Anatomy Lesson

His
bare buttocks rest on
the cold steel shelf; the smooth, hairless skin has a ghastly
pinkish-orange hue.

That is the opening to an article (in the IEEE magazine) on the href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5557">anatomy of
crash-test dummies.  Geeks can have a sense of
humor, especially when it comes to anatomy.  The body is,
after all, such a laughable thing, when compared to something
engineered
-- something sensible.
 



Pictured above, Fred, a 50th-%ile Hybrid III male, Is made
by Denton ATD
somewhere near Detroit Michigan.  It is their leading product
for automotive safety testing.  



They also make the FOCUS: Facial
and Ocular
Countermeas style="text-decoration: underline;">Ure for style="text-decoration: underline;">Safety
Headform.








Because facial and ocular injury are particularly important,
there is a special device just for that.  It is used to test
goggles and helmets and such.  It looks simple, but it
actually contains a complex array of sensors.  



So anyway, he is the story...

I know a guy, now retired, who used to be an automotive engineer.
 He worked with air, specifically, how hot air moves through
things like exhaust systems, piston valves, and the like.



Once, he got involved consulting with some biomedical engineers.
 They were looking at air flow through the human trachea.
 He told me his first thought was "huh, air in a tube, what
could be complicated about that?"  



We both laughed.  



The trachea seems simple, at first glance.  It actually is a
marvelous device.  It causes a particular kind of turbulence
such that almost all particulate matter ends up coming into contact
with the surface.  It gets trapped by mucus, rather than
traveling into the lung.  

Those little inhalers that people use to inhale powdered medications
seem simple, but they would not work at style="font-style: italic;">at all without some
diligent engineering.  The particles have to be exactly the
right size, and dispersed in exactly the right way, in order to have
any chance of getting far into the lungs.  (In fact, there is
an entire journal devoted to the topic of aerosol medicine, the href="http://www.liebertpub.com/publication.aspx?pub_id=24">Journal
of Aerosol Medicine).



That is what makes "weaponizing" particles, such as anthrax spores, so
challenging.



I find things like that to be absolutely marvelous, even awe-inspiring.
 Others feel the awe, also, and take that as evidence for the
existence of a creator.  That is a position that I find
perplexing.  One's emotional response to a perception is
indeed evidence, but it is evidence that is never conclusive.



In order to get conclusive evidence, you have to do the experiments.
 How safe would you feel driving in a car, when the only
evidence for its safety was someone's intuitive sense that it style="font-style: italic;">has to be safe?
 It was that kind of thinking that led to the Titanic disaster.



The thing is, it is hard to do an experiment on the entire Universe.
 There are no dummies for that.