Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

What did they put in this year's flu vaccine? They must be expecting something pretty nasty, as I had a shot this morning, and it's left me wiped out for the rest of the day...

In other news, while dinking around the interwebs I came across an Arthur C. Clarke short short on Forbes' site as part of its Futures special (I suspect taking a leaf from Nature's book) - The View from 2500 AD

Fortunately, technology--which had caused the problem--came to the rescue. With the development of reliable psychological probes, any suspected individual could now be painlessly and accurately interrogated, by being asked to answer a series of questions. Most of these would be innocuous, but some were obvious lies, which the subject would be asked to repeat in order to calibrate the "Psi-probe."

The next step was a highly controversial one. Individuals were selected at random and interrogated painlessly, then rewarded for their cooperation. The difficulty here was determining the size of the sample needed in any given nation, to make sure that the overall result was accurate.

One outcome of this--the greatest psychological survey in the whole of history--was to demonstrate conclusively that the chief danger to civilization was not merely religious extremism but religions themselves. This was summed up in a famous saying: "All Religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from Mankind."

Billions of words of pious garbage spoken by statesmen, clerics and politicians down the ages were either hypocritical nonsense or, if sincere, the babbling of lunatics. The new insights enabled by the Psi-probe helped humans finally recognize organized religions as the most malevolent mind virus that had ever infected human minds.

Surgeons from Great Ormond Street Hospital are working with Ferrari's pit crew, to see if the high-speed surgery of the Formula 1 team can help them improve their emergency room procedures.

The Ferrari people filmed the doctors at work, then dissected the images with them. "For years we've been convinced that we were doing things pretty well, but seeing the tape it was shocking to notice our lack of coordination", says Nick Pigott of the intensive-care unit.

TEDBlog also mentions how IDEO have been taking US emergency room surgeons to NASCAR pits:

Time is of essence in both the ER and a car race, and "doctors were impressed by the high level of preparation and coordination of the pit team". Tom explained that while the Nascar teams are perfectly synchronized and approach the car from planned directions and carrying all the necessary tools and parts on them, doctors often enter the ER just to start asking nurses to gather, every time anew, the necessary tools and machines and drugs.

Fascinating stuff, and a look at just how we can learn from many difference places.

TEDblog has gone straight onto my blogroll.