The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

The UC San Diego Center for the Future of Surgery (love that moniker) has demonstrated a first that I’m not sure I’d want to be part of:

…surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center removed an inflamed appendix through a patient’s vagina, a first in the United States. Following the 50-minute procedure, the patient, Diana Schlamadinger, reported only minor discomfort. Removal of diseased organs through the body’s natural openings offers patients a rapid recovery, minimal pain, and no scarring. Key to these surgical clinical trials is collaboration with medical device companies to develop new minimally-invasive tools.

Not that I could be a part of that particular surgery, being a guy and all that.  But a very interesting part of the story for me is the patient’s decision to allow release of her name.  Diana’s a grad student in UC San Diego’s Molecular Biophysics Training Program, a mouthful all its own; she says that “the surgery appealed to me because the work and study I do every day relates to science research and discovery.”  Okay, that’s one very cool student.

Somehow I forgot to mention in yesterday’s robotics post the fact that iRobot Lead Roboticist Brian Yamauchi is a Clarion Workshop alum. Brian, whose website lists many of the project’s he’s working on, once described the value of the Workshop in his line of work as follows:

I was already good at creative thinking, and so were all of my classmates, but the real value was the life experience of being immersed in an environment with people who were passionate about storytelling and science fiction.

Another Workshop alum whose not currently a writer, Mark Nall of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, had a similar positive reaction:

One problem that many people have in technical fields is expressing complex topics to non-technical people. Clarion has helped me quite a bit in this area. With the lunar architecture about to be rolled out, I spend a lot of time speaking with people about why we are returning to the Moon, and what we will do when we get there. The workshop has helped me get through the jargon, and get to the story that people can understand.

Mark was in the news last week doing just that, explaining the rationale for his latest project, updating our maps of the moon in order to have a clearer understanding of its geography.

Mark and Brian actually crossed paths a while back at the Lunar Commerce Executive Roundtable; at the time, neither knew the other had attended Clarion. I guess space is a small world too…

As many of America’s great newspapers continue their decline into oblivion, one result is the cheapening of daily business sections, and especially the Monday business section.  Sometimes this leads to news that otherwise wouldn’t show up in the paper, including this morning’s Los Angeles Times article and sidebar on robots.  Much of the article has that “Japan’s in the lead again’ feel that pervades American stories on that nation’s technologies, but the sidebar’s recounting of Japan’s long love affair with robot-like devices is particularly interesting:

Japan’s love affair with robots could be said to be more than 300 years old. Wooden wind-up dolls known as karakuri appeared as early as the 17th century.

Especially famous is a kimono-clad tea-serving machine considered one of the world’s first “robots.” It carried a bowl of tea on a tray from the host to the guest, waited patiently until the guest replaced the bowl and then returned to the host.

Based on Western gun- and clock-making technology, these robots were designed as helpers or crowd-pleasers.

Speaking of crowd-pleasers, my favorite robot is the Roomba vacuum-cleaner robot from iRobot, the Burlington, Mass., company whose 2002 corporate milestones include a June search for terrorists in Afghanistan and the September launch of the Roomba.  Their website’s demo video is an unintentionally funny compilation alternating between a Roomba cleaning the house and various military robots speeding across unfriendly terrain, leaving one to think, if only they could sweep up in Afghanistan like they’re doing on that nice kitchen floor.  Or maybe that’s just me.