procedure in the back seat while making a run for groceries or dropping his kids off at soccer practice. But I guess Hummer isn’t hurting for endorsers.

Having already seen the film adaptation of The Bourne Identity, I knew the basic plot… or so I thought. In fact, the book is completely different.

The characters are shaded differently: the book’s Bourne is a darker and significantly less stable character. The Marie character in the movie is just along for the ride, whereas in the book she plays a more central role, stabilizing the brink-of-self-destruction Bourne.

And the book is 22 years older than the movie, making it less high-tech. For example, the fancy LED projector extracted from Bourne’s hip at the beginning of the movie began its life as a simple piece of microfilm. To put the time difference in perspective: in 1980, when The Bourne Identity was published, Paul Allen and Bill Gates began writing DOS 1.0.

The storyline of the book is different, and significantly more complex: Bourne isn’t who he thinks he is — or is he? And much of the plot is driven by the hunt for Carlos, the international assassin, who doesn’t appear in the movie. As the original NYT review exclaimed, “Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined.”

The nice thing about the disparity in stories is that the book becomes a rich, compelling, fresh experience for people who enjoyed the movie. I had a hard time putting it down.

Patronize these links, man:

• Mass-market paperback (Amazon)

“Hi, this is Wayne. I just stepped out to get my ass waxed. Please leave a message after the groove.”

       1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +  | 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + |    (1/4 = 100)
4  HH   xx  xx xx x  x  |  xx  xx xx x  o |
-  SD     O   o    O    |    O   o    O   |
4  KD  o         o   o  | o         o   o |

Patronize these links, man:

• MIDI
• MP3

I planned to post photos from Wired Magazine’s NextFest, but as it turns out I’ll only be able to show you one: the ticket line.

We arrived at 2pm. We saw two ticket lines of depressing length. But it was a nice afternoon, so we waited.

After 30 minutes we were near the front of the line, maybe 10 minutes from the ticket booth. We noticed that a third line had formed to the right — another ticket line? No, because everyone in this new line held a ticket in their hands. I followed the new line to its head at the front door of the exposition hall. This was the line to get into the show!

It was huge. Everyone who had been ahead of us in the two ticket lines was now in one (very) long line to get into the building. The staffperson at the front door said that they’d reached the building’s capacity; due to safety regulations, they could only allow new people into the show after other people left.

This meant we weren’t waiting for a short process like a ticket-purchase transaction. Rather, we were waiting for 500 people to leave the NextFest. We might be standing in the sun for another hour.

So we bailed. Between parking (a 15-minute task) and walking four blocks (another 10 minutes) and waiting in line, we’d invested nearly an hour already, only to learn that an event about future technology, put on by self-proclaimed futurists, can easily be bogged down by lousy capacity planning and poor crowd control.

The Straus Dairy has 270 cows, each of which produces about 120 lbs of manure every day. That’s 5900 tons of manure per year. To put it in perspective, a typical cow produces 6.5 gallons of milk per day — or roughly 52 lbs of milk, if we assume that milk (like water) weighs 8 lbs/gallon. The point is that dairy farms produce 2.3 times as much manure as milk. You could even say that milk is a byproduct of the process of manure creation.

What do they do with all that crap?

The Straus family found a great answer: the dairy installed a 75 kilowatt biogas generator, aka “methane digester.” The synergy is amazing:

• the methane digester saves the dairy $5000 per month in energy costs — it will pay for itself in three years (and then, like my photovoltaic array, make free power for a long time)
• the system consumes tons of greenhouse gasses emitted from the decomposing manure. According to the Chron article, “naturally occurring methane is a potent greenhouse gas, estimated to be 21 times as damaging to the ozone layer as carbon dioxide.”
• the system “strip[s] 80 to 99 percent of organic pollutants from the wastewater” generated at the farm. (Read about the effects of agricultural runoff on the fishing industry.)

But wait, there’s more — “The Straus project is the first of 14 methane projects to receive matching funds from the California Energy Commission.” This means there are 13 more similar energy systems under construction. That’s the best news I’ve read all week.