Chuck Guzis wrote: This is very, very dangerous. Going without sleep for that long can cause permanent damage. Peace... Sridhar

On 4/21/11 10:11 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: So what does this hazing accomplish, beyond it being 'tradition'? I worked at the Medical College of Wisconsin for a few years, and I never understood why they do this to interns.

On 22 Apr 2011 at 6:04, Al Kossow wrote: ...and they wonder why some people are fearful of physicians... Would you fly as a passenger on a jet whose pilots pulled 30 hour shifts routinely? I wouldn't--hell, I wouldn't ride on a bus whose driver was pulling a 3-day no-sleep shift. Of course, having a dopey-from-no-sleep intern order drugs and perform procedures on your person couldn't possibly go wrong, could it? --Chuck

When I stareted (physics) research, they sent me to get a 'bucket of steam'. Of coruse I realised it was a hoax, but decided to play along. I got a bucket and filled it to adepth of about 2cm with water. Carried it up to the hoaxer and poured it over him with the comment 'sorry, it condensed on the way up here'. My favourite thing to send people to stores for was a 'monochromatic white light source' :-) -tony

The 'cable stretcher' is another one (for when you've cut the wire a little too short ;-)), although of course a tool for tensioning cables when running overhead lines does esixt. The 'noise emitting diode' (by analogy with a 'light emitting diode') is another thing to get newbies to attempt to order ;-) And there's a well-known set of diagrams of non-existant screws -- things like a screw with a step in the middle for use when the holes don't line up. Again, newbies are often sent out to get a box of items from said list. The reverse of this joke is to ask for things that genuinely do exist but sound like they shouldn't. 'All pass filters' for example. Newbies who think they can spot a joke a mile off generally assume this is another spoof... Indeed. The poiint is, though that in all these examples, the newbie has a little time wasted and gets a bit embarassed, but that's all. No real damage, no danger. WHich is rather different to keeping somebody working for 30 hours doing a job that could result in loss of life if it's not done properly. -tony

On Fri, 22 Apr 2011, Fred Cisin wrote: Left handed pipe wrenches are another fun one. (or a spool of flight line, a box of grid squares, etc.) I had a 5 gallon bucket behind a telco rack years ago. It caught water from a roof leak, but I told everyone it was there to catch dropped packets. :) BTW, they actually do make plastic nails that are used in pnumatic brad nailers... g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On 4/24/11 9:35 AM, Tony Duell wrote: Would that be bearing grease made from one's relatives? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

In Brazil we call the crescent wrench the 'engineer tool' because most of them are lazy to get the right tool :) Because the mouth of it opens waay larger than normal pliers, and water pump locking pressure rings need a larger mouth to unlock it

Chave-de-grifo, there is no direct translation to english...You're talking about this, eh? http://conteudo.efacil.com.br/p/05/400/0500751_01.jpg There is a good question...Why is it called "monkey wrench"? :oD I always read that but never had the curiosity to ask... CCtalk is (international) culture! ;oD

I though it was the same Interesting I don't remember ever seeing one of these in Brazil ;oO Very interesting reading, thanks! :D

ROTF!!! We call that "drive alignment tool" or "asus motherboard repair kit" :oD Sure, but it is very hard to take the water pump locking rings with a "universal plier". Ask me how I know :)

On 24 Apr 2011 at 13:31, Fred Cisin wrote: Not exactly the same thing. There really are "knucklebuster" slip- joint pliers, where the pivot slimply slips in detent within a groove. Channellocks use a tongue-and-groove guide as well, so that the pliers don't have the chance to slip out of their detent...and bust your knuckles. "Slip joint" here in the US most commonly applies to the two-position do-nothing-well pliers found in cheap toolkits--although I've found them to be useful for pulling porcupine quills out of a dog's nose... --Chuck

As you may have guessed, I quite like practical jokes. I play them, and I can take them. But... The joke has to be funny to all involved. That means no real danger (to anyone), no major loss or damage. It is not funny if somebody gets connected across a high voltage supply. It's not funny if they end up losing months of results. It's not funny if a patient ends up with the wrong drugs or the wrong doses (even if unintentional). On the other hand, my colour changing adpater (a DE15 plug wired to a DE15 socket with VGA pinouts so that most pins go straight through but the R,G,B signals are cyclically permuted [1] is quite amusing if connectrd to somebody's PC when they are developing a video driver. Well, provided you tell him before he spends too long debugging his code :-) [1] This has a serious use, of course in determining whether a mising colour is due to a problem in the monitor or the video card. -tony

On 4/22/11 4:58 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: And they don't think there's something wrong (and unprofessional) about this practice? It looks (to the layperson) that it's so deeply ingrained in the culture that it has become acceptable and expected. Do the people involved just view it as an acceptable risk, or do they think there just isn't any risk? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

I also don't want to defend it all, and I would suspect that there's a better way to do it, but there is one other benefit I see to the forced endurance. If I have a surgeon doing an 8, 10, or 12 hour procedure on me, I like the idea that the length of time that person needs to be focused and alert is much shorter than the lengths of time that person was dealing with more typical cases during their internship. Also, I suspect that when it comes to the question of accuracy and judgement during long shifts, there are probably bigger factors than just time awake. I learned early on that my coding ability isn't a monotonically decreasing function of time since last sleep. BLS

But is there a good alternate solution other than shorter shifts? Here's the potential downsides: - Lower number of cases seen, requiring either a protracted residency or accepting less skilled graduates. The former seems better than the latter except when you realize how few doctors the American medical school system actually produces, in addition to the real cost of residents having to defer their debts longer. Medical education is highly experiential. This is a bigger problem for surgical programs, but still for medicine/peds/etc. - The subtle shift in medical focus from patient to task. Much is said (and I will not give my opinion on it) in the current "health reform bill" about improving outcomes. This sounds great. Almost nobody wants this as a patient however, because the doctor doesn't see you as you but rather as a goal that must be reached or a disease state that must be quelled. Losing the commitment to the patient only furthers the perception that doctors don't have time for patients as people any more. It starts when patient work is seen as punching a clock and not a calling. This is not good for patients, and it is not good for the profession. - In a related vein, the loss of complete care awareness. This is squishy and is best explained by what happened after residency work hour reform: more work got slogged off on non-clinical personnel or the doctors remaining on duty. Some of this work was unnecessary scut and no one is sad to see it go. However, a fair bit of it was actual care delivery, and one thing that is very important to witness in residency is the natural progression of disease and cure. I know what to expect of a post-op because I saw the patient in the pre-op clinic, in the OR (on my surgery rotation), in the hospital if we had to admit them, and in the post-op clinic when they left. Pieces of this are missing otherwise. You don't know what that wound is supposed to look like on post-op day #2. You don't know that this is an expected effect of medication Y. You may not realize you don't know this until you get out of residency. Mind you, I'm still not saying that crazy-ass long hours in internship is wise. Clearly it is not, and clearly the practice as a whole was excessive (I was at a program that was comparatively kind to its residents, for which I was grateful, because some programs border on abuse). But bad as it is, I think that it is as good as it gets, because erring on the other side tends to have more subtle, long-range effects. Medicine is a dangerous profession for patients (spoken as an MD). New doctors have to start somewhere, and you don't want them turning out badly. I am forever grateful to the patients who knew I was a resident, and saw me anyway. The ones in the hospital didn't have a choice. The ones in the office did. When I graduated from residency, the first thing that struck me as a new junior attending was how little I actually knew. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Computers are like air conditioners. They stop working if you open windows.

I'm not convinced of that either, and I'm a physician! Surgery is probably a bad example, because who do you blame when it goes wrong (i.e., provably human error, not our typical litigious sue-the-pants-off for any complication "gone wrong")? But for non-surgical fields, I still point to continuity of care as the gold standard. Perhaps this is my primary care bias, but continuity means a lot, even in a hospital setting where it is significantly less expected. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- BOND THEME NOW PLAYING: "Thunderball" --------------------------------------

To tie in another thread, I feel that many old-time radho amateurs feel that a Morse test should still be part of the license exam for much the same reason. They had to do it, so do you... -tony

Oh, you can't forget "headlight fluid" either.......

No 'focus powder' to use in video cameras and screens? =D

11+ days wake (woke? waked? Sorry)??? I doubt it :)

I am quite sure that most of us here have spend more than 276 hours of our lives typing something. Of course we've done other things in between. If you're going to allow breaks, then IMHO the whole contest is meaningless. -tony

On 4/22/11 2:27 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Oh hell, I spend that much time typing in two months. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Fri, 22 Apr 2011, Tony Duell wrote: But, with support and accommodations (such as a really long extension cord), many functions could be done with little or no interruption.

Ah, but in the UK, 'portable' mains powered electrical equipment (defined as not needing a tool to move it) may not legally be used in a bathroom (defined as a room contianing a fixed bath or shower) under most circumstances. I woncder if running a 110V Selectric off a 55-0-55V isolating transformer (centre tap to earth) would be legal in a bathroom over here? -tony