Part of the problem is that insurance companies like having double-blind placebo-controlled studies (as are required for drugs). That level of proof of effectiveness is utterly impossible for prosthetics. Then you've got the extreme complexity of how many ways it can benefit the user- improved fitness, quality of…

My mother used to teach disabled kids. One of her favorite stories was about a little girl with no arms who painted with the brush in her mouth. She was so good at it that all of the other kids in her class (who did have arms) thought that they were doing it wrong and started painting with the brush in their mouths…

I've seen many cases where it's the opposite- they charge insurance companies more because they will pay it in order to charge people much less if they pay without insurance.

Walking is completely different mechanically from running. In walking, you "vault" from leg to leg kind of like an inverted pendulum. This ankle provides a critical force at pushoff where it is needed to make gait more efficient and natural, but I doubt it could keep up with the greater forces required for running.…

Seconded. I also suspect that this study did not control for the number of statistical tests (see [xkcd.com] for a good explanation of this).

Better, not perfect. I was particularly miffed at how they handled the dimpled car episode. They expected the dimples to not make the car more fuel efficient, as that is what the science says should happen for something the size of a car, yet the car with dimples did get significantly better mpg. At the end they just…

They've gotten much, much better. Back in the first few seasons I'd have agreed with you. But the last few seasons have been much more controlled and scientific. It's still entertaining and made for TV, but now most of the time I think, "but what about..." they answer it in the next segment. I'm with Groucho- the…

The needles are now so small and thin that they're nearly pain-free, but they're also testing inhalable insulin now. I was almost in a research study to test this stuff, but my blood sugar was too good for me to be included. I could care less about getting the insulin into me- that's the easy part and the tiny needles…

Might not be as difficult as you think. Circuit boards have been flexible for more than a decade and you can easily overmold rigid plastic with flexible stuff (think toothbrush handles). It would be pretty easy to make an ebook reader in the same form factor as a paper book. Open to turn on and read, fold in half to…

A dual mode screen (eink or LCD) would make ebooks much easier to read and allow the current battery to last weeks if it were used only in eink mode. The Notion Ink Adam has this already, but I'm surprised it hasn't spread further.

As a diabetic who injects himself 5+ times per day, this would be useless to me. The needles used for insulin are so thin they are already virtually painless. I don't mean that they only hurt a little- I mean if I didn't know there was a needle there I wouldn't have been able to tell. What really hurts are those damn…

Huh? You agreed with me in your first paragraph, then disagreed with me in the last one. I agree that someone could use the lack of evidence that bigfoot exists to argue that bigfoot doesn't exist, but that would be incorrect. I am saying that the more times you look for something and do not find it, the less likely…

Absence of proof does not constitute proof of absence, but absence of proof is *evidence* of absence. Without this point, people use this statement to support all kinds of things that are almost certainly false. Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. If you look for something thousands of times and never find it, you haven't…

True, but you could chuck the StarTac before it at a wall a hundred times and it would still work. Motorola and Nokia phones from that time could survive damn near anything.

Me three. I also miss being able to drop a phone without it shattering.

Ah, the old Talking Moose. Fun times. I also messed around with a later voice recognition thingie on my Mac around. It worked pretty well and I messed around with it until a friend of mine walking by my room said "computer shut down". It did, and I lost everything I was working on. Never used it or any other voice…

Adding pepper spray to the smoke would've made this video so much more entertaining.

I can actually help with why people talk so loud on their phones without realizing it. On a landline phone your own voice is fed back into the earpiece, which gives you feedback on your volume and people end up talking more reasonably. As far as I know, this does not happen on cellphones, which leads people to talk…

It probably twists and flexes so much because it's going so damn fast. If they slowed it down to the speed of the fishertechnik one and used stock technics components it would have no problem. For example, here's one made from stock lego mindstorms parts solving a cube. Much slower, but probably still faster than the…

Leaves Lego in the dust by solving Rubik's Cube? I don't think so- check out CubeStormer II, which can beat the human world record for solving a Rubik's cube (<5.4s).