Medical Release: Fill & Download for Free

5 years ago I broke my back on a Florida beach. Long story and no alcohol involved. Hospitalized, medicated released with a plastic torso body cast. The full torso cast keeps the back straight and the pressure off of the break enabling the bones to heal. Still excruciating pain. Arriving at the St. Pete airport to go home to Indianapolis walking thru security TSA pulled me aside. I had a note from the Dr. that I was wearing a medical device and to let me thru. No such luck. The “plastic” tested with the wipe for the same substance in bomb making materials. I was then lead to a TSA storage closet where I lay on my back while they removed the cast so they could run it thru the scanner, all the while I lay screaming and crying in pain.

Yes. I was trying to subdue and arrest a woman. She was extremely intoxicated and was violently resisting. I was by myself and there was a large crowd watching. They were becoming angry and were on the verge of assaulting me. Then her brother came running up and pushed me. As he drew back his arm to strike me, I threw a right upper cut. He went down like a sack of potatos.The crowd, and his sister were momentarily stunned. The assailant out weighed me by fifty pounds. He had six inches of reach and height on me. Yet there he lay. From somewhere in the crowd came an awed, subdued “I think he killed the son of a bitch”. My back up arrived. My Sergeant walked up through the now silent crowd, looked at the unconscious man and said “I think you killed the son of a bitch”. (Years later, I was absently watching a movie and in the film the same scenario unfolded, with the same dialog.)I took the break in the action to cuff the now compliant woman and place her in my car. The hood rats stood in stunned silence. We called an ambulance, and the EMS personnel revived and transported him. After medical release, he was arrested.At his initial appearance he was charged with Simple Assault on a Police Officer, a felony in Mississippi. I didn’t think he needed to go to prison for drunkenly defending his sister. I proposed a plea bargain, allowing him to plead to Interfering With the Duties of a Police Officer. He paid a small fine, but avoided prison. I can’t say we ever truly became friends, but he sincerely appreciated that gesture. The whole incident gained me a lot of respect in the projects and a degree of good will.Those who sanctimoniously state “Violence never solved anything” never worked the street.

As others have pointed out, a CPU architecture is an abstract concept.CPU implementations, however, have gotten positively tiny.(Image credit: University of Michigan. Found here.)In the image above, you have a very tiny CPU dwarfed by a grain of rice. It’s been billed as the world’s tiniest computer.At some point, you can’t go much smaller because you have to be able to hook something to it. Very tiny CPUs will likely live on a chip with a lot of other stuff, such as other CPUs, memory, and/or peripherals.That last link goes to the KiloCore chip, which has 1000 CPUs on it. Each CPU is only 0.055mm². It could be much smaller—perhaps a factor of 10 to 20 times smaller—if they moved to 7nm. They fabbed the KiloCore at 32nm.(I give a range of 10 to 20, since I know scaling isn’t perfect, particularly with wires. Perfect scaling would make them 1/20th the size.)Very tiny CPUs would have applications in all sorts of gizmos. Given our aging population, I expect novel healthcare applications to be one space they move into. We already wear FitBits and smart watches and so on to monitor activity.Imagine much tinier modules (with even tinier embedded CPUs) monitoring all sorts of other health parameters, and perhaps controlling medication release.And speaking of tiny CPUs in healthcare-related applications: The 65C02 only has about 11,500 transistors. At least at one time, it was the only CPU certified for use in pacemakers.