1985: Karen Ann Quinlan, brain-dead and nine years removed from the respirator doctors employed to keep her alive, finally dies. Her case is a landmark in the ethical debate over the lengths medical science should go in trying to preserve a life that is deemed irretrievably lost.

Karen Quinlan was a 21-year-old college student in 1975 when she ingested a combination of drugs and alcohol at a party. Feeling unwell, she was put to bed by friends who later returned to find that she had stopped breathing. By the time help arrived, Quinlan's oxygen-deprived brain was severely damaged, and she was reduced to what doctors describe as a persistent vegetative state.

Quinlan was kept alive with life-support technology, including feeding tubes and a respirator that enabled her to breathe. While there was some low-level brain function, her cognitive abilities were wiped out. When months passed without any improvement in her condition, Quinlan's parents asked that she be removed from life support and allowed to die.

Doctors refused, saying she didn't meet the criteria for brain death, meaning she could not be declared legally dead by existing medical standards. The state of New Jersey also intervened, saying it would prosecute any physician who helped end Quinlan's life.

Joseph Quinlan, Karen's father, sued to have life support discontinued, but was denied by the court. He appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court, where he based his case on the First (freedom of religion) and Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment) Amendments. Although the court rejected both arguments, it ultimately ruled in Joseph Quinlan's favor on the basis of U.S. Supreme Court precedents affirming an individual's right to privacy.

It also rejected the state's argument that removing life support constituted a homicide, saying that Quinlan's death would result from natural causes. Following the court's ruling, Karen Quinlan was removed from the respirator.

But she did not die.

Instead, she continued breathing unaided and lived for another nine years before infection and pneumonia finally killed her. She was 31. The autopsy disclosed severe damage to her thalamus, that part of the brain that controls -- among other things -- the processing of sensory information.

Quinlan's case is a milestone, a legal precedent for other right-to-die cases. It is also a milestone in bioethics, touching as it does on a number of moral and ethical issues surrounding the end of life. As a direct result of the Quinlan case, in fact, hospitals and other health care facilities nationwide established ethics committees.

It's not an issue that will resolve itself anytime soon. The implications of prolonging life under extraordinary circumstances are only bound to multiply with every advance in medical technology.

Source: Various

It's time to retire the NSFW acronym and associated phrases. I've simply seen far too many electrons sacrificed in long, pointless arguments about what "not safe for work" means.

Whose work? Are you bleaching the hot tubs at Playboy Mansion or arranging candlelight vigils for Citizens Against Potty Mouths? Are you European? To hear some Europeans tell the story, everyone over there watches hard-core porn and smokes hashish between staff meetings where they discuss where to find the best porn and hashish.

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Most people end up taking one of two stances, each filling in important words. First, there are those who read the classic warning as "not safe for (my) work." These people are touchy. They're the first to dive into the comments and sear off your eyebrows for not realizing that some people have jobs where the boss does not look kindly on the word jockstrap. In fact, as far as I can tell, these people have such strict work policies that the only web activity they're allowed to do on company time is complain about improper blog post labeling.

Most people, however, read NSFW as "not safe for (the platonic ideal of) work." Apparently there's this archetypal concept of a workplace that exists in the universal consciousness, and you should consult the great mother mind before putting anything on the web. Of course, not everyone is hooked into the same plane of hyper-awareness, and thus you get arguments.

For instance: bikinis? Are photos of women in bikinis safe for work? What about one-piece bathing suits? Tight pants? I've seen someone argue that a cartoon of a fully-clothed wolf-lady in a turtleneck sweater and slacks was just too steamily erotic to be work-safe. (I don't know where the arguer worked, but I hope it wasn't the Disney Store.)

And then there are those sad, twitchy souls who get hung up on the work-safety of URLs. You could post a link to a recipe for baked chicken, but if the URL contained the word breasts, they'd be convinced they're going to be shoved roughly out the backdoor of the building, to be unemployed forever as each new workplace hears of the unforgivable sin of that fateful day when you ruined their life.

Now, I know geekfolk love their acronyms and all, but I'm tired of the whole stupid conflict. Maybe, possibly, we could agree that the scope and depth of human reaction to matters biological can't be flattened into a binary designation as if stomping on a soda can? Hell, even the Motion Picture Association of America has five different categories for the relative acceptability of a movie, and its system is arbitrary and biased. What makes us think we can get away with only work-safe and not work-safe?

Here's my cutting-edge solution: How about if we actually describe things? This isn't semaphore, people. Unless you routinely blog in the middle of a desperate escape from a burning building, you've got plenty of time to say something like: "Warning: visual depiction of pert nipples and raspberry jam" or "Beware: contains pictures of Drew Barrymore in a business suit, eating ice cream and giving the camera that look" or "Cuidado: cloacas!"

If we just added those extra few words, a few additional strikes of the keyboard, then everyone could make an informed, adult decision to look around real quick before clicking through, and people could stop complaining. Except for those URL guys -- they're hopeless.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to insist that NSFW is pronounced "nossfaw."

1943: Brothers László and Georg Bíró, Hungarian refugees living in Argentina, patent the ballpoint pen. A half-century-old idea is coming to commercial fruition.

Lewis Waterman's invention of a practical fountain pen, patented in 1884, had solved the problem of portability. You no longer had to carry around an inkwell to be able to write when and where you wanted. But the ink still took a while to dry and was subject to running and smudging.

American banker John L. Loud patented a ballpoint pen in 1888. It used a ball-and-socket to deliver sticky, quick-drying ink. Too sticky: The ink was so coarse, it didn't really work well on paper. (It was a good idea on paper, except literally.) It did find industrial uses for writing on leather and cloth.

László Bíró was a Hungarian journalist who saw an idea in the quick-drying inks newspapers use. His brother Georg, a chemist, helped him with technical aspects. They used a tiny -- and precisely ground -- ball bearing to serve two functions. It distributed ink evenly from the cartridge to the paper for writing, and it contained the rest of the ink inside the cartridge.

The Bíró brothers made progress on improving the ballpoint to the point, so to speak, that it could write as smoothly as a fountain pen. But the situation in their homeland was deteriorating. When World War II started, they fled from Budapest to Paris, then to Madrid and finally to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There, they applied for a patent and sought financial backing. One of their contacts, an English accountant named Harry Martin, realized that the ballpoint solved a problem faced by Britain's Royal Air Force: Conventional pens were unsuitable for writing aircraft logs, because they leaked, were too sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and wouldn't let you write on a vertical or overhead surface.

Martin eventually flew to Washington and London, convincing both the U.S. Air Force and the RAF to adopt the new technology. By the time the Allies won the war, the ballpoint shared the luster of victory.

When the pens went into commercial production in 1945, they were a sensation. In the United States, the Reynolds Pen sold for $12.50 (about $150 in today's money). Yet people swarmed a New York department store to buy 8,000 of them on the first day of sale.

What? People lining up to be the first to buy new technology? Where have we heard that before? You mean, it happened in the old days, too?

Some of the earliest versions of commercial ballpoints leaked and smudged, but manufacturers eventually worked the bugs out. What? A technology brought to market before it's quite ready? How could that be?

Today, the ballpoint is what most people mean when they say just pen. And in much of the world, the generic name for a ballpoint pen is biro. In Argentina, by the way, it's a birome.

Source: BBC h2g2

Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It's a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He's getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He's a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. "It's like a videogame," he says. "Can I beat my new high score?"

It's a game that some say started during the gas-rationing days of World War II and came back during the oil embargo of the 1970s. It's catching on again as fuel prices spiral out of sight, and skilled players say small changes in driving style -- eliminating hard acceleration, turning off the engine at stop lights, coasting to a stop -- can bring big improvements in fuel economy no matter what you drive.

"If you combine a handful of simple hypermiling techniques, you can easily see increases of 20 percent," said Tim Fulton, a 25-year-old designer from West Bend, Wisconsin. "Use a few more techniques and 30 percent is yours."

Fulton routinely gets 55 mpg from his 1997 Toyota Paseo, a car the EPA rates at 29 mpg. He started hypermiling about 18 months ago when he landed a new job 37 miles from home and got tired of burning so much gas. He mastered "pulse and glide" -- turning off the engine and coasting while driving. "This technique alone dramatically increased my mileage from 38 mpg to 47 mpg on my first tank," he says. "I was blown away."

Pulse and glide is controversial -- and in some states, illegal -- because the engine drives the power steering and brakes. Shut it off, critics warn, and you can't steer or stop effectively. Hypermilers say the risks are overstated. Still, there are easier -- and, arguably, safer -- things you can do to boost fuel economy. The first suggestion?

"Try the speed limit," says Rick Harrell, a moderator at the website ecomodder.com and its list of more than 100 ways to improve fuel economy. "It's a crazy idea, but it works."

The U.S. Department of Energy says gas mileage plummets above 60 mph. Every 5 mph above that speed is akin to paying another 20 cents a gallon for gas. For that reason, hypermilers scrupulously obey the speed limit. They also use the accelerator and brake as little as possible, preferring instead to coast. The truly hardcore coast to a stop, avoid using brakes around corners and draft behind trucks or other large vehicles.

Following the speed limit was quite a change for Harrell, who favored high-performance cars before getting the hypermiling bug three years ago. "I knew I needed to slow down for both environmental purposes and not to scare the living daylights out of my passengers," he says.

These days he's driving a 1998 Acura Integra and getting as much as 40 mpg in a car the EPA rates at 24. His quest for better fuel efficiency started with the car, which got a tune-up and an engine-block heater for more efficient starts. He inflated the tires to the maximum listed on the sidewall to reduce rolling resistance. And he installed a fuel-consumption gauge that provides real-time data about how much gas he's burning. He and other hypermilers highly recommend them.

"The instant feedback was great," Harrell says. "Simple things like slowing down on the highway, timing traffic lights (to maintain) momentum and coasting with the engine off started to push that fuel-efficiency number higher and higher."

Hypermilers call the gadgets "game gauges" because they're always trying to see how high they can go. The best of them get absurd figures. Wayne Gerdes, founder of cleanmpg.com and the king of hypermilers, recently drove a Honda Civic hybrid 800 miles from Chicago to New York on a single tank of gas. That works out to 65 mpg.

That's low for Darin Cosgrove of Brockville, Ontario. The co-founder of ecomodder.com averages 69 mpg in his 1998 Geo Metro, a car that got 40 mpg off the showroom floor. He's gotten as many as 133 mpg on a long trip by going slowly and using pulse and glide. He's also modified his car to make it more aerodynamic and tinkered with the drivetrain to improve efficiency.

Fahimuddin hopes to achieve those kind of numbers with his 2000 Honda Insight. It was a heap when he bought it and he's overhauled just about everything, but the clutch is shot so he's only getting 45 mpg or so. He'll replace it eventually, and add a belly pan to improve aerodynamics under the car. He figures that and a few tweaks to his driving style will get him to 60 mph.

But that's just the beginning.

"I'd like to hit 70 mpg. Seventy would be pretty sick," he says. "It's doable."