CG: the final frontier?

Here's another spectacular photograph (the first one I posted is here) from NASA's Cassini-Huygen's mission to Saturn. It doesn't look like terribly much at first glance, but here's the description from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini-Huygen's image database:

In a splendid portrait created by light and gravity, Saturn's lonely moon Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn's northern hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc gracefully across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn's night side.

The part of the atmosphere seen here appears darker and more bluish than the warm brown and gold hues seen in Cassini images of the southern hemisphere, due to preferential scattering of blue wavelengths by the cloud-free upper atmosphere.

The bright blue swath near Mimas (398 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is created by sunlight passing through the Cassini division (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide). The rightmost part of this distinctive feature is slightly overexposed and therefore bright white in this image. Shadows of several thin ringlets within the division can be seen here as well. The dark band that stretches across the center of the image is the shadow of Saturn's B ring, the densest of the main rings. Part of the actual Cassini division appears at the bottom, along with the A ring and the narrow, outer F ring. The A ring is transparent enough that, from this viewing angle, the atmosphere and threadlike shadows cast by the inner C ring are visible through it.

Images taken with red, green and blue filters were combined to create this color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Nov. 7, 2004, at a distance of 3.7 million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel.

What I want to know is if anybody else looks at an image like this and says "wow" and then, promptly, "no way." A computer graphics (CG) artist could draw that same image easily, right? It makes me wonder if the whole mission is a hoax, if NASA just posts neat looking pictures they've created periodically and makes up some fact-based caption like the one above. Nobody can really refute their claim that they have a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. I don't think Cassini-Huygens is big enough for anyone to see with a telescope. And these amazing pictures come at a time when NASA is recovering from the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, and as a consequence is fighting against perceived incompetence.

In any case, I'd rather believe them and be amazed. Look at those translucent rings and that beautiful blue color! Wow.

No way.

«Post a comment»


«Back to top»

The Hippocratic hoax

Yesterday, I went to the dentist for my periodic teeth cleaning. Usually, despite the discomfort of having sharp tools jammed into my gums, I am happy when I leave with sparkly clean, tartar-less teeth. But this time, I left distraught and infuriated.

I don't think it is too naive to expect to learn certain basic things from a trip to the dentist: how your teeth are doing, what you can do to improve your oral hygiene, which dental procedures you may have to undergo to prevent tooth loss. I did learn these things yesterday (kind of), but for the first time, they took on a coercive, salesman-like hue. And for the first time, I felt I was being tricked and used by a medical professional.

It started when, after digging and scraping around with that horrible little metal hook, my hygienist Beverley mentioned that I had some gum recession. She didn't do this with much explanation, though; she would just off-handedly mumble alarming comments like "oh, these pockets are getting deep," and "looks like your roots are nearly showing there." Naturally, I was expecting her to reprimand me about my brushing, that I should use an elliptical, rather than circular, brushing pattern; or that the $100 Sonicare toothbrush she recommended to me last year was recently found to do more harm than good. But she offered no such resolution, just painful jab followed by worried comment followed by painful jab.

Eventually, after wedging her ultrasonic pick between tooth and gum, and sandblasting all corners of my mouth with sodium bicarbonate (a wholly unpleasant ordeal), she made me put on my glasses and look in a mirror at my inflamed, receding gums, and patches of exposed dentin I could not see (dentin is the tooth material that lies below the hard enamel coating). My first reaction was "of course they are inflamed! You just irritated the hell out of them!" But again, I was most apt to trust her judgement and learn what I was doing wrong. However, she had yet to tell me how I was going to fix my receding gumline, and so finally I asked her what I was supposed to do about it.

The answer: a $500 retainer that prevents me from grinding and clenching my teeth.

Supposedly, gum recession is now thought to be caused by clenching one's teeth. When you bite down hard, and your tooth surfaces lock together, this puts stress on the interface where your teeth are anchored to your jaw. The resulting force wiggles them around and...leads to gum recession. At the time, I just accepted this as sound scientific research, but the more I think about it, the stronger my conclusion is that this explanation is downright fishy! Wiggling teeth causes receding gums?! How?! I wouldn't be quite so skeptical if my dentist, during the post-cleaning examination, hadn't faltered so unassuredly when explaining all of this to me, as if the current theories are not quite solid and may not justify the sale of an expensive item that could very well do nothing to help. (He also mentioned quietly to me that I could buy a $10 mouthguard from the drugstore to do the same thing, and never gave me a straight answer when I asked him whether the $500 retainer would fix my gum problems.)

My mistrust was only worsened when, as my dad drove me home (visiting my folks in Albuquerque, I have no car of my own), he told me that Beverley had tried to sell both him and my mom the same $500 retainer! Here, mistrust turned to disenchantment. In the car, my dad (an infectious diseases doctor) told me to wake up and smell the changing face of medicine. Patients nowadays have to be selective about what you take away from the doctors. Now, healthcare is a business just like any other.

I could barely believe my ears. How in god's name can you expect patients to extract truths from salespitches, as if they are visiting Jiffy Lube? Be selective? BE SELECTIVE?!?! Doctors are the only people you can go to for advice about your health. If you can't listen to them and trust them then who the hell is going to help you take care of your body?

And now that I have selected not to buy the $500 retainer, how am I supposed to fix the gum problem Beverley made so abundantly clear I have? Was she making it sound worse than it is? Do I really even have anything to worry about? Such dilemmas should not be the burden of the patient, most of all because the patient has meager means of resolving them. I can pay more money and see another dentist, or I can ignore it and wonder whether my gums are actually unhealthy.

I cannot see this new healthcare paradigm as anything but destructive. Should this type of business attitude come to predominate over the ideals of medicine as a purely curative art, health care will become a worthless shell. Patients will know nothing more than they did before their visit to the doctor, except confusion and helplessness.

One thing is clear. I will never visit Beverley again.

«Post a comment»


«Back to top»