The Easiest Way To Save A Life: Give Blood

Health, Medical

IMG_20120909_112118On Sunday, I was exhausted from being up until 2am.  Still, an opportunity presented itself.  There was a blood drive going on and I decided to donate.  Now, I’m no stranger to giving blood.  I’ve done it before.  I’ve even blogged about it.  Still, this is an important subject so I figured I’d blog about it again.

The whole process of giving blood is easy.  When you arrive at a blood drive, you’ll be asked to sign in and will be given some information about blood donations to read.  When you are called, you then go to a private area to be asked a few questions and some minor medical tests performed (blood pressure, pulse, etc.)  The worst of these is the hemoglobin test where a finger is stuck to get a drop of blood to test.  Even this only hurts for a second.  When the tests are over, you will be left alone with a computer to be asked a series of questions that might affect your eligibility to donate.

IMG_20120909_112310Once you are done with these, the donating process begins.   You will be escorted to a cot for you to lie down on and some kind of squeeze ball (or in my case horse) to compress.  (This helps keep the blood flowing in your arm.)  Your arm will be cleaned with iodine (to prevent any infections) and prepped the needle stick.  Even though I’ve given blood dozens of times, I always look away for this just in case I flinch.  There’s a sharp pinching feeling but it quickly subsides.  Soon enough, you are filling up the bag.

bloodWhen you’re done (about 10 minutes later), they fill a few vials (to be used in tests to ensure your blood is clean) and then the needle will be removed.  (This is entirely painless, actually.)  You apply pressure and raise your arm for a few minutes, get a bandage put on, and then carefully get up.  Finally, you go to the snack table where you dine on cookies and juice (the extra sugar and sitting still helps prevent you from getting dizzy).

Once that bag of blood leaves the donation center, it can be used for three people.  For a mere half hour to hour of your time, three lives can be saved.  Since you can give blood every 8 weeks, you can theoretically save 18 people a year.  However, it always seems like the blood supply barely covers the donations needed.  44,000 donations are needed every day.  That’s 16 million donations a year.  According to the Red Cross’ Blood Facts and Statistics Page, only 16 million are obtained per year.  This means that the slightest fluctuation in our blood supply could mean people dying for lack of a blood transfusion.

IMG_20120909_114725_rotatedSeptember 11th marks a day when a horrible act was perpetrated.  However, it also marks a day when the world came together.  When people joined as one to try to help those who were hurt.  Over the years, divisiveness settled back in as is human nature.  However, let’s rekindle this spirit of helping one another and keep it alive.  Do something that will save the life of someone else.  Someone that you don’t know.  That someone could be black, white, Democrat, Republican, Jewish, Christian, Atheist, etc.  The thing that matters is that they are human and your blood donation could save their life.  Go to http://www.redcrossblood.org/ and make an appointment to give blood.  Go save some lives.

Disclaimer: I was not compensated in any way for this post.  This post is purely my own opinion.

Backup Often… But Not Too Often!

Computers, embarrassing, TechyDad.com

This past weekend was a busy one.  It all started on Saturday night.  I came home to find an e-mail in my inbox alerting me to a problem with my dedicated server.  It seems as though TechyDad.com had somehow filled up the partition by growing to 44GB large!

Now, TechyDad.com (along with TheAngelForever and the other sites I run) don’t usually take up that much room.  Not nearly that much.  I began performing some backups and looking at some old databases that might be taking up the extra space.  At first, I couldn’t find anything.

Then, I located it.  The directory where I backed up my mySQL databases was about 39GB large.  As I looked through the directory, I realized what went wrong.  The previous day, I had noticed that my daily backup routine was failing to e-mail me the file.  Thinking that it might be the size of the backups, I altered which databases were backed up.  Then, realizing that I’d need to wait a day to see the results, I set the backup to occur every 15 minutes.

Then, I made my big mistake: I got distracted.  Other matters came up and I forgot all about testing the backups.  But the backups didn’t forget.  They kept going.  Every 15 minutes they would complete another backup.  Every hour, 4 backups would be done.  In no time at all, megabytes of backups turned into gigabytes until the entire disk was flooded.

Thankfully, once the server was running properly again (thanks to plenty of help from a friend of mine), fixing the root cause was easy.  I set the backups to run once a day and I deleted the extra backup files.  Before long, we were back to normal operations.

There are three lessons to be learned here.  First, everyone messes up, including Techy Dads.  Second, backup often… but not too often.  And third, don’t get distracted when you’re doing important work!

Aloha Friday: School Time

Aloha Friday, JSL, NHL, School

school-boundThis was the first week of school for NHL and JSL.  NHL is now in the fourth grade.  After a very rough second grade and some moments in the third grade that made us want to break down and cry, we’ve got some hope that this year might improve.

JSL, meanwhile, is now starting kindergarten in the same building as NHL.  The transition hasn’t been easy.  He’s embarking on a brand new adventure, but he is scared of the change.  Drop offs have been filled with tears (both his and B’s).  Still, once he gets into the groove, I know he’ll have a blast.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: How have your kids taken to the start of the school year?

P.S. If you haven’t already, try out my Twitter applications: FollowerHQ and Rout.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha Friday by Kailani at An Island Life

Aloha #155

As Many People As Stars In The Sky

Geeky Pursuits

Every so often, I see something that makes me geek out a bit… or a lot.  Most times, the "geek out" can be cured with a tweet or two, but sometimes 140 characters isn’t nearly enough.  Sometimes I need a whole blog post.

Today’s Geek Out was inspired by a tweet by Phil Plait, aka BadAstronomer:

PhilPlaitTweet

My first thought was: What if people were as spaced out (relative to our size) as stars are?  Finding the average human height turns out to be a bit tricky.  Different countries have different average heights.  In addition, men and women tend to be different heights.  Averaging the two figures (men and women) on this page gives me 66.6 inches.  Of course, the rest of my figures are in metric, so let’s convert that.  The average person is about 1.665 meters tall.

human-height

Now, Phil’s tweet indicated that a star’s "elbow room" was 40 million times it’s width (on average).  Scaled down to human-sized figures, this would be 66,600 kilometers between each human.  Arrange the people in a grid and they would each have a square foot area of 4,435,560,000 km (66,000 times 66,600) all to themselves.

person-space-labeled

Now, we’ve run into a problem.  The Earth has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometers.  There simply isn’t enough square footage to separate two people on the entire planet Earth.  In fact, the only planets whose surface area would be big enough to support two or more humans at "relative star distance" would be Jupiter (13 people) and Saturn (9 people).  Uranus and Neptune would be only be able to support 1 person each and the other planets are simply too small.

population

Therefore, counting only planetary size and requiring at least 1 "relative star distance" per person, the solar system’s population would be a whopping 24.

Now, obviously, there isn’t a tiny amount of stars in existence.  Thanks to the huge Universe (impossibly huge, unimaginably huge), there are a lot of stars in the sky.

There are somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy and possibly as many as 100 billion galaxies.  This means that there is somewhere around 10 sextillion stars in the known Universe.  (For those keeping count, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.)  The biblical pledge to "make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky" was really saying something.  One hopes that we’ve invented space travel by then, because that would be one crowded Earth.

But how crowded?  If we magically increased the world population to 10 sextillion right now, how much space would you and I have to live on?  To make things simple, we’ll also magically make every square inch of the Earth able to house a human being.  Even the oceans and mountains would be fair game.

With 10 sextillion people and a surface area of the Earth as specified above, each person would have to occupy an area about half of a square nanometer.  To put this in perspective, this is slightly less than the width of a Uranium nucleus.  Talk about a tight fit!

Crowded_Earth

What about Jupiter, though.  Surely, if we all moved to the Solar System’s biggest planet (and could somehow withstand the gravity), we would have room to spread out, right?  Sadly, Jupiter "only" has a surface area of about 61,400,000,000 square km.  Even a helium atom’s width would be too much.

So let’s move to the sun.  If we can magically make 10 sextillion people appear, we can also magically keep them from incinerating (or getting crushed by gravity or suffocating from lack of air) as they move onto the Sun’s surface.  Even that would be too tiny: Two carbon atoms’ width per person.  This "as numerous as the stars in the sky" thing is starting to sound more like a curse than a blessing!

Thank you for indulging me in my little geek-out.  Hopefully, I was able to translate just how many stars are in the Universe and how spread out they are in space.

Disclaimer: The person silhouette image is by rejon on OpenClipArt.org.  The images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were obtained from Wikipedia (links to each on each of the planets’ names) but are public domain images taken by NASA.  Finally, the "glossy globe" image is by freedo on OpenClipArt.org.

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