From Natick, Massachusetts (HT to Bill Sloat):

Feb. 25, 2013

Imagine a world without dirty clothes. Quoc Truong, physical scientist at Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, wants to make that a reality.

“As a single father of four, I fully understand the rationale for self-cleaning clothing, especially when I look back to the time when my children were younger,” Truong said. “So, when former Army General John Caldwell challenged me to come up with clothing that our Soldiers won’t have to wash, I thought that was a great and stimulating challenge.”

Soldiers cannot avoid getting their uniforms dirty while carrying out their missions, especially on the battlefield. Laundering clothes is time-consuming, adds to the logistics burden on the force, and is not always available to forward-deployed Soldiers, who may come into contact with mud, dirt, water, and an assortment of contaminants such as petroleum, oils, and chemicals.

The fabric Truong helped create has a special durable, super-repellent coating with “dual micro- and nano-size architecture.” When this special coating is applied onto clothing, it will give the surface of the clothing a low critical surface energy, or surface tension. When this surface tension is lower than that of the surface tensions of harmful, toxic liquid chemicals, the toxic chemicals would roll off the fabric on contact. Additionally, fabrics that are coated with this special super-repellent coating showed minimal to no attraction to dust and dirt.

“With minimal or no attractions to dirt and other contaminants, textiles’ frequent launderings will not be necessary, and wash-free clothing could be developed,” Truong said.

Earlier researchers studied microscopic, naturally non-stick surfaces such as the leaves of the lotus and lily flowers, duck feathers, and the feet of a floating water bug, known as the water strider. They found a uniform, repeating “pimples” structure, and they also observed liquid drops’ contact angle as they sit on these micro- and/or nano-structures.

“We go one step further to make our self-cleaning clothing with a special surface coating to resist wetting by oil and dangerous chemicals,” said Truong, who wanted to apply these findings to benefit Soldiers.

Truong submitted a Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, topic on Development and Applications of superoleophobic coatings for textile applications in 2007 based on earlier work on self-cleaning, but more importantly, it was based on Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s recent breakthrough discovery about designing superoleophobic surfaces.

By leveraging MIT’s technical findings, Truong believed he could develop self-cleaning clothing for Soldiers. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Vatican City:

Oct 16, 2012 / 12:06 pm

On the second anniversary of the historic rescue of 33 workers from a mine in Chile, the group’s leader attended a Mass opening the Year of Faith at the Vatican on Oct.11, thanking Pope Benedict for his prayers.

Luis Urzua Iribarren, 54, was shift leader at time of the collapse in the San Jose Mine in Atacama. He was the last to reach the surface during the rescue effort that began on Oct. 11, 2010, and ended two days later.

The Chilean miner traveled to Rome to attend the opening Mass of the Year of Faith and to thank Pope Benedict XVI for his prayers and support during the ordeal that lasted 70 days.

In an interview with CNA, Urzua said that without the help of their Catholic faith, “we would not have survived that harsh trial.”

“I made this visit to thank the Pope for his care, for being an ambassador of faith to the entire world, which is most important,” he said. “The Holy Father has asked us, and we must all do our part.”

During the Mass, Urzua and other workers from around the world received a copy of the documents of the Second Vatican Council from the pontiff. In return, he gave the Pope a letter and a photo signed by each of the 33 miners.

The group was trapped underground after a collapse occurred in the mine on Aug. 5, 2010. Thanks to the meticulous efforts of rescue workers, they were taken out one at a time Oct. 11 and 12 through a special capsule which brought them to the surface from a depth of more than 600 meters. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Champaign, Illinois:

Surgical sutures are mindless threads no more. Researchers have now coated them with sensors that could monitor wounds and speed up healing.

The electronic sutures, which contain ultrathin silicon sensors integrated on polymer or silk strips, can be threaded through needles, and in animal tests researchers were able to lace them through skin, pull them tight, and knot them without degrading the devices.

The sutures can precisely measure temperature—elevated temperatures indicate infection—and deliver heat to a wound site, which is known to aid healing. And John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and inventor of the smart sutures, imagines that they could also be laden with devices that provide electrical stimulation to heal wounds. “Ultimately, the most value would be when you can release drugs from them in a programmed way,” he says. The researchers could do that by coating the electronic threads with drug-infused polymers, which would release the chemicals when triggered by heat or an electrical pulse.

The smart sutures, reported online in the journal Small, rely on silicon-based devices that flex and stretch. Rogers and his colleagues make the devices with silicon membranes and gold electrodes and wires that are just a few hundred nanometers thick and patterned in a serpentine shape. The technology, which they have also used in inflatable catheters and medical tattoos (see “Stick-On Electronic Tattoos”), is being commercialized by MC10, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based startup Rogers cofounded (see “Making Stretchable Electronics”).

The researchers first use chemicals to slice off an ultrathin film of silicon from a silicon wafer. With a rubber stamp, they lift off and transfer the nanomembranes to polymer or silk strips. Then they deposit metal electrodes and wires on top and encapsulate the entire device in an epoxy coating.

They have built two types of temperature sensors on the sutures. One is a silicon diode that shifts its current output with temperature; the other, a platinum nanomembrane resistor, changes its resistance with temperature. The micro-heaters, meanwhile, are simply gold filaments that heat up when current passes through them.

All the materials used in the devices are safe for use in the body …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Erlanger, Kentucky:

What started as a summer job at a newly built chili business has become a 50-year pursuit and source of pride for employee Mike Bramlage.

He and Dixie Chili at 3176 Dixie Highway are celebrating their 50th anniversary this month.

The Erlanger location opened on Aug. 10, 1962 — also Bramlage‘s first day on the job.

“My mom asked them if they needed any help. They said they were really looking for some young people to work at the restaurant. She told them, ‘I have one of those at home,’ “ Bramlage said.

The location will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this week — and honoring Bramlage.

“I’m not at all surprised that we made it 50 years,” said owner Spiros Sarkatsannis. “We have always been very successful.”

Bramlage, on the other hand, never planned to stay so long.

“I was just going to work one summer, but it turned into 50 summers. You know the old saying: time flies,” he said.

He attributes his own dedication in part to the kindness the Sarkatsannis family has always shown him.

“I have worked with all six Sarkatsannis brothers and have had a good relationship with the family. They have treated me really well,” Bramlage said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Sometimes, sports has moments where athleticism, a career of hard work, and determination combine to produce a jaw-dropping moment. This is one of them:

If Major League Baseball forces the video from YouTube, this link should still work (and it has better video quality).

Dictation in Apple’s Mountain Lion is a game-changer.

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media on Tuesday evening and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday morning.

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I composed this column using what might as well be a new computer.

It really isn’t new at all. In fact, it’s only a few months away from the expiration of its extended warranty. Incredibly, a $20 system upgrade has transformed it into a heretofore unimaginable powerhouse.

It’s likely that most readers here don’t know that I have been a big fan of Apple’s Macintosh for 27 years, going back to before the things even had hard drives. Back then, Arthur Young, where I worked, was the only one of the then-Big Eight CPA firms using Macs for anything meaningful (it might have, cough-cough, had something to do with the fact that Apple was a client). Those who have known me for a long time certainly remember that many years ago I was often a pain in the rear end about how technologically superior Macs were at the time (because they were).

My preference for Macs is by no means the same thing as saying that I’m a big fan of Apple itself, or even a blinders-on acolyte of its late founder Steve Jobs. As a company, it seems that Apple has been too quick to claim full credit for things others largely developed, and far too eager to legally harass and intimidate critics and “leakers.” Al Gore’s continued presence on the company’s Board of Directors is more than a little disturbing. As much as one can’t help but be impressed to the point of awe with the development, marketing, and commercial success of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, I’ve never been crazy about and don’t own any of them, and am among the few holdouts who believe that phones should primarily be for conversation.

Until Saturday, I had begun to think of my current Mac as a nice machine that does a serviceable but insufficiently swift job of helping me get things done — quite a bit better than most Windows-based machines ever could, but not really cutting edge. Then I installed Mountain Lion.

Somehow, even on a clunky old MacBook like mine, virtually every task moves far more quickly than on any Mac I’ve ever owned, even brand new ones straight out of the box. That alone was easily worth twenty bucks and an hours-long download on a pretty fast Internet connection. (Confession: Part of my reaction to the speed improvement was the spoiled user’s lament: “Where the heck have you guys been the past two years?” Users — can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.)

The speed improvement is really nice. But, at the risk of being seen as applying for readmission to the cult, Mountain Lion’s dictation program is truly transcendent and insanely great (there I go).

Using it is ridiculously simple. First, make a one-time selection to enable dictation in System Preferences. Then, with your cursor appropriately placed in a program or form’s entry area, press the Function (fn) key twice. A small dictation icon pointing to where your text will begin when you start speaking appears. To interrupt dictation after speaking for a while to collect your thoughts, press the Function key once; what you’ve said thus far will appear. Press the Function key again when you’re ready to resume. To end dictation, press the Function key twice or click “Done” in the dictation icon. That’s all there is to it.

Compare that to what one must do to get dictation working (sort of) in Windows 7: Select speech recognition; set up microphone; take speech tutorial; and train your computer to better understand you.

For those unfamiliar with speech recognition technology, the last step just noted isn’t a joke. Before achieving acceptable accuracy, at least until recently all but the highest-end programs have to get acclimated to your voice, requiring users to spend time reading “See Spot run” exercises before beginning live use. Although an Apple tech support representative told me that the company has not released any estimates about the accuracy of Mountain Lion’s dictation, what I have experienced thus far with absolutely no set-up is at least 95% — and Apple says “The more you use it, the better it understands you.”

To the extent I could verify them (in English only), the claims Apple makes on its information page about dictation appear to be accurate. One reviewer has panned its roughly 30-second limitation on a single dictation stream. Given the ability to almost instantly pause and resume with the Function key, I don’t see how that’s really a valid complaint.

So how did Apple do this? The “secret” is that the computer which is interpreting and then rendering your speech isn’t yours. It’s Apple’s, reached through Director Al Gore’s “invention” (i.e., the Internet, for those who don’t remember the 2000 presidential campaign). This means that the company can throw all the processing power required make its recognition capabilities robust, while still giving users with Macs that are even four or five years old the ability to join in the fun.

As I see it, if you don’t have a Mac running Mountain Lion, your computer is seriously out of date.

The company which Steve Jobs built, left involuntarily, returned to save and then transformed has just opened the door to productivity-increasing, life-enhancing, and economy-improving possibilities one can only begin to imagine — and yes, Apple, while improving on the accumulated technology of predecessor efforts which were never able to make what they had into something the average person can and will use, including on their iPads and soon their iPhones, is the company which built it. Too many big-government advocates who should be thanking God every day for private-industry breakthroughs such as these, including our incumbent President, instead act as if they deserve the credit because many of Apple’s employees commute to and from work every day on government roads and transit systems. Give me a break.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Friday (link won’t work until then) after blackout expires.

Money quote and probable engine starter for a lot of readers: “As I see it, if you don’t have a Mac running Mountain Lion, your computer is seriously out of date.”

Milton Friedman was born 100 years ago today. Tributes abound.

For my money, “The Pencil” is the best vignette he ever did, and the best elucidation as to why government and central control will never be able to duplicate, let alone outperform, what free people in a free market can orchestrate and produce:

“No one person in the world knows how to make a pencil” (utterly from scratch, including the production of all components and tools of the trades involved in producing the components).

From About.com:

“I fish only for edible fish, and hunt only for edible game even in the laboratory.” – Willis Haviland Carrier on being practical.

In 1902, only one year after Willis Haviland Carrier graduated from Cornell University with a Masters in Engineering, the first air (temperature and humidity) conditioning was in operation, making one Brooklyn printing plant owner very happy. Fluctuations in heat and humidity in his plant had caused the dimensions of the printing paper to keep altering slightly, enough to ensure a misalignment of the colored inks. The new air conditioning machine created a stable environment and aligned four-color printing became possible. All thanks to the new employee at the Buffalo Forge Company, who started on a salary of only $10.00 per week.

The ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’ (U.S. Pat# 808897) granted in 1906, was the first of several patents awarded to Willis Haviland Carrier. The recognized ‘father of air conditioning’ is Carrier, but the term ‘air conditioning’ actually originated with textile engineer, Stuart H. Cramer. Cramer used the phrase ‘air conditioning’ in a 1906 patent claim filed for a device that added water vapor to the air in textile plants – to condition the yarn.

In 1911, Willis Haviland Carrier disclosed his basic Rational Psychrometric Formulae to theAmerican Society of Mechanical Engineers. The formula still stands today as the basis in all fundamental calculations for the air conditioning industry. Carrier said he received his ‘flash of genius’ while waiting for a train. It was a foggy night and he was going over in his mind the problem of temperature and humidity control. By the time the train arrived, Carrier had an understanding of the relationship between temperature, humidity and dew point.

Industries flourished with the new ability to control the temperature and humidity levels during and after production. Film, tobacco, processed meats, medical capsules, textiles and other products acquired significant improvements in quality with air conditioning. Willis and six other engineers formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1915 with a starting capital of $35,000 (1995 sales topped $5 billion). The company was dedicated to improving air conditioning technology.

In 1921, Willis Haviland Carrier patented the centrifugal refrigeration machine. The ‘centrifugal chiller’ was the first practical method of air conditioning large spaces. Previous refrigeration machines used reciprocating-compressors (piston-driven) to pump refrigerant (often toxic and flammable ammonia) throughout the system. Carrier designed a centrifugal-compressor similar to the centrifugal turning-blades of a water pump. The result was a safer and more efficient chiller.

Cooling for human comfort, rather than industrial need, began in 1924, noted by the three Carrier centrifugal chillers installed in the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Michigan. Shoppers flocked to the ‘air conditioned’ store. The boom in human cooling spread from the department stores to the movie theaters, most notably the Rivoli theater in New York, whose summer film business skyrocketed when it heavily advertised the cool comfort. Demand increased for smaller units and the Carrier Company obliged.

In 1928, Willis Haviland Carrier developed the first residential ‘Weathermaker’, an air conditioner for private home use. The Great Depression and then WW2 slowed the non-industrial use of air conditioning. After the war, consumer sales started to grow again. The rest is history, cool and comfortable history.

Willis Haviland Carrier did not invent the very first system to cool an interior structure, however, his system was the first truly successful and safe one that started the science of modern air conditioning. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

It was worse than the seasonalized numbers indicate.

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday.

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It’s hard to decide which aspect of the horrid April employment report the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday is the most troubling: the understated unemployment rate, the awful raw number of jobs added, their suspect seasonal conversion, or the sickening attempt at positive spin by the Obama administration’s labor secretary.

As to the genuineness of the official seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, the jig is basically up. It’s clear that many Americans, even among the relatively disengaged, have long since figured out that the official figure, which dipped to 8.1% in April, doesn’t include an extraordinary and unprecedented number of those who have given up looking for work. At 63.6%, the labor force participation rate is back to where it was in the early 1980s. Qualitatively, and despite a few years during which baby boomers have begun to collect Social Security, today’s rate is worse, because the frequency of stay-at-home parenting was far higher three decades ago. Zero Hedge has calculated that a participation rate equal to its post-1980 average would have generated an unemployment rate of 11.4%. Even establishment media reports from the likes of the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, acknowledged that April’s rate drop occurred “only because more Americans gave up looking for work.”

It’s hard to understate how deeply disappointing April raw numbers of jobs added were, and how lucky the administration was (at least I hope it’s luck) that the seasonal conversions to 115,000 and 130,000 jobs added overall and in the private sector, respectively, came in as high as they did.

In early February, I wrote: ”[T]he acid test for Team Obama’s claim that the economy is finally legitimately recovering will come during the next five months (February through June).”

They’re flunking:

Despite a clearly larger pool of people who want to work or could be looking for work, through three of the first five months of the acid test period, this year’s economy has added fewer raw jobs than the 2004-2006 average for those same months. It has also added fewer than last year. The trend this year is even worse: February was okay, March trailed where it needed to be, and April stunk to high heaven. Sadly, it all makes sense. Last year’s peak in gas prices came in early May, about a month later than what (we hope) was this year’s early-April high point. In 2011, job creation in May and June fell off badly compared to what was needed. May and June 2012 seem to be on track for a repeat — or worse, as gas prices will almost certainly be higher than what motorists paid last year.

Most Americans don’t appreciate how truly bad the situation is because April’s seasonal adjustments worked in the administration’s favor. Somehow, even though the economy really added 283,000 and 233,000 fewer jobs in April 2012 than it did in April 2011, and 2010, respectively, April’s seasonally adjusted result was only 136,000 lower than 2011 and 124,000 lower than 2010. I’m not saying that the calculations were cooked (seasonal adjustments in March made things look a bit worse than the really were that month), but it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect that the 896,000 jobs actually added in April would have generated a zero or even negative result after seasonal conversion. I’ve been saying for years that relying solely on seasonally adjusted numbers during a time of abnormal economic volatility is foolish, and that the press’s almost universal failure to even look at the raw numbers in such times is derelict.

Unfortunately, those who believe that the BLS is no longer walled off from political influence gained three forms of support for their argument this month.

First, the bureau’s “Birth/Death” adjustment, which incorporated 206,000 jobs into April’s raw number, seems abnormally high and without strong basis. The adjustment in April 2011 was 172,000. We’re really supposed to believe that thousands more Americans are starting up enterprises than were doing so a year ago, and that they generated 20% more jobs than such people did a year ago (net of bankruptcies and other business terminations)? Subtracting Birth/Death from April in both years means that the raw number of job additions the bureau found through its normal survey methods dropped by over 30%.

Second, the employment report’s verbiage seemed like an attempt to water down the bad news in a vain attempt to minimize the damage. Unlike the vast majority of previous months when the news was better, the authors failed to mention the particularly weak number of seasonally adjusted 130,000 private-sector jobs added (130,000). It made sure to remind us that there were “gains averaging 252,000 per month for December to February” (like we care now?). It also decided to trumpet the seasonally adjusted 62,000 jobs added in “professional and business services,” even though the raw gains in that broad category were less than in each of the previous two Aprils, and despite the fact that this April’s number included 21,000 positions added at temporary help services. (Temps, a segment which is barely 2% of the private workforce, have made up over 740,000, or almost 28%, of the 2.66 million jobs added to private-sector payrolls since the recession officially ended in June 2009.)

Finally, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’s related press release was an arrogant exercise in see-no-evil partisanship, as seen in these excerpts (my comments are in italics):

“I would characterize our growth as durable and steady. For 26 straight months, we have added private sector jobs. The national unemployment rate has fallen a full point in the last eight months. Layoffs are continuing to come down and are now back to 2006 levels. (Mass layoffs may be down, but unemployment claims, the better indicator of overall layoffs, were lower during every week in 2006 than during any week so far this year.)

“In April, our largest gains — 62,000 new jobs — were in good-paying business and professional services careers, meaning more architects, engineers, computer programmers and consultants are finding jobs. (Uh, over one-third of them were temps, and most temps aren’t particularly well paid.)

… “We’re on the right path, and we know our recovery would be even stronger if Congress hadn’t blocked almost every single proposed investment in the American Jobs Act. (Because AJA will work just as well as the stimulus did — oh, wait a minute…)

… “Going forward, we have a choice to make. We can either make investments in things like education, transportation and new sources of energy … Or we give more tax breaks to wealthy Americans who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them. (Team Obama’s current solution is hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases scheduled to kick in on January 1, 2013.)

This is delusional. All the lipstick in the world can’t disguise how ugly this pig is — and in case you’re wondering, I really am referring to the jobs report.

The only reasonable response to April’s employment report and the Labor Secretary’s reaction is “OMG.” As in, “Obama Must Go.”

Impressive — and fun:

Can your drummer do this?

From Houston (video at link):

Friday, April 20, 2012

A Houston hospital is the last place you’d expect to find love. But, it actually happened to two young people were waiting for heart transplants at the same time.

Linda Thibodeaux and Jordan Merecka like watching alligator shows, and they like to cook.

Linda said, “I do things my way and he does things his way, but somehow we seem work together.”

And they both have … new hearts.

Jordan said, “She got her transplant May 11 and I got Syncardia May 22.”

Their romance began when in a hospital. They were waiting for heart transplants at the same time. When a heart became available last May, it matched Linda. To keep Jordan alive, Texas Children’s surgeons gave him the new artificial heart.

It made national news. Jordan’s face was on a JumboTron in Times Square. But it was hard. At 18, living on a mechanical heart, still waiting for a heart transplant.

Linda Thibodeaux understood. This was her second heart transplant.

“Our physical therapists and our nurses thought we should meet,” Jordan explained,

Jordan came to visit, dragging the 400 pound console that ran the artificial heart.

He sad, “They brought Linda out of her room and her mask and everything and I was on big blue in the hallway. And I’m not going to lie — it was kind of an awkward meeting at first.”

“I don’t think we really knew what to think yet,” Linda said.

But they had so much in common.

“I’d never met anyone my age who was going through pretty much the same exact thing,” Linda said.

“It was really nice to have someone to talk to who understood what I was going through,” said Jordan.

Linda added, “Its a connection you can’t really have with anyone else.”

Linda was the hospital for the five months Jordan was on the artificial heart.

He said, “There was hope I could live a normal life like she was doing.”

He was near death in October, when they found a donor heart.

Linda said, “I felt like myself getting a whole new heart again, but it was him and it was a beautiful moment.”

As Jordan and Linda recovered, their friendship grew into a romance.

“Seems like we’ve come so far and both doing amazing,” Linda said. “It’s wonderful.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.