I used to toss sensitive documents in the hospital shredder bin. The bin is usually a locked cabinet that is emptied occasionally by a professional shredding company.
Several weeks ago, I noticed that a few of the hospital maintenance workers were digging around the “locked” bin. Since then, I’ve acquired a cheap-o-shredder for shredding purposes.
What I’ve discovered is that the standard 6-8 page vertical shredders are junk. You can’t aggressively shred anything thicker than 5 pages without jamming the grinder. In addition, the papers shreds could actually be reconstructed without too much difficulty if all the pieces were available.
I guess I have two alternatives:
- Buy a nicer, cross cutting shredder with larger blade.
- Burn my documents.
Or shred AND burn them. That would be entertaining and most effective.
misc
humor, work
The NOAA has a tsunami tracker on their website. Interesting find…
misc
I saw a disproportionately large pigeon outside my window. It would take only 5 of those birds to span the entire width of the A/C unit. That is big.
misc
misc
I’ve been stuck at the airport gate for hours numerous times waiting for my delayed flight to be cleared for take-off. I see the flight agents typing away at their 1970’s-style computers frantically to rebook stranded travelers. Behind them sits an aging dot-matrix printer churning out airline codes on reams of paper. Every so often, I hear a muted announcement over the loudspeakers regarding re-routed flights. The passengers, miserable at best, are on their smartphones frantically texting their travel status to friends and family. Some of them sit in clumps near the power outlets to refuel their power-craving gadgets. How could an airport possibly function in such chaos?
In aviation design, there is no room for chance. Every detail serves a purpose. For instance, the design of airport runways required efficiency to the finest detail. Chicago’s Midway Airport is a prime example. Considered the “busiest mile”, the airport roughly consists of a square mile of runways closely surrounded by local businesses. Its longest runway runs approximately 6000-ft, which limits the size of aircraft the airport can handle. A fully fueled Boeing 747 with maximum payload requires a minimum ground speed of 200-mph for a safe take-off, not considering incoming winds. Approximately 13000-ft of runway is needed to achieve this speed. Furthermore, airfields with limited land area implement displaced threshold airstrips.
The area of the runway marked with chevrons is the displaced threshold region. This region indicates that no aircraft is to land directly on that portion of the runway. The designation applies often when noise ordinances or structural buildings prevent a gradual aircraft descent onto the runway from a particular direction. In many cases, the displaced threshold section also offers less structural support than the opposite end of the runway; the ground on which an aircraft touches down must be able to withstand a greater pressure (force / area) than the rollout region.
How the hell does air travel function with airports working the way they do now? It is futile to seek out an explanation. Airports operate the same way our eye clinic does–despite all the mis-scheduled patients, missing charts, absent technicians; all the patients are remarkably cared for at the end of the day.
medicine, misc
euphemisms, travel
The further I progress in specializing in medicine, the more I realize how much my daily abilities deteriorate.
Take language, for example. Aside from the broken Spanish I acquire from my Hispanic patients, I rarely invoke English dictum beyond the eighth grade. Our vocabulary in the office is limited to a defined collection of complex medical terms strung together with linking verbs and qualifiers describing outcomes (hemorrhage, blindness, infection, inflammation). Outside of the office, I’ve struggled to identify common objects like “spoon” and “basket” without using hand gestures.
Is this shift simply a result of natural selection (adaptation on steroids!)? French naturalist Jean Lamarck coined terms like “use” and “disuse” for adaptation spanning generations. Are professionals contributing to their own extinction by being good at their job?
It would be interesting to measure cortical function throughout the course of medical school. This could be followed with serial PET scans to localize metabolic activity in the brain. Areas that fail to sustain signal can be used to correlate with mapped cortical regions. Indeed, a spatial correlation in such an experiment would be damming to future physicians-to-be…
misc
euphemisms, humor, life