Actually, the trip home was interesting. Our car lost power, and we were stuck by the side of the road. Thank goodness for AAA. Later it turned out that the alternator belt had fallen off, and we simply got a new one to fix it. I really wish I had some money to get a new car…Matthew’s car is 20 years old and it’s starting to fall apart.

Also, I got Scribblenauts. It’s a really fun game, and it requires a lot of creativity. It’s not perfect though, because the controls aren’t orthogonal…you use the stylus for virtually everything and it especially sucks when you accidentally miss an object you wanted to move with the stylus by a few pixels and your guy jumps into the lava instead…but other than that it’s great.

It seems that there’s a bill in the senate that will require NSF funded textbooks and curricula to be released under an open license. That means that when our tax dollars are used to produce textbooks, they will be freely available to everyone over the Internet, and can even be modified and released by the users of the text with certain restrictions (depending on the exact license used), which can be useful if errors are found or if someone wants to use the book as the base for a derivative work.

If someone wants to publish their textbook with a closed license, they simply have to write it without government grants. No big deal.

This article from 2006 describes some more details of the technology: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523/

It seems that by doing away with the pulse, this artificial heart is able to be significantly simpler, smaller, and more robust than presently approved models. Instead of lasting for about 2 years, it can last for 10. Instead of being too large to fit into most women, it’s small enough to fit in virtually anyone. However, there are worries that the lack of a pulse could cause unforeseen issues in patients…I suppose we’ll see soon enough. Also, when I mentioned it to Matthew, he pointed out that in a disaster a first-responder might classify someone with such a heart as dead due to the lack of pulse.

In any case though, it’s good to see such progress in the development of artificial hearts. An artificial heart that is as good as a real heart would be a real lifesaver. According to the Wikipedia article on heart transplants, there’s need for about 800,000 heart transplants each year, but only about 3,500 that can actually go through each year due to an extreme shortage of donor hearts. Effective artificial hearts could save several million lives in a decade. It might even be able to save more lives than that, as it would be a much easier decision to implant, leading to more cases being considered for implantation, including lost causes and as a preventative measure in less developed cases. It might even be possible to keep such hearts on hand for emergencies, unlike transplants, though transplanting them in an emergency could be difficult. It might also be possible to do detection (or even control) within the artificial heart, so that subtle signs of trouble could be detected by the heart and the patient warned before a catastrophic event, so the patient can get to a hospital and the problem resolved before the heart fails. One last possibility is that a sufficiently small heart transplant could lead to the implantation of redundant hearts, so that a single failure would not necessarily be disastrous.

All of this could lead to longer lives, which is a good thing.

There are some pretty cool electronics projects there. In particular, this one looks pretty awesome.

It’s a really neat resource for programmers.