[QUOTE=Paul Beardsley;1473780]

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Imagine reading the above in the 1970s. "Are you saying that in 30-odd years time, ordinary people will be walking around with Star Trek-style communicators? No way!"

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QUOTE]


I believe that the best prediction of the cell phone was by the "science fiction" writer who drew the Dick Tracy comic strip.


I frequently have my knees x-rayed due to arthritis problems. It's kind of nice that they've developed the hardware to the point where I don't have to take off my pants and put on one of those bizarre hospital gowns. Just stand there and let the x-rays do their stuff.

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Later . . .

Even more so, there are digital x-rays, where the image is recorded by a digital detector, not on film (my dentist has one).

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Saves on film, and in some applications, would allow quicker access to image enhancement techniques (You just have to say the word "enhance" and hit a single key, right?).

Things that should not go digital; many of our applications for insurance are now digital. Save's paper! Go green! Right? But they're legal documents that require physical signatures - so you have to print them anyway. Often, since more business is coming from over-the-phone or internet transactions, you need to print them twice, so that when the purchaser fails to sign and return the first, you have a backup copy (digital copies aren't always available after the fact). So by going green, I'd estimate we use 30% more paper than before.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!"
"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything! 14% of people know that!"

See, that's the "fiction" of living in a science fiction future. The fiction is/was that using computers would save us paper.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Was it ever truly necessary to take off your pants and put on bizarre hospital gown? Or was it just a CYA thing, like the ban on cell phones in the hospitals? (AFAIK, no hospital device was ever actually harmed by a cell phone transmission.)

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

To be fair, by writing a book or term paper or whatnot entirely on a computer, it's possible to revise the thing until you're satisfied with it before printing it out. I gave a copy to a friend recently to go over, and I haven't even finished writing the thing--I loaned him my data stick. And he's going to return the stick with pictures he took using his phone. (No, I'm not expecting them to be as good as photos taken with a camera. However, my camera was out of batteries at the time the pictures were taken.)

Geonuc, are you thinking of Andy Jackson, too?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

My experience has been that the one thing the gown doesn't do is CYA.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

My dentist claims that the digital sensors work with lower power x-rays than the film versions. If true, that's a good thing.

Now, if she didn't need to stick the sensor in my mouth...

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I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

When kids in rural Australia, half an hour from Tamworth, can see images of Enceladus from a robot camera orbiting Saturn just as clearly as if they were at JPL watching them come in.

Probably the most touching moment of my People to People Australian trip.

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When you're standing on the edge of nowhere, there's only one way up...
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Don't live in town? No problem! You order from Amazon.com. It's the Sears catalog of the future!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

And you can read reviews of the products by people who already own them. (That may not be science-fictional, but it is one of my favorite things about Amazon. Well, maybe video reviews are a little sci-fi)

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I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

Though you should take the reviews with a grain of salt, especially the five star reviews.

There was a thread sometime back about an ATM book where it seemed pretty clear that negative reviews with comments on the bad science were being pulled. If you just went by the reviews on that site you would likely get a distorted view of the book.

It isn't a consistent issue (I've seen other things get what appear to be fair reviews), but I wouldn't trust the reviews too far.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

There's a story here... Oh, yeah, the immortality serum is great, but 200 years after taking it your IQ drops to 25. Sorry 'bout that.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I'd say there are plenty of biased 5-star and 1-star reviews, not so much bias in the ones in between. But as always, got to actually read the review rather than count the stars--often the biased reviews "tell on themselves" in the writeup (e.g. so much hyperbole you could fill the Grand Canyon with it).

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Actually, there was a science fiction story that had that idea as a minor element. In Robert L. Forward's book Rocheworld, the astronauts take a drug to slow down their aging, for the interstellar trip. But one of the consequences of the drug is that it drops their intelligence to that of a child, while they are taking the drug. At the end of journey (IIRC it takes 40 years, during which they physically age about 10 years), they stop taking the drug and return to normal.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

... there's a robot "certified by the FAA to file its own flight plans and use civilian air corridors in the United States with no advance notice".

Okay, so the STS-125 launch happened to be during the period I have art, my art teacher happens to be really nice, and I happened to have much of my work done, so I was able to go to the computer lab to watch it.

Now, our computer teacher used to be the head of Stage Crew, so she likes me a lot, and once I got the live feed on SpaceVidcast up, she actually put it on the SmartBoard and turned the sound up, so everybody in the class could hear it.

Now, SpaceVidcast has a chat-box under the video stream, so I typed "I'm watching with all my friends in computer class!"

Most of the other people typed back something like "Hi, Kai's computer class!", but one person typed "Now all you school kids watching, remember when you grow up to vote all the politicians who don't support this out of office." (Remember, this was flashing onto the screen the whole class was watching.

So yes- you know you are living in a science fictional future when you can be digitally embarrassed in front of all your friends by somebody you don't even know.

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When you're standing on the edge of nowhere, there's only one way up...
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

So by going green, I'd estimate we use 30% more paper than before.

I only wish I'd bought stock in paper companies when everyone was talking about "the paperless office." It'd be interesting to see how those stocks performed over the last 20-30 years.

When you see an honest, no-funny-glasses 3D TV.

About a year ago I went to an open day at the Diamond Light Source (Synchrotron). For a start it looks seriously sci-fi from the outside (less so inside - rather more concrete and rather less polished stainless steel than you usually see in the movies)

There were various scientists showing off what it would be able to do, such as find the structures of viruses - including 3D-printed (rapid prototyping) models. And there was a 3D TV just sitting there, showing a spinning CGI virus. And no label. If that was me, there'd be sign there saying:

When you read details of expense claims
derived from hundreds of thousands of such
claims. In days gone by someone would have
had to nick several filing cabinets full of
paper but now its all on a cdrom or datastick.

When you can sit underneath the wing of an airplane that flew from New York to London in 3 hours and eat lunch with your family. (Concorde Alpha-Delta at the Intrepid museum)

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When you're standing on the edge of nowhere, there's only one way up...
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Nearly all x-rays taken these days are digital, for a number of reasons, the principle one being the fact they're far less expensive, per x-ray, than film. The second one is that they're loaded into the hospital's patient administration system, which allows any doctor seeing the patient to view the x-ray.

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"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief." - James Russell Lowell

Try wiping your, uh, um...

Nevermind. I guess outhouses aren't part of the future, anyway.

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"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief." - James Russell Lowell

Technically, there are two common modern ways to get those images in the computer, and only one is "digital", meaning captured originally by a digital sensor. The other option is to use a "CR" plate about the same size, shape, and weight as a film casette, which records an analog image, and then plug it in to a reader which pulls out the part that has the latent image recorded on it, scans it, digitizes its information, clears it, and slides it back into the cassette to be reused. "CR" came along before true digital sensors did and was named, as an alternative to film radiography, "computer/computed/computerized radiography".

As a radiography student, I've worked with both, and even handled some film. Overall, I prefer CR. It's not as fast, but the difference between a few seconds and maybe 20 seconds is small, and the separate, independent sensor cassette allows more options and freedom for positioning. (And positioning to get the image at just the angle you need is a very big deal!) Also, digital sensors not only are fixed to the machine but also have a built-in "bucky", which slightly increases the distance between the anatomy of interest and the sensor and filters out some of the radiation. Sometimes you want or need that, but sometimes you don't really want it, and using CR cassettes gives you the choice.

For those reasons, even in the true digital radiography rooms with the built-in digital sensors, we still bring in CR plates for some exams. Also, even if the entire X-ray department were to use nothing but digital rooms, the hospital would still need CR readers and cassettes because they're the only way to get an image from the "portable" machines, the ones that get taken in to patients' rooms or out to their homes, because you physically can't build in a digital sensor for those. As a result, even hospitals and clinics that never touch film at all and are fully computerized have either all CR, or at most a mix of CR and digital.

(The thing about dentists doing it either way intrigued me; I'd never heard of digital sensors that small, but I've also never seen a CR image receptor that small either.)

Imagine being able to tune out all the nonsense of a commercial flight with You want a big screen TV with surround sound. Grab up some iTheater video glasses. Yes, I said glasses and they only weigh 3 ounces.

Right now they're pricey at $550, but worth the cost to the frequent flier who has to deal with the obnoxious fellow passengers and often ill-behaved children.

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Ala Nose

Haha, that reminds me of my mother-in-law all worried about a friend of mine she saw walking up and down the sidewalk talking to himself...
(that was a few years ago, when earphones were not as common as today)

And a third reason--saves scanning it before sending it to Bangalore so that an MD can do what a technician in the US would do, but cheaper.

Ok, you know you are in an SF future when it's cheaper to have someone on the other side of the world do it!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

The fact that I could be reading this on my hand-held entertainment device (read: ipod :P) is pretty amazing. This chunk of metal in my hand can play so many songs that you could fill a house with the vinyl copies.

Scientists and engineers all over the world have clubbed together to dig a 21km tunnel under the earth, fill it with giant magnets and shoot stuff around it at velocities touching lightspeed. The fact that we even have a reason to do that is very SF to me.

I was talking with my project supervisor about it the other day; CERN (I think it was CERN, could have been a telescope...heh) can put out 2 gigabytes of data a second. How many magnetic tapes from the 1950s would that take?

The world's such a mishmash of old and new. I'm writing this post on a computer that would make scientists of 50 years ago stand back in awe. Said computer is resting on a wooden desk next to a rather shabby blackboard; both of which wouldn't have looked out of place 100 years go.

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"Bessie Braddock to Churchill "Winston, your drunk!"
Churchill: "Bessie, you're ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober""
the solar system

There are still port-a-Johns in use. Especially during events where large crowds of people gather. Or during construction work. They are plastic portable 'buildings', to put it politely, but they are supplied with rolls of T.P. so you don't need a Sears Catalog or a newspaper anymore.

There are permanent outside ...uh...um...but those presume you carry your own relief supplies in your purse (if your a lady) or your pocket (if your a gent). Such rugged utilities are located in locals far removed from civilization such as hunting and critter reserves.

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Ala Nose

Hmmm, I believe the dentist clinic I go to uses CR plates, they are small pastic things pretty similar to the more classic film carriers used by dentists to take X-Rays, but when exposed, the operator just slides it into a slot on a machine next to the computer, and shortly there after the image comes up on the computer, and can be added to my patient files. There are digital sensors for dentists, too, like this one but I suppose they are thicker and more unwieldy, due to the cable.

Not that long ago, I was to have a wisdom tooth removed, and then they used a dental tomograph machine to image the entire jaw, to help determine if it had to be removed by surgery or if it could be just pulled normaly. That machine seemed to use digital sensors. I suppose that for such a machine, where the X-ray projector and the detector are part of the machine, and just moved around the patient, it is more convenient to have a digital sensor than having a film or CR plate.

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...