With a bit of training, you can do it without the headphones or music or drugs It's done in monasteries all the time. Some religious groups do it with repeated chanting. na-mu-my-h-ren-ge-ky y'all.

Anyone who is used to playing with databases can probably search those dozen books, and find numerous instances of phrases that were copy/pasted from one author's book to another. In fact, I'll bet that technical and factual books will have a higher incidence of matching phrases and sentences than works of fiction

My favorite example is the RS-232 port, or maybe it should be a USB port now ... how many different ways can you write the explanation of what each pin does, and still write comprehensible English?

I am not a programmer and I'm certainly not going to play one on this part of the internets, but after looking at a couple of the "infringing" examples from ELF (whatever that is), it looks like they are claiming that declaring variables, setting offsets, and other common computing activities are infringing.

If ELF is a standard format, it is going to have many "scenes a fair", standard functions, and standard names for calling things. It's as if they declared that using standard English grammar was a violation of their copyrights.

You know I heard the same story ten years ago but it was that a server would spontaneously reboot. I have a feeling this may be an urban myth.

No ... I was working in a Norfolk hospital lab when some idiot turned on the horizon-scanning radar for an aircraft carrier that was nearby - it should have been locked down, but wasn't. A lot of our electronics readouts went berserk from the induced interference, harmonics and other crap that thing was belching out. ICU had it worse because all their heart monitors and ventilators were affected. It was an interesting few minutes.

There's a few things that sound a bit odd to my untrained eye. What do gut bacteria have to do with urine? Why wouldn't this be more related to diet, metabolism, liver function, or possibly even neurotransmitter levels?

Many things are absorbed in your gut and excreted by your kidneys - so it is plausible. But with that small a sample compared to the complexity of the signal I would have to see a lot more data, including predictive data where they get a bunch of unknowns, analyze them, and correctly assign the sample to one of their three groups.

If they can do that, then they might have a test.

My son is autistic. From where does the information come that it can now be detected through urine? Is there a science magazine source?

It is preliminary research on a VERY small sample. Trawling through a complex chemical substance (the urine) with extremely sensitive analytical equipment and finding a few substances that appear to differentiate among the three groups (autistic children, siblings of autistic children, and non-autistic children) is easy.

The real test will come when they get samples of urine from children outside the test group and are asked to repeat the analysis and assign the children to the correct group. IF they can do that, they might be able to claim to have a test.

Thanks. It's probably the culture thing.

With all the cost-cutting, how does the NHS justify letting expensive lab equipment do nothing, while patients are waiting for tests so they can be properly treated and discharged sooner to make room for others?

My (heavily extrapolated) understanding of the situation is that doctors work any day of the week, but technicians are more 9-5 Mon-Fri.

Unless the UK's medical system is back in the 1940s, where very little was done on weekends, that hospital should have a lab that can do any critical test any time.

If the admins of Worthing had a brain to share amongst them, they would match the lab staffing to the expected work load - the US was doing it in the 1970s. The two hospitals I worked in then had our hours arranged so shifts overlapped during peak workload.

My Google-fu says. "Worthing Hospital has more than 500 beds and provides a full range of general acute services including maternity, outpatients, A&E and intensive care." A 500-bed hospital with ICU, ER and maternity wards better be full-service 24x7.

Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word [CC] when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. The managers said the move is aimed at easing pressure on hospital workers charged with performing blood tests by making doctors consider whether the tests are essential.

WTF? I was a medical technologist - the staffer who would perhaps collect "the bloods", and certainly would be the one doing the lab tests. I can see several things wrong with this scenario:

• If this is only a weekend protocol, it violates the K.I.S.S. principle of having things work the same way all the time, and of course they will forget that it's Sunday, bloody Sunday and forget to say pretty please with sugar on it at least half the time.
• If one or more of the weekend docs are ordering tests that are medically unnecessary or ordering the tests all STAT (extremely urgent) so they can go home sooner, you review their test ordering patterns (easy to do with computers). If a pattern of abuse emerges, having the senior pathologist or the lab manager chew them out for it works wonders.

• A pathologist, lab administrator, or hospital administrator with backbone can set up a list of tests that will be done STAT, and under what conditions. If Dr. Gottahaveitnow wants something that is not on the list, too bad. He/she can get an override from the lab director.

• Medical technologists have their own way of dealing with the pile-up of STAT requests. We redefine the acronym to be "Start Test Any Time". We smile and say, "Certainly, I'll get right on it as soon as I finish the STATs from Dr. Wanna Playtennis, Dr. Tooimportanttowait, and Dr. Dammitiforgotmypreops. What is your pager number, I'll call you." That leaves them snarling at each other for cluttering the queue.

Before you start declaring a CURE!!! look at the number of test subjects. Preventing death in five monkeys is not exactly a cure. It's a very promising start, but they need to test it in non-infected humans to make sure it's not going to cause some odd problems and to get max dosages worked out.

Ebola's death rate is so high that this treatment would have to be extremely dangerous to keep it form being used. Death rates are in the 80-90% range now, so if it dropped them to even just 50% it's worth a large risk.

You sound like a real super guy. You make a wrong on your way to Arizona?

What?

We've discussed this problem in OEC (Outdoor Emergency Care) training - how to safely deliver and transport newborn infants in hostile environments. This is REALLY GREAT!

wouldn't a low-tech solution of using a cloth baby-carrier on a compassionate person often be better, safer, cheaper and easier than this ginormous contraption?

Under some circumstances, yes. But this is not meant for those times when you can tuck the preemie into your clothing while you walk a few hundred feet to the helicopter or ambulance. This is back-country gear. This is for those cases where you have to scramble up/down steep terrain to the patient's location, and scramble back out with the baby.

Let's say mummy and daddy's car went off the road while the were taking Junior to the mountain cabin, and the car is a couple hundred feet down the canyon. Or let's imagine Mummy-to-be went to a friend's cabine and labor started during a blizzard (even in AZ we have blizzards). If you slip and fall with Junior swathed against your belly it's going to hurt the baby real bad.

Look at the access ports ... this lets you check out the baby, give O2, aspirate the breathing passages, give fluids, etc. without exposing the passenger to the ambient temps. Whoever is the pack mule just has to kneel.

The law gives police the right to ask for papers ONLY when they lawfully stop somebody.

"For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person."

The specific wording is "Lawful Contact" ... which is not defined anywhere in that law, or in the entire AZ law code (I looked). So ... if a car is pulled over for a busted tail light, how far does that "lawful contact" entitle the LEO to start dewtermining? The driver, certainly. But then what? All the passengers? Some of the passengers? Just the swarthy guy in the sombrero?

And then there is this: where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States. How the heck can you tell the state of "unlawfully present"? What triggers suspicion? How do you tell an Arizonan who grew up in the barrio, from a family that was living here before the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo from someone who just arrived via the coyote express? What about the snowbacks from Canukistan, or the lutefisken who have "overstayed their visas" from the fjordlands? The only way to find them is to check everyone at every contact ... and the backlash from that will be amazing.

Where's the popcorn?

but when one particular species that's affected has the unique importance to the field that D. melanogaster has, blind adherence to principle starts to look like a really bad idea.

If you start making exceptions, you have no reliable rules. You have nomenclature that is spaghetti code. There were many arguments about why Pasteurells pestis should not be renamed, based on its "unique importance" and the fame of Pasteur (who still has most of that genus, just not the really famous one).

It will be called "Drosophila" until the last of the old geezers who worked with it in college dies off ... that means you.

Heh. I expect to have at least thirty years of working life ahead of me, and many of my colleagues are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. Don't count us geezers out of this battle yet, sonny!

Exactly. it's going to be "the fly formerly known as Drosophila" for at least a century.

This is a change roughly equivalent to the C standards committee deciding that the reserved word "for" will be replaced with "of". Could it be done? Yes. Would it be a good idea? You decide on your own answer to that one.

Difference being that your project won't crash if you accidentally type Drosophila.

The split follows a core principle of nomenclature: when you have to fork the project, do it in a way that means the fewest number of species are affected. Keeping Drosophila melanogaster as a species would mean changing over a thousand species. Moving D. melanogaster and it's relatives to a new species affects a smaller number.

It will be called "Drosophila" until the last of the old geezers who worked with it in college dies off ... that means you. And, another principle of nomenclature is that you don't reuse species names when a species is moved out of the genus. There will never be a melanogaster in the new Drosophila group to muck up the journals and databases.