This is exactly the same sort of thing that started the Watergate scandal: breaking into the DNC looking for dirt. This is theft, pure and simple. The fact that it may be a foreign government attempting to influence our elections by using illegally obtained information just might be a bit concerning. So yeah, you should care how they got out.

Pre-print here. They used data from the first two runs (Jan-Jun 2010 and Nov 2010-Mar 2011). I can guess why Run 2 ended when it did. The speculation about earthquakes and Fukushima contamination are unfounded.

Yes, the prostate is easy to access from the rectum, but that does not make it a good idea to shove a linear accelerator up a guy's ass. Apart from the discoftort caused by the insertion, you'd also burn a large hole in his rectum and cause your patient to need a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. Good work!

Gah. Even worse, the article quotes the physicist talking out his ass about cancer therapy:

“Already, radiation for cancer does something like this but uses a different principal. And it can only shrink tumors near the surface of the skin. But in our case, CPAs may be able to reach a bit deeper.”

Ummmm...no. Not even close. Radiation therapy can "shrink tumors" anywhere in the body, not just near the surface of the skin. Unless he thinks the prostate is near the skin surface. I don't know how much "deeper" he plans on going.

If anyone can tell me what's in THIS plan, I'll give them a cookie.

Right now, I don't know what the hell we're all arguing about. I work in the healthcare field (I can tell you some stories about how absolutely monstrous the insurance companies are), have been paying close attention to this "debate", and I don't know what THIS plan or THAT plan contains. There's been some talk about a public option (which I hear is tantamount to replacing Congress with the Politburo) that's in some versions of the bill and not in others. And apparently a modest proposal to kill all the old people and Stephen Hawking. But other than that, it's all a big blur.

So please enlighten us on what sort of meaningful reforms the Republicans have proposed. Other than their courageous stance against eugenics.

Meet Hatebeak

William the Conqueror spoke French, as did most of the Kings of England in the Middle Ages, when they weren't busy dying of dysentery. Richard the Lionhearted, that exemplar of the English Monarchy, spoke only French and spent approximately 20 minutes on English soil in his entire life.

What this has to do with DRM, I don't know. But the fact that we went from there to here says something. What that something is? Again, I don't know. Athesimo bless the internets!

I hope your wife is doing as well as I am. Cancer is truly a bitch.

Protons are an attractive modality of treatment. They offer attractive depth-dose characteristics (see the previous mention of the Bragg Peak), a higher relative biological effectiveness (they kill more cells per unit dose), and do somewhat better on hypoxic tumors (tumors with areas of low oxygen concentration). And I admit, it sure would be a cool toy to have here at work. But...

There are many practical problems with proton accelerators. First is that they are HUGE; the bending magnet is often 10 to 100 times as large as that of an electron accelerator (used to make x-rays). There are not that many hospitals who have the real estate to accommodate such a machine. Because they are so expensive and expansive, most facilities will only be able to afford one such machine. What do you do when it breaks down? Radiation therapy outcomes can be quite sensitive to skipped days and breaks in the scheduled treatment course, which often are every weekday for 6-8 weeks (which is why we are treating patients on both Saturday and Sunday last weekend and this one, to give our patients Christmas and New Year's Day off without compromising their treatment). As for being "crisper and cleaner around the edges," advanced techniques in photon therapy do this pretty darn well. Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy can construct dose distributions with very sharp gradients that are comparable to the distributions achieved by protons.

In the end, until superconducting bending magnets become cheap, or until plasma wakefield proton beams achieve the luminosity necessary to be useful in the clinic, protons will remain a niche market. And honestly, for most cases it would make very little difference to me if I or any of my family were treated with x-rays or protons.