Pneumonochrome

I think I’m going to try to start a weekly post where I briefly discuss some medical treatment that I think is neat, interesting, cool, amazing, or otherwise worth mentioning. This week, I’m going to talk about ECMO, or ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. You’re welcome to click on through to Wikipedia to read about it there, or you can just read my short summary below.

ECMO is used in some cases where a person’s lungs aren’t working well enough for them to get enough Oxygen. It works as follows:

1. Blood is removed from a large vein in the patient’s body.
2. That blood crosses a special membrane that causes carbon dioxide to be released and oxygen to be absorbed.
3. The blood is returned to the patient’s body either through a large artery or a large vein.

This way, the patient gets the oxygen he needs, even though his lungs aren’t working well. It’s already used with newborn babies when their lungs aren’t working well, whether because of infection, underdevelopment, or trauma. You can check out the Wikipedia article if you’re curious about when the blood is returned via an artery and when it is returned via a vein.

One of the things I think is cool about it, though, is that it’s under investigation for the management of Hanta Virus Respiratory Syndrome. When a person in the US gets the Hanta Virus* it almost always causes lung problems. The person’s lungs fill up with junk, leaving no room for air to go in and out (this is a really simplified way of talking about ARDS) The standard treatment is mechanical ventilation, but that can cause injury to the lungs and isn’t as effective as it could be because the lungs are full of stuff, rather than just not moving like they should.

That’s why I think it’s so cool that they’re looking into ECMO for treatment of it. There’s no guarantee it’ll be the best approach, or any better than the current approach, but it’s a cool way of approaching the problem, I think.

*I said, “When a person in the US gets the Hanta Virus” because the strains that are more common in Europe and Asia cause a very different set of symptoms.

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I bet it’s out there somewhere. We live in a world where the average computer user probably has at least 5 different “accounts” that require that user to have a password. I’d be willing to bet that most of them have between 10 and 20 such accounts. Some of these accounts are going to require the user to occasionally change that password, no two accounts, it seems, do this at the same time.  I think there are laws against it.  These laws were developed by people who hate sanity and happiness.

So we’re left in a situation where a person could potentially have to remember 20 different passwords at the same time.  The best security, of course, would be to have a different password for each different account, each of which follows the conventional rules of password security, and all of which are changed on a regular basis.   But for the user who has 20 different accounts, that means remembering 20 apparently random strings of 8 or more characters, and is beyond the abilities of most people I know.

Have you ever sat at a website, trying to log in, but unable to remember what your password was?  I know I have.

Most people get around this problem in one of the following ways, or a combination of both:

1)They use weak passwords.  Weak passwords, such as dictionary words or names, are easier to remember than strong passwords that resemble something like this Jlw#s2Ml&.

2)When the mandatory password changes come around, they cycle through a short list of passwords, and do their best to change all their passwords whenever they have to change one, keeping all accounts on the same password, and cycling through 4-6 strong passwords.

This second method is, in my mind, the better way of doing it.  Ultimately, if you use a strong password, the second way should be fairly sufficient.  Unfortunately, some organizations require you to use a unique password each time you change it, keeping a history of old passwords.  These organizations also tend to be the ones that require password changes the most frequently, as much as every 2 or 3 months.

I happen to have an account with such an organization, and to be honest, it’s one of the biggest pains in my butt ever.  To reduce the craziness that would ensue from changing 50 or so passwords every 3 months, I don’t keep that account in sync with other accounts, but because of this, I have to keep the password recorded somewhere to reduce the number of times I have to call the stupid helpdesk to have the password reset, thereby reducing the security of my account.

It seems that by being so draconian regarding the creation and changing of passwords, they are being counter productive, resulting in poorer security than there would be if they relaxed a little bit.  If they allowed passwords to be reused after a certain amount of time, or a certain number of uses, for example, I’d be able to treat this account like every other account I have, and I wouldn’t need to write the password down in order to make sure I knew what it was.

Well, it looks like Apple has released some new iPod software for the 5th (5.5th) generation iPods.  It just lists “Bug Fixes” as the content of the new update, so I don’t have much hope of having any of the cool features that the 160GB iPods do on my 80GB model, but maybe some day.  I can’t see any real reason I wouldn’t be able to have those features on this one, the video system seems pretty much the same.  Meh, I didn’t notice too many bugs, except those associated with syncing with Outlook’s Calendar, and I’ve worked around those already.

Maybe they’ll surprise me though… or maybe not.  It just finished restarting, and it doesn’t look like it’s got any new features.  Oh well.

It’s a happy, happy thing.  I’ve wanted this functionality (yes, I know all of it was present with hot-keys rather than a separate application in Mac OS a long time ago) in Windows for a long time, and it’s nice to see it actually there.  I’ve used it a few times in the last couple of days writing quick how-to’s for people to help them figure out our lecture podcasts.

I don’t have much else to post today, as I’ve been buried in studies all day long, and haven’t had time to think about much.

I almost missed today.

It’s been a busy day.  I’ve got two big tests tomorrow, one on Monday and two more on Wednesday.  I’ve been studying all day and just looked at the time and realized I needed to post if I was going to stay up with NaBloPoMo. So I’m taking a break from studying histology to blog about something I learned earlier today.

Windows Vista has SymLinks!  This page details how to make/work with them.  There are so many times I’ve wished Windows had SymLink, especially after spending a lot of time working with Linux boxes.  The things are just so danged handy.

The first thing I did with a symlink?  I used it to let an addon I use for World of Warcraft, called ProfessionsBook work across my multiple accounts.  It was as easy as creating a Symlink called ProfessionsBook.lua in every SavedVariables directory but one, and pointing them at the real lua file in the directory I didn’t make the symlink in.  Aaaah happiness