Via backchannel, a request to highlight the “signature” wound of the current war: Traumatic Brain Injury.

March is Brain Injury Awareness Month for the Brain Injury Association of America.  Pass the Word, please, as you can and know this is a very probable issue with our injured Vets.

For those who have long supported the Soldier’s Angels Voice Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops (VALOur-IT), this is one of the things the program has been addressing, along with the coputer contact with the world, by providing GPS Units for those wounded service members who are getting out and about. The reason: TBI has an associated symptom of loss of short term memory, and the GPS Units help remind the driver where they were headed.  (Note:  You don’t have to wait until this November to donate to VALOur-IT…SA will be happy to accept donations all year long…even today to help this great cause)

Below is the article Chelsea asked if I could post to help get attention to the cause:

Traumatic Brain Injuries in the Military

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is becoming a common wound of modern warfare. It has even been coined the “signature wound” of the War on Terror. While TBI is becoming more prevalent in wartime activity, many service men and women continue to go undiagnosed. Institutions, like the US Department of Veterans Affairs, are working to make quick and accurate diagnoses in order to prescribe appropriate and effective treatment.

TBI is caused by forced trauma to the head, either by being shaken or hit. The severity of a TBI varies from case to case, but symptoms range from mild concussions to a debilitating state. The majority of TBI’s acquired by military personnel are classified as mild traumatic brain injuries (MTBI). Initial symptoms of MTBI consist of loss of consciousness, disorientation, loss of memory, headache, and temporary loss of hearing and vision. They are often partnered with anxiety, irritability, difficulties processing information, limited concentration amongst other problems experienced down the road. While MTBI is most common amongst the men and women of the armed forces, more severe cases of TBI are happening much more frequently and often require the victim to attended specialty rehabilitative nursing centers, like CareMeridian.

The most common cause of a TBI in the military is due to blasts. There are three degrees of blast injuries where a TBI is common; Primary (due to blast itself), Secondary (due to objects being propelled by a blast) and Tertiary (due to a collision with a third party object). According to the Veterans Health Initiative, active male members of the military from the ages 18-24 are hospitalized with a TBI at a rate of 231 per 100,000 and females 150 per 100,000. Based on military force projections this would mean that 4,141 military personnel are hospitalized on average each year with a TBI, and these numbers often rise during wartimes.

The best prevention for veterans to avert the long-term effects of a brain injury is to recognize the symptoms of a TBI. Once the symptoms are identified an individual should take basic precautionary measures in order to begin the healing and recovery process until a more specific diagnosis can be made.

Service men and women give so much to protect this country and they deserve to come home to a happy and healthy life. Creating awareness about TBI will help ensure their long term health. By helping our veterans, their friends and their families recognize the early warning signs of a TBI, treatment can be sought as early as possible.

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Well, I’m not a real scientist, but I play one on this blog sometimes. The naming of this blog had this concept in mind, as formulated by the reading of “Chaos: The Making of a New Science” by James Gleick, about 15 years ago. Actually, my entire point, I think missed by many, is James Gleick pointed out that chaos is actually organization at a level we fail to take the time to dig for. It’s in the way past the decimal point places, that we round off before we get there, either out of “good enough,” laziness, or computational limitations. It’s order at a very subtle level, while looking exceptionally random to those who don’t take the time to take the journey. Over 20 years ago, I began playing with the creation of fractals on my Macintosh II, sometimes leaving it running all night, just to generate the image way down in the insides of the fractal form. Now, such things are easy to make quickly, and are widely used to generate scenery for movies.

I had always planned, from day one of the blog, to write about this, yet…almost 5 years later, and three iterations of this blog at different places, I have failed to get there yet, however, I feel vindicated today, by real scientists. Fallen rip

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.
[...]

Lets go to the video:

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Take some time to read the article. When Harry Met Sally… video Maybe you’ll get a grasp on the chaos that reigns sometimes.

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So, here I sit on the domain “Chaotic Synaptic Activity,” before the brain scientists figured it out. Sometimes even a blind squirrel finds an acorn in the snow.

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The hype is now is the end of mankind is coming in 2012, based on the fact that that’s the last day listed on the Mayan calender. You know, sometimes you just have to work with finite boundaries and it means nothing more than that’s all the space you have to work on.

Things imitating art may be more of an issue than we think in reality: Apophis is coming.

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Staff Sergeant Matthew Maupin’s remains are coming home to Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport on Saturday, April 26th. The Critical Hour blog has a request for those wishing to honor Matt to line the route to the Union Township Civic Center holding lighted candles. SSGT Maupin was the soldier captured in Iraq in 2004 and was recently found dead. Details of the route for tomorrow, Saturday 4/26/2008 are here. A condolence page to leave a note to Matt’s parents is also available.

SteelJaw Scribe reminds us of the final airlift out of Vietnam in 1975: Operation Frequent Wind in his ongoing excellent “Flight Deck Friday” series. Straight-Jacket full movie

CDR Salamander’s “Fullbore Friday” Numb Accepted download AVP: Alien vs. Predator video Ocean Voyagers movie download Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol ipod chronicles reminds of how one man from Hollywood served his nation well crossing the beaches at Normandy on day one and then further into Europe. The man is Charles Durning.

“Rounds Out!” on Townhall reminds of “Climate Change” with a painting depicting a cooler time in history.

Yid with a Lid presents the speech BhO might have given, had he been at the Reed Sea when Moses parted the waters en route the Promised Land.buy Panic Room

From the Telegraph in the UK:

Chief scientist in sports cars warning to women:

Professor Sir David King said governments could only do so much to control greenhouse gas emissions and it was time for a cultural change among the British public.
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And he singled out women who find supercar drivers “sexy”, adding that they should divert their affections to men who live more environmentally-friendly lives.

His comments were greeted with anger by sports car drivers who insisted that their vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions were tiny compared with those from four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Sir David, who is due to retire as the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser at the end of the year, said individuals needed to change their behaviour.
[...]

I’m guessing the pilots, ESPECIALLY the real go fast guys, who can step it up that one more notch to “buster” speed, will be the next to fall form grace at the green alter of “Climate Change.” Gotta be lots of “bad emissions” from the raw JP-5 dumping into the afterburner section…

Will pilots have the “fortitude” to stand tall and defend their right to turn a liquid into bone rattling sonic booms?

Ya know, if the women are more concerned about staying cool than dating “cool,” they might want to heed the messenger!

Good thing Lex already has made his mark on the future of society…and needs no more fawning babes at his feet, begging for a “Tiger Cruise” of their very own.

On the other hand…think about a world where the Guv’ment tells you who to date…You think they blew it with Katrina? Yeah, standby to standby for that disaster…Yep, we need to tell women how to think, according to Sir King. Will the feminists come out to protest this round of patently obvious misogyny of this line of reasoning?

I think it’s just jealousy hidden behind the current “blame all” crisis of the moment…I bet Sir King never even owned a super car….

Put your links to your best (or…well…anything you have) here…The sights at sea are amazing, and some one a few will witness, unless they look for them.

So, you call yourself a sailor, and you don’t believe in “the Green Flash?” Do you consider your fellow mariners who boast of such siting as more (maybe a lot more) or less on the wrong side of sanity for a moment or a lifetime?

Well, I have seen the phenomena, and now, you can know I’m quite sane, if you are an unbeliever, but at least I saw it in person a few times…

The “why/how” is here.

More real sitings captured here.

Facts and fiction about same…

Do you believe me now, shipmates?

Linking, learning and OOPS! Information coming in!

Found at the Scientific American Mind website, the adventuring into the upper reaches of the atmosphere has a cumulative effect on the thing that makes you think.

From “Into thin air: Altitude’s toll on the brain”:

Douglas Fields
National Institutes of Mental Health
Washington, D.C.

Three attributes of a good mountaineer are high pain threshold, bad memory, and … I forget the third. – R. Douglas Fields

Climbing Mount Everest is not so difficult; the hard part is getting down intact. According to a recent brain imaging study, almost no one does. Of thirteen climbers in the study who attempted Mount Everest, none returned without brain damage. The study also scanned the brains of climbers who attempted less extreme summits. For those of us who love to climb, the results are less than elevating. It seems that almost no one, whether the weekend warrior chaperoned to the summit or the seasoned mountaineer, will return from the high peaks with a brain in the same condition it was in beforehand.
[...]

Some of us will be able, based on a propensity to “get high” in aircraft or climbing, will be able to use this as a defense in our more advanced years to cover our mental errors. But then we know the other people who “get high” also will have that excuse…

Watch Lex’s posts for signs of too many rides when he took his O₂ mask off against the directives of NATOPS.

(Click for the large version)

I can hear it now, a new parody song for NASA’s shuttle crews:

“Ground Control to Major Tom:
“Go out there and put some Duct Tape on”
You can work on the rest of the replacement lyrics yourself. You also can get credit for preforming it on YouTube.

NASA Photo: Expedition 15 Flight Engineer Clay Anderson holds a Crew Equipment Translation Aid cart as he rides on the end of the International Space Station’s robotic arm during STS-118’s third spacewalk. Image: NASA TVAnyhow, if you check out the link above, you’ll see it’s not so much a joke.Now, on the more serious side, think about being a bona fide astronaut and, having scoffed at skydivers all these years (for no real aviator would jump out of a ‘perfectly good’ airplane) and now you are in orbit, above the atmosphere and the safety of being able to depart a potential soon to be disaster and put some space age fabric in the shape of a wing above your head, mumbling to yourself while on the EVA, what Bill Cosby said (“Hope the plane don’t crash!”) and praying that it’s Duct Tape to the rescue on reentry…

I’m thinking it might not be such a silly idea to see if you can make a spacesuit and integrated lifesaving parachute for future Shuttle flights, but then again, I know how much fun freefall really is. Now that I think about it, in WWI, only the Germans supplied their air crews with parachutes, with the Allies believing that, once so equipped, pilots would rather jump than work to get the plane back to home plate. Oh, how wrong they were in that assessment.

If you’d like some real data on the STS-118 “issue,” check this page out to see several videos of the damage.

Too many have already been there and tried it before anyone today could try it: Going lower than the ground in an aircraft.

The USAF has a plan to keep it from happening: Auto-GCAS.

From Defense Tech:

Helping Pilots Avoid the Ground

Aviators have a saying: “You can only tie the record for low flight.”

Well, the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command is installing a system in its jets that is designed to keep future pilots from tying the record. Press Zoom reports that the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System is a software-based technology that has demonstrated a 98 percent effectiveness rate at eliminating aircraft crashes into the ground. The system is ready for operational integration on F-16 Fighting Falcons, F-22 Raptors and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

Auto-GCAS differs from other crash-avoidance systems in that it doesn’t create nuisance warnings and activates only at the last instant to take control and recover the aircraft when it determines collision is imminent. The determination is made when the aircraft is within 1.5 seconds of the “point of no return” and no action has been taken by the pilot.
[...]

In the skydiving world, we have the “AAD” or “Automatic Activating Device” that monitors your rate of descent, and if you reach a certain altitude and are still moving at a fairly high percentage of freefall speed, the system activates a cutter that cuts the loop holding your ripcord pin on your reserve. There are versions designed to pull main parachute ripcords, and are commonly used with military related High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) equipment, but the sport world only uses them for activating a reserve canopy.

I, once, will acting as a jumpmaster for a SEAL just returned from operational deployment, had to get a requal sport jump (AFF Level 4) to get active sport jumping again. The exit was fine, his stability was great, but the plan to knock off turns once 6000′ AGL was reached went out the window. He kept doing turns. At this point, I was falling about 4 feet in front of him, where I had been since turning him loose a few seconds after exiting at 13,000′.

I gave him the hand signal to pull several times, then I began to fly in to position myself next to his main ripcord to back up his thought process. Instead of realizing I was moving, he thought he was turning (using me as a reference point, and not some landmark out in front of him on the ground), so he kept maneuvering to point at me. Net result: I couldn’t get into position to pull either his main or reserve ripcords), about hip position on the right side (main) and heart position on the left for the reserve.

I lost altitude awareness, as had he, so we proceeded, at the speed of the pull of gravity (it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!) towards the pine trees on the south side of the airport. I finally got smart and backed off and reached for my pull out for my main, and as I let go of the pilot chute, my AAD opened my reserve. A quick check of my altimeter put me just a little above 1000′. The setting for the Cyres AAD I was wearing is fixed at 800′, but apparently it comes on about 1200′ to monitor and when it saw the drastic change in the rate of pressure change (indicating rate of fall change) when my main began to open, it activated a little early. I had two clean canopies, so I cut away my main, checked my reserve for controllability, then hung a left turn into the wind and landed.

The student’s AAD also performed as designed. He got a talking to, and so did I from the DZ Owner. He made only one remark, but that’s all he had to say: “They have an AAD, too. It’s not worth losing your life if you’ve done all you are supposed to.”

Then George reminded me that training for students included “If you see your jumpmaster pull, it’s probably a good idea to do the same.” I had said it for years in class, too, but it’s one of those cases you just don’t happen into with regularity.

So, moral of the story:

• Jumpmasters: Don’t forget to pull on time
• Students: Yeah, what they did!

Oh…and I never tried to break the low pull record either.