Civilian IFAK - Infantry First Aid Kits like used in Tucson

NPR had an article about how medic kits were key to saving lives at the Tucson shooting scene. [via BoingBoing]

I copied down the listed contents and I threw together a list on amazon of everything listed as being in the Pima County Sheriff Department's first aid kits as put together by David Kleinman, the medic for the sheriff's SWAT team.

Civilian IFAK - Infantry First Aid Kit < ------ Link to Amazon

Not for boo boos, more for gunshots, stabbings and/or serious trauma.

NOTE: The tourniquet is there only because it was in the article. Tourniquet use must be limited to actual life vs limb scenarios, and then only as a last ditch intervention.

Pictures for Flickr

Took and posted some pictures on Flickr over the weekend to contribute to the image pool for The Consumerist.

Real heroes rarely think of themselves as heroes.

"This isn’t about being a hero — that’s not even close to what it’s about,” Meche said.

Baseball Player Quits, Says "I Don't Deserve $12M"

From this TED talk on Visualizing Medical Data.

10 year purchase volume from amazon.com

I had to call amazon tonight to report a missing shipment. UPS said it was dropped at my side door but there was nothing there. I called to request an investigation, but the operator just went down the path to ordering a replacement.

This being the first time an amazon order ever went missing my curiosity was piqued.

How many times had I ordered from amazon without anything ever going missing? 179 orders. Not bad. Over 200, probably 250 plus items and just now one went missing. I've had damaged packages before, one time an item was damaged beyond use, twice they've damaged the packaging significantly but its contents survived.

Anyway, the easiest way to get a count was from Amazon's "order by year" history.

This lead to the graph below of the number of times that I ordered (not items, not shipments) from Amazon including my first purchase back in 2000. My first purchase from amazon? Deluxe Scrabble, which back then Amazon for $29.99 plus $7.15 shipping. When I bought the same Scrabble Deluxe as a gift for a friend in 2007 they'd raised the price up to $34.05 with free shipping.



Latest purchase? The Office -- Digital Shorts DVD as a birthday present for my wife.

Most expensive? A tie between my wife's pink netbook and my Leupold rimfire scope.

Cheapest? An ipod accessory retractable cable, which was under five bucks with free Amazon Prime two day shipping

Last year I read Beat the Reaper,a novel, and from it I squirreled away this tidbit. It describes how an overworked, under-slept resident stays on top of a workload.

... you give the patient the once-over, keeping a particularly sharp lookout for "iatrogenic" (physician caused) and "nosocomial" (hospital caused) illnesses, which together are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.

I liked it because it was the first time I'd learned the words nosocomial and iatrogrenic. The bit about them adding up to be the eighth leading cause of death I'd assumed that this was an exaggeration as part of the story.

Turns out it may not only be realistic, it might be optimistic, either way, the numbers are hard to track down since CYA trumps self-reporting.

At the core of subcultures lies insanity

Dive far enough into any subculture and two common traits become evident:

1) At its core there is insanity. Appealing, attractive, charming, tempting, beckoning madness.

2) True believers spend inordinate amounts of time fending off the intrusion of reality.

_______

This isn't directed (for now) at any particular website nor group. It's just something I've been kicking around for years.

The first form of this that I coined, unsatisfactorily, parroted Arthur C. Clark's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" with "Dive far enough into any subculture and it becomes indistinguishable from insanity." I think that this form gives the weirdos at the cores of movements far too much credit for simply being different to the point of appearing insane. I now think that there lies in the center of subcultures an actual insane person (or persons) fueling their obsessions and making the less committed actions of non-true-believers seem downright normal by comparison.

Whether high level MMORPG players, car detailing fanatics, sports fans, runners, politics watchers, birders, etc., they are held together by someone who has them self come unglued.

UPDATE: I guess I should admit that I wrote this post after reading this hilarious Washington City Paper article about the website DC Urban Mom.that

Just finished my first run through of our taxes using H&R Block's 2010 tax software.

Our overall tax rate for 2010 was 35%.

Direct taxes sure add up. Between federal income tax, our share of social security & medicare (not including employers' portion), state income tax, real estate tax, car tax, sewer tax, fire tax, sales tax on our new car, gas tax and other sales tax our overall tax rate for 2010 was 35%.

My wife and I are working more than 1/3 of the time to simply cover our direct tax costs. I don't know how to figure out what that fraction would be if you could figure out the indirect tax cost buried in the price of all the goods and services we bought last year.

My tax freedom day last year was May 8th.

Another, even more depressing way to look at is that one and three quarter days of each work week are merely to pay for my taxes.

If I only worked 8 hours per day, I'd be working the first two hours and 48 minutes of each day to pay my taxes.

Twenty one minutes of every hour.

More than a third of my income going directly to government.

By way of comparison the next biggest single line item on our annual budget is the principal and interest on our mortgage.

It is a mere 3.7% (three point seven percent) of our income.

Politicians fear that they would face prosecution if they no longer held the power of their offices to protect them

A conversation with my politics loving brother-in-law yesterday led to me crystallizing one of my long held beliefs into sound bite form. Here goes.

(Allowing for maybe five percent of them who really are in it to try and help make things better) High level politicians are in politics because they are seeking legal cover for their horrific, likely crime filled lifestyles. That is why so many septuagenarian and octogenarian lawmakers refuse to step aside.

Politicians fear that they would face prosecution if they no longer held the power of their offices to protect them from legal troubles.

I will continue operating as though most all politicians are drunks, inside traders, philanderers, rapists, bribe takers, murderers, check kiters, drug users, negligent killers, influence peddlers, slumlords, name droppers, graft seekers and/or pederasts. Or worse.

Before, during and after their time in office.

The most likely way that this fails me if I think that the politicians whose stated (though likely not believed) politics I agree with are "The good ones."

They're not.

They're all scum.

Think of the national or state-level politicians that you know personally.

Or the ones for whom your friends have had the misfortune of being around and/or working for. No no, not your Koolaid drinking, true-believer friends.

High level politicians are all scum.

They're bad people.

And politics didn't make them that way.

They're in politics at that level because they are bad people.

Make no mistake, they're bad people when they are in office, but they are usually already bad people before they get elected.

Yes, they often do find new and exciting ways of being bad once they are in office.

So, in its purest form:

Power corrupts and the corrupt seek greater power.

Hilarious Review of a "Cold Steel" "self-defense" Brookly Bat by Amazon user J. Strickland.

The pinnacle of bat perfection. Blood stains wash off easily with soap and water. Femurs snap like toothpicks under it's irresistible force. Deadbeats pay up instantly at the mere sight of this instrument. I can't imagine how I ever got by without it before. This thing could drop an elephant. Buy this bat.

I just noticed a weird goof in a deleted scene from The Office episode "The Duel".

There is a no-smoking sign in the office marked with the legend "SEC 6405.5," an apparent reference to California Labor Code Section 6405.5 which bans smoking in all workplaces in California, a pointless reference for an office set in Pennsylvania.

Something like this...

Hornady Reloading Gear