CRAP THIS WAS ACTUALLY AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE  OOPS!

Some news stories you really can’t make up.   Perhaps it’s a little bit off color to chuckle at a story about someone who is very likely mentally ill, but in some cases it’s hard not to.

For that matter, I suppose we could also at least consider that this might be true.

Apparently, a man from the future has come back to the present day (or so he says) to stop the LHC from discovering the Higgs boson, which would lead to some as yet unknown source of limitless energy for humanity.  While this sounds like a good thing, he explained that this ultimately was the undoing of society and therefore he was there to stop it.   Tragically, he made the mistake of forgetting to fill the tanks on his time machine with whatever fuel it uses, and it now seems he might be trapped in the present, which to him, is the past.

Via Cnet:

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

This isn’t the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so “abhorrent” that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock’n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. “Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn’t mention bloody black holes.”

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Unfortunately Mr. Cole apparently did not take into consideration some important factors that really all time travelers should consider.

1. Always bring enough fuel. (Although I thought he was from a future of limitless energy.. oh well). In fact, you should bring more fuel than you think you’ll need, because you never know when you’ll make a wrong turn or you’ll have to go back to the past yet again, because for all you know, Biff Tannen might have stolen the sports almanac and stopped your parents from falling in love at the dance, and then what are you to do? You can’t just rely on an opportune bolt of lightning, because lightning doesn’t even provide a huge amount of energy, contrary to popular belief.

Remember to bring both kinds of fuel that you will need. Sure, the time circuits may be electric, but what about the internal combustion engine? That runs on regular unleaded and always has. You can’t always find that.

Also keep in mind that 1.21 gigawatts is not actually an amount of energy at all.  It’s an amount of power, which means a reasonably large capacitor bank can provide it, but only for a brief period of time.   If you need it for longer, it’s still not impossibly high.  Any large power plant should be able to output it.    I never really figured out the whole “1.21 gigawatt” thing, but the best I can think of is it might be the amount of power continuously needed to travel a given amount of time.   For example, time traveling a year means you need 1.21 gigawatts times one year for the total energy.   That would seem to work, but then again, a lightning bolt would still never be enough.

So in any case, choose your fuel well and bring plenty of it.   You don’t want to rely on lightning or hijacked locomotives.

2. To be perfectly honest, don’t expect to return to the future you left and have it look anything like you expected or have a place for you. If you change anything, even slightly, those changes will propagate. If that happens your great great grandparents may not meet or may not marry and procreate. And just having your parents meet is not good enough. You can’t just set them back up if you mess up their meeting. Everything has to be identical, which it never will be. If they mate at a slightly different time or if the temperature is different by a fraction of a degree or anything like that, a different sperm will fertilize the egg and the resulting offspring won’t be you. This goes for all generations all the way back to where you have traveled.

So in all likelihood, just stepping into the past will result in a different time stream that you will return to in which you never existed.   You could go back to 1890, for example, and just by swatting a fly, you end up stopping World War I and World War II from happening.  That might seem like a good idea, until you realize that it prevents a guy from dying who then goes on to marry your grandmother, thus avoiding the marriage of her and your grandfather and now you don’t exist.

Or even if you did exist, you will find that you had not traveled back in time because you had no reason to, thus when you return, you will find yourself and have a real identity crisis.

You might be better off not going back but sending some kind of terminator unit.   The terminator could be made of living tissue around a metallic framework or out of some kind of shape-shifting metal.  It’s up to you.   The only problem is it probably won’t change your present because it gets inserted into an alternate reality.   Really, you just can’t win at this.

3.   You have all the time in the world.   Plan well.   Don’t just show up at the LHC with no idea how to stop it.  Bring weapons or something.  Flesh out a response plan and run it by a couple of your friends for input.  Consider what could go wrong.  Take the tools you might need.  Brush up on your period lingo and customs in case you had to blend in.   Just be sure not to mess up.

You only get one shot at this… well, actually, I suppose you can do it as many times as you want, but then you really start to make things messy and complicated.  You can encounter yourself on one of your aborted missions, for example.   It’s just best to avoid such problems.

4.  Consider *when* you want to go back to.   Is this really the best time?  Why wait until the LHC is constructed and operational?   You can go back a little further and it might be easier to stop it during construction.  Perhaps you could somehow disrupt the funding for it or sabotage the construction.  OR, you could try to stop an earlier accelerator from being built, which would stop the discoveries that would lead to the creation of the LHC.

5.  Remember there are alternate possibilities.  Don’t focus too much on one issue when it will likely spawn others.  Sure, you could shut down the LHC, but what will that do?  Some other accelerator will eventually be built and make the horrible discovery.  You need to think big and stop all particle physics.

6.  If you are going to resort to telling people not to do it, make sure you are believable.   It’s not a terribly bad plan to just be honest and tell the world that you are from the future and stopping a horrible mistake.   If you can get the governments of the world to listen, that might be the best way of actually stopping the project, but you really need to make it clear you are from the future, so bring some future stuff to show everyone.   Since you will be coming from the future, you’ll be able to choose the most opportune time to make a big splash.  You might want to pick a time when the news cycle is slow and when you can grab some media attention to warn the world before the government tries to stop you.

Of course, as long as you’re well prepared, the government shouldn’t be a problem.   They’ll have no way of stopping you with the crazy ray guns and telliportation devices you’ll have on you, so be sure to be well equipped to prove you’re from the future and that you are serious.

7.   Why not mix business with personal time travel?   We don’t get many visitors from the future, so it’s obviously fairly expensive or difficult to do, so use the trip wisely.   Once you’ve stopped the LHC, why not invest some money in a stock that you know is going through the roof or at least put it in an interest-bearing account.   Stop by some of the scenes of the past before they’re gone and enjoy the quaintness of 21st century culture.   Maybe grab a few interesting photos, like giving the future president of the world a wedgie while he’s still eight years old.   Now that’d be something cool to show your friends!

8.  Consider doing something nice.   After all, you’re messing up the time stream as is, so you may as well stop 9/11 or warn the Japanese about the 2011 earthquake or the Indian Ocean region about the 2004 tsunami.   At the very least look up some people who died of cancer and tell them they have it while it’s still treatable.

You don’t have to do this, but since you’re messing up the time stream, it just seems like you’d be a dick not to.

It could also help with your image, which might be hurt pretty badly if you happen to do something like destroy the LHC.   If you destroy the LHC, you’ll go down in history as the guy who destroyed the LHC, and when you return to your day and age they might not think you’re a hero, because they won’t be aware of the problems the LHC caused.

On the other hand, if you evacuate the Indian coast before the Tsunami and then destroy the LHC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be remembered well just the same.

The big Atlas rocket has rolled out of the Vertical Integration Facility and is now on the launch pad, payload checked and stowed and systems being checked.  Tomorrow (the 26th of November) it will lift off with the Mars Science Laboratory, a new rover bound for the red planet with plans to land on the red planet in August of 2012.

This is truly one of the most exciting unmanned space missions in a long time, and perhaps the most exciting to visit mars since exploration of the planet’s surface began in 1978 with Viking 1.   The probe is a rover, somewhat similar in design to the rovers Spirit and Opportunity which proved to be astoundingly long-lived and robust machines.

It’s build on the success of the previous rover missions, but is far more bold and ambitious.  The rover will be physically much larger than the previous rovers and will have considerably greater scientific instrumentation and on board computing power.   The rover will carry extensive analytical instruments.  Like previous rovers it will have an alpha-particle x-ray spectrometer, but will also have a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy system, along with a host of other scientific instruments for analyzing soil and rock, examining samples and detecting environmental variables like particle radiation, temperature, pressure and light levels.   The rover will have the best camera systems yet taken to mars and will be able to take full motion video, even capturing ten frames per second of high definition video.   With two gigabytes of radiation-hardened storage it will be able to cache thousands of pictures and volumes of scientific data for transmission back to earth.

What makes this all possible and what makes the MSL so much more capable than previous rovers is the source of power.   Spirit and Opportunity were designed to be solar powered.  As we all know, solar cells don’t provide a huge amount of energy on earth, but on mars it’s even less.  Under ideal conditions, the Exploration Rovers could gather .6 kilowatt hours of energy each day from their solar panels.   However, conditions were rarely so good and dust on the panels made the amount of energy the panels provided in a day even less.  This is a severely limiting factor, forcing the rovers to spend considerably more time sitting idle and charging their batteries and making it a necessity that energy be used as frugally as possible.

The Mars Science Laboratory has its own nuclear power source, providing vastly more power, day or night.   It’s not a reactor but a radio thermal generator, powered by the decay of plutonium-238.  The power source will deliver a constant supply of more than 100 watts to the spacecraft.  By mars probe standards, that’s a real lot, especially because it’s continuous.  With a half life of 88 years, it’s likely that the mission will end due to equipment failure before any noticeable reduction in power output occurs as a result of the decay of the plutonium-238 heat source.

Getting enough plutonium-238 to power future missions could be a problem due to lack of capacity to produce it in the US and tightening supplies from Russian producers, but that’s another story.

Despite the astounding science that is provided by interplanetary missions, the use of anything “nuclear” for any purpose is sure to draw some protests.   (Don’t even get me started on how stupid it is to complain about polluting outer space with radiation)  Some of the opponents claim that the material is so dangerous it could cause catastrophe if the rocket exploded or the probe crashed back to earth.  Of course, both because of the design of the RTG and the material used, dispersal is unlikely even in that event, and the worst case would result in only minimal exposure to anyone.  Still, some have tried to stop the launch or at least protest it.

But not many seem to really be buying into it anymore.  In fact, the protests have dwindled down to almost nothing…

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There are two primary types of smoke detectors: ionization and photoelectric.  Ionization smoke detectors are the most common type and have been around the longest.   Photoelectric detectors have not been commonplace until more recently and are still generally less common than ionization detectors.

Ionization detectors use a tiny amount of radioactive material, usually amercium-241, to ionize air in a small chamber in the detector.  When smoke particles from a fire enter the detector, they interrupt the ion potential of the air in the chamber, thus tripping the detector.

Photoelectric detectors work by using a tiny light emitting diode, usually infrared and a light detector.  A small gap between the light and the detector allows air to pass between the two.  When smoke particles enter the detector, they obscure the light beam and this triggers the detector.

Recent Opposition to Ionization Detectors:

In recent years there have been some groups that have sprung up claiming that ionization detectors are entirely unreliable and that the use of ionization detectors puts lives in danger due to their failure to adequately detect and warn of fire.   This is often accompanied with claims of some kind of conspiracy between authorities and smoke detector manufacturers to keep this information from the public.   The issue of radioactivity and claims of corruption by the nuclear industry as also been a fixture in the argument.

It may not be that surprising, in the end.  Given the rampant radiophobia that has gripped the world, even the humble smoke detector had to eventually become the subject of fear.

These arguments were used as the basis for an Australian documentary and advocacy project with the absurdly dramatic name “Stop the Children Burning.”

Here is a clip from the film:

In reality, there’s no danger posed by the tiny amount of Am-241 in smoke detectors.  Am-241 produces some low energy gamma rays, but is primarily an alpha emitter.  The material is present in microscopic quantities and is in a form that is non-soluble, chemically stable and not easily absorbed.  It can resist all but the most extreme temperatures, and if the temperature was that high, you’d have worse things to worry about than inhaling a tiny amount of Americium liberated from the detector.  In most cases, the Am-241 is in the form of an oxide or ceramic and is embedded in gold foil that is affixed to a steel disk, usually recessed.   It is specifically designed to make release of the material unlikely.

There is no requirement for special disposal of smoke detectors nor do they require a license to own or sell.  The total radiation exposure during normal operations is negligible and even in the most extreme cases of a release of the embedded material would still be too small for much concern. It has not been “declared fifteen times more dangerous than plutonium.” It is technically about fifteen times more radioactive per unit of mass because the half-life is shorter, but that also means a much smaller amount is needed to produce the same ionization effect than would be needed if plutonium were used.

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I’m trying a new method of addressing the lunacy of chemtrails by showing that dumping chemicals at altitude wouldn’t generally do very much or be a very effective way of exposing populations to the chemicals that some claim are being sprayed.  It’s worth noting that the chemtrail loonies can’t even seem to agree on what is being sprayed, so here are some of the more common chemicals claimed.

If chemtrail conspiracy theorists are to believed, then large jet aircraft, possibly the same aircraft that carry passengers are being used to spray unknown quantities of chemicals of some type at high altitude.  While it’s rather difficult to judge the altitude of an aircraft by sight alone, based on what has been claimed to be chemtrails it’s fairly clear that the aircraft were flying at normal jet altitudes, well above tropospheric weather.   If they were indeed passenger aircraft then the altitude is generally above thirty thousand feet.

Some commonly claimed materials:

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In 1946, Hermann Muller won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the ability to x-rays (and therefore other forms of ionizing radiation) to cause mutations in living cells. There is no doubt that Muller’s discovery was profound and vital to understanding radiation’s effects on living things and to establishing the field of health physics and radiation protection. The fact that radiation could cause mutations also had important implications to the understanding of cell biology and genetics.

Muller was also an early proponent in the establishment of the linear non-threshold hypothesis for radiation exposure. Despite a lack of conclusive supporting evidence, LNT has become the mainstay for radiation policy and is accepted as fact by many government agencies. The simplistic model basically states that radiation always causes damage with the potential for cancer and that the increase in risk is directly proportional to the exposure level. Thus, there is no “safe” level and all radiation should be avoided when possible, though the danger is small if the exposure is small.

Despite the fact that, even by LNT predictions, the level of exposure from living near a nuclear power plant presents a miniscule increase in risk (less than living next to a coal burner), the model has been used very effectively to argue that nuclear energy is always unacceptable, because the tiny amounts of radiation involved still present a risk. (Don’t ask me how they can make the case that nuclear is worse than coal or gas, or for that matter, having a granite counter top which involve more exposure. I still can’t figure that out.) The model has also resulted in extreme fear of medical radiation, resulting in calls for limiting of potentially life saving imaging and cancer treatment procedures.

While it has always been known that Muller did not have conclusive evidence to prove his claims of an LNT dose-risk relationship, evidence now indicates he may have had evidence that actually refuted it.

Via UMass Amherst News and Information:

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Every once in a while I read a story about some technology or discovery that the writer seems to think is new or some kind of breakthrough. This is one of those cases.

Here’s the video that started this all:

And in this case, the same story has gotten a huge amount of coverage, up to 174 articles on Google News as of this posting.

Via News.com.au:

Back up: The future’s close – and it’s really cool
WE could be hooning on Marty McFly-like hoverboards sooner than we thought.

It’s called “quantum trapping” or “quantum levitation” – and it’s real.

This footage shows a magnet, cooled with liquid nitrogen and locked into space.

The display was made by scientist from Tel Aviv at a conference in the US.

Watch as the magnet hovers in place – giving hope to fans of the hit Back to the Future films.

Okay, stepping back for a second. Yes, this is really cool, both figuratively and literally. But it’s not anything new. It’s a great science demonstration that would put any middleschooler in the running for first place at the local science fair, but it’s not new and it’s not groundbreaking.

What is shown here is a superconductor. Superconductors have been around since 1911. They have electrical resistance of zero and this results in some other interesting properties. The first superconductors discovered only displayed the property of superconductivity at extremely low temperatures, requiring liquid helium to get down close to absolute zero.

Type II superconductors, the type which manifest this effect, were discovered in 1954. The effect directly was observed shortly thereafter.

In the 1980’s, “high temperature superconductors” were developed. These still require cooling well bellow normal ambient temperatures, but they can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, rather than liquid helium. The temperatures are much more manageable and some of these materials can even be briefly touched without injury, as shown in the video, although the superconductor itself is probably surrounded by insulation, thus making the surface less warmer than the actual superconducting material.

What is actually being shown is known as the Meisner effect, combined with flux pinning, which it found in Type-II superconductors. Without getting too deeply into it, placing it in the field sets up currents in the superconductor which oppose the field. At the same time, flux pinning causes the magnetic field to become entrapped in the superconductor due to tiny defects in the material. The net result is the superconductor physically resisting reorientation in the field and thus levitating. Flux pinning was the subject of much study involving superconductors in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

More info here. and here.

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A cautionary tale of how medicine can become far too accepting of a procedure of limited value and great potential for harm…

First, some background on the lobotomy:

The lobotomy may well be the most notorious and misunderstood medical procedure ever to have been developed.   It’s the butt of many jokes and is portrayed widely in the media as a savage operation preformed on those who were unruly as a means of turning them into dribbling vegetables, incapable of resisting and placid in all respects.  This is partially true, but is an overly simplistic portrayal of what the lobotomy really was and how it was used.

To understand the use of the lobotomy one must first realize the environment it was developed in.  Prior to the mid 20th century, there was very little that could be done for the severely mentally ill. Psychotherapy existed and was useful in helping those with problems like anxiety, phobias and depression better manage their symptoms, but this could do little for the truly insane. For those who suffered from severe delusions, violent episodes, severe depression with suicidal tendencies, extreme bipolarism, there was no effective therapy.

Such individuals were placed in mental institutions, where they were often forced to live the entirety of their lives.   Often miserable places, institutions provided little more than warehousing for many individuals.   Mental institutions were enormous, becoming huge communities onto themselves.  Attempts were made to make life more pleasant by providing  classes and recreation, but the enormous expense of caring for the populations made that difficult to do on a large scale.   The worst cases were often left restrained or locked in padded cells.  With so many completely crippled by mental disease, conditions could easily degrade to the point where wards became filthy and filled with the screams of insane patients.

The origins of psycosurgury can be traced back to the 1880’s, when Gottlieb Burckhardt, a Swiss neurosurgeon began to experiment with operations on the brains of the most severely insane. Small sections of brain were removed in the hope that it might calm the continual mania of the patients operated on. The results were not encouraging, but research continued into the 20th century. It was known that traumatic brain injury, brain tumors or their removal could alter a person’s personality, but only the most basic understanding of the regions of the brain associated with various aspects of thought and emotion existed.

The lobotomy was developed in 1935 by Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz, who intitially called the procedure the leukotomy. Moniz had become aware of experiments carried out on apes in which portions of the brain were intentionally removed or disconnected. Operations that removed the frontal lobes had a major effect on the learning capacity of the animals, but also made them more placid and less prone to expressions of frustration and emotional outbursts. He believed that doing so on humans might allow those with the most violent psychiatric episodes to lead more normal lives, or at least be more manageable. Early experiments involved injecting alcohol into the nerves that connected the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. This was later replaced by simply cutting the connections.

The belief at the time was that mental illness was caused by areas of the brain becoming too active or the brain being overstimulated and going haywire with out of control signals. It was thought that there was simply too much emotional activity that that cutting away the overly active portions of the brain would relieve this. While this belief is not always entirely false, it’s overly simplistic and does not apply to most cases of mental illness.  While there are portions of the brain that are associated with certain functions or aspects of personality, it is far too complex for a single region to be defined as the source of something like delusions, violent episodes or depression.

Still, the procedure did appear to have some validity. Many of those who received the operation did indeed become calmer and more easy to manage. Contrary to popular belief, it did not necessarily render the individual incapable of speech or basic function, although this did sometimes happen. It seems that overall, the results were highly variable. This is likely attributable to the simplicity and crudeness of the surgery. It involved drilling holes in the head of patients and cutting the pathways by inserting instruments. Exactly what kind of effects this had on the brain could vary quite a bit, especially since the individuals it was preformed on had all manner of conditions to begin with.

Early observations considered the outcome of the procedure to be result in a 33% to 33% to 33% success rate. In other words, roughly one third of patients could be considered to have improved from the operation. One third could be considered to be worse than before the operation and one third were roughly the same. This is hardly a stellar success rate, but given the lack of options for the worst cases of mental disease, it may have seemed worth the risk. There certainly were a few cases of individuals who seemed to gain extensive relief with few complications, but these were relatively rare.

A few individuals died during the procedure.  Others were left completely incapacitated and severely disabled.  Many, however, did retain their basic abilities to communicate and do simple tasks.   Some lost the ability to walk or talk but subsequently relearned it.   A number of reports indicated that the patients became very child-like and lost the ability to comprehend complex concepts.  Lack of emotional responses or social capacity was also reported.   Another effect was the loss of inhibitions.  Many seemed to have no fear or anxiety, even in circumstances where it would be appropriate.  Apathy and social disconnection were common.  Many patients began to overeat and put on large amounts of weight.  Some developed complications ranging from incontinence to lack of balance to sleep disorders.

The psychiatric community accepted the procedure with varying levels of enthusiasm. It gained rapid acceptance across the world, but many remained uneasy about the implications and ethical considerations. It was used primarily on the worst of the worst cases, at least initially. Directors of mental hospitals welcomed anything that could make it easier to manage their overcrowded wards, resulting in an expansion of use that raised questions about whether it was really being used as a last resort. Overall, the procedure was never without controversy, but given the lack of alternatives, it often was considered about the only thing that could be done to at least try to relieve severe mental illness.

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I started thinking about this topic after the discussion on an other post regarding loss of electricity turned to railroad crossings (grade crossings), where railways intersect roadways.   Understandably, loss of power for warning signals can result in some safety problems.

Unfortunately, adding entirely redundant backup power to railroad crossing warning systems wouldn’t actually address the real safety problem with railroad crossings:  idiots.    It’s really not hard to avoid being killed at a railroad crossing.   If there’s a train coming, don’t enter the crossing.   If there isn’t a train coming, it’s safe to cross.    It’s not hard to tell if a train is approaching either.   Most crossings have signals, such as flashing lights and gates to make it obvious, but even if the crossing lacks signals or the signals don’t work, it’s still fairly obvious.   Trains are generally required to blow their horn when approaching a railroad crossing, so if you’re about to go over a railroad crossing and hear a train horn, look both ways, because it’s possible that the signals are not functioning.

Seems simple, right?  After all, stopping at a railroad crossing to let a train pass is only going to cost you, at worst, a few minutes, and cutting in front of a train is not a good way to keep yourself alive.    It’s impossible for the train to stop in time to avoid a collision, and it certainly can’t swerve out of the way.  Estimating the speed and distance of  something like an approaching locomotive can be surprisingly difficult, especially when you’re also moving.   If you’re wrong and that train hits, it’s not going to do just superficial damage.

Despite these seemingly obvious facts, grade crossings claim a surprising number of lives.   In the US alone, hundreds die in grade crossing accidents every year – 247 in the year 2009 and 338 in 2007.  The problem is not confined to the US, of course.   Everywhere that grade crossings exist, there are deaths on a fairly regular basis.

Supporters of Social Darwinism might suggest that this is not such a bad thing, since it’s generally the fault of the idiot driver who gets killed, but the problem is more broad than that.  Despite the fact that locomotives tend to be a lot larger and sturdier than road vehicles, they can and do get badly damaged by striking cars and trucks.   Debris can fly up and injure train crew.  On occasion, trains have even derailed due to grade-crossing accidents.   Even if the accident does not cause any significant damage to the train, it still means that it has to come to a stop, the crossing ends up being blocked for some time and emergency services need to respond to clean up the mess.   And the idiots who try to beat the train are actually more likely to survive with injuries than die outright.   Add to this the fact that there may be other passengers in the vehicle who had no control over the situation and it’s easy to see why this is a major social problem.

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It’s often argued that alternative medicine is safe because most of the remedies considered to be “alternative” are in and of themselves harmless.   This is certainly true of things like homeopathy, which, if prepared properly, contains absolutely nothing other than the solvent the preparation was based on, which is usually water.    However, it does kill by another means: it displaces real, useful and scientifically valid medicine and leads to people harboring the belief that something will cure them when it won’t, directing them down the wrong road for treatment.    It does not need to completely stop someone from getting real treatment to kill; just delaying real treatment can be enough.

Such would appear to be the case with Steve Jobs.   I do not mean to make light of his death.   While I do think his legacy has become extremely inflated, especially in light of his death, he was, by all accounts a nice guy and certainly a good manager.   He was a great motivator, he had a pretty good sense of industrial design and he helped provide direction for Apple in the mid to late 1990’s when the company was faltering.

Without diminishing the grief his family and friends are surely feeling, we can still look at this death as an example of why alternative medicine is dangerous.   Hopefully it can even save lives.

In 2003, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.   Pancreatic cancer happens to be one of the most deadly forms of cancer, because it tends to be asymptomatic until it reaches very late stages of development.  By the time most pancreatic cancers are discovered, the prognosis is very very poor.   Once the cancer has metastasize, it becomes very difficult to treat.   Pancreatic cancer is often aggressive and will quickly invade the liver and other organs.  Once this happens, simply removing the tumor does little to stop the spread of the cancer and even the most aggressive treatment with chemotherapy and radiation only results in a long term survival rate of a few percent.

Steve Jobs, however, was lucky.   His form of cancer was slower in progression and less aggressive than most forms of pancreatic cancer.  Even more importantly, it was caught relatively early on in the progression of the disease.  The cancer was discovered entirely by chance.   Steve Jobs had a history of gastric problems and therefore had been receiving periodic abdominal scans. In October 2003, doctors noticed a growth that was confirmed to be pancreatic cancer.

It’s impossible to know with absolute certainty whether the cancer had begun to spread when it was detected, but based on the early stage it was in and the type of cancer, it probably had not. With any form of cancer, delaying treatment can be deadly, but with a form of cancer like pancreatic cancer, it’s all the more vital. As long as the cancer is confined to the pancreas, it can be operated on and the survival rates are very good. Yet the longer the cancer remains, the greater the odds that it has begun to spread to other organs. In 2003, the time bomb had probably not yet gone off, but it was definitely ticking.

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I’d like to make something clear:  No posts or opinions expressed here are bought.   In fact, you can’t buy them because they’re not for sale.   I’m willing to post guest content from time to time, but only if I consider it to be something I can stand behind.  Furthermore, it’s always labeled as such and attributed to the proper creator.

That is why I am so downright offended by this e-mail:

Subject: Guest editorial on depletedcranium.com

Hi,

Could we purchase advertising on depletedcranium.com?

We could pay you $195 for a guest editorial about my client’s site (http://www.NAME OF A MEDICAL PRODUCT SITE.com/) and payment can be made by PayPal (or check delivered via FedEx US/Canada only).

I know time is valuable these days and I appreciate yours.

Sincerely,
NAME REMOVED
Marketing Assistant

Yep, that’s what I got. Of course, it had the actual name of the site and the name of the marketing assistant.

Obviously I did not actually accept this offer, but when I declined I was then responded to with another e-mail explaining that they understood that I was declining but then offering me $315 if I should happen to change my mind. Well, honestly, I could use $315, but not bad enough to take a blatant advertisement and pass it off as an editorial.

As for the site, it was not a blatantly quack-related site. It was basically a site about cosmetic surgery which would be used to find cosmetic surgeons in an area for those looking for cosmetic procedures. I suppose it could have been worked into this site and looked believable, perhaps by starting off by saying how some surgeons are quacks and then stating that people should go to this site for referrals to qualified ones.

However, if I did that, I’m not sure I could ever feel clean no matter how many showers I took.

So I must pose the question to any others who have blogs: Has anyone else ever gotten this kind of solicitation? Is this a common way of advertising?

Finally, I should add that while I’ve never actually published anything here for money and have no intention of it, I have to admit that it’s not impossible that I could be bought off – but it’s going to take a real real real lot of money.   So I’ll give this warning: if ever you see an article posted here that seems questionable and the next article posted is about my personal experiences in shopping for a private jet, moving to a private island or becoming a space tourist, you may assume that I have sold out