Hawking Expecting To Make Full Recovery 103
explosivejared writes "Yesterday we discussed the medical scare that physicist Stephen Hawking was going through. Happily, his website has posted a succinct statement that he is being kept for observation, but he is comfortable and expecting a full recovery."
Full Recovery? (Score:5, Funny)
Are any of us expected to make a full recovery?
Life is the leading cause of death, ya know.
Rushing to Death (Score:4, Insightful)
But still, there's not reason to help death on its rounds...
I, for one, am glad Professor Hawking is expected to recover.
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Are any of us expected to make a full recovery?
You are a sysadmin, right?
Re:Full Recovery? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Life is the leading cause of death, ya know."
"Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily." François de La Rochefoucauld
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Life is the leading cause of death, ya know.
It's not really the cause but it's indeed a requirement.
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By full, I take it they mean of the chest infection, not that they're experimenting with stem cell therapy to replace the motor neurons in his brain and spinal cord. (Though if they got to that point before he was too old to operate on, it might be kinda cool.)
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Living, is a very dangerous activity . . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . no one has been able to survive it yet.
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So you never heard of that MacLeod guy?
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. . . no one has been able to survive it yet.
Close to 6.8 billion people would beg to differ.
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I'm a physicist myself (Score:2, Insightful)
Cannot be killed by conventional weapons (Score:5, Interesting)
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How long does it take him now? I attended a lecture probably a decade ago at CalTech, and he took questions but was able to answer only one or two in the 45 minutes that followed. I've heard that the technology for his communications has been improved, but not to what degree.
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About the same - although he might have got an extra question if his helper hadn't been too busy fielding questions himself to notice the cheek mounted sensor wasn't calibrated right.
Re:Answering questions (Score:2)
THIS is the man who needs the slashdot meme form!
"Your questions fails for the following reasons:
Creationism
Snide
Hostile
Answered in Intro Biology page 43.
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I'd love to see a sampling of common Q&A from creationists answered by Hawking.
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Well one of the questions was 'IF the universe is expanding, where is it expanding from' and the other was 'What happened before the big bang' (I paraphrase in both cases).
Both had a tone in their voice suggesting they had some uber-clever question with which to catch out probably the greatest living British mind, and both asked questions that could've been answered by myself or any of the about 50 people from the physics department who attended the lecture. It angered me, I must say.
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Or anyone with a rudimentary science education.
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I don't know... I always thought "what happened before the Big Bang" is a good question. I am still expecting a convincing answer.
I have heard that there was no time "before the Big Bang" because timespace is a single thing, but that only makes me wonder what triggered time or how matter could exist outside space, since there was no time.
Then, I get an explanation about how particles appear and disapear, coming and going from "somewhere else" (sorry, I don't remember the right term) without an apparent reas
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The common answer by scientists is quite unconvincing, and what it really amounts to is "sorry, can't explain it, the equations don't go back any further". A year or two ago I saw a Hawking video (covered on Slashdot) where he actually addressed this question as part of the presentation, and he gave the answer as a joke along the lines that God created Hell for people who asked such questions.
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You didn't hear these people. Their questions were hostile, and pretty fucking dumb.
So maybe that particular talk brought out an especially dumb sample of Creationists.
Does this really tell us much about the general population of Creationists vs. the general population of non-Creationists? It's a pretty small sample.
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Yeah, most of them really ARE that dumb. There's a few who are fairly well educated but they have to take a lot of effort to make the world around us fit into a 2000 year-old fairy tale and still be plausible.
Call me small-minded. Call me a bigot. I don't care, as far as I'm concerned they are a plague that's long outlived their usefulness.
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Well, this individual story might not tell us much but there's a lot of evidence that creationists are in general dumber and less educated than the general populace. (This is assuming that we define creationist to not mean "belief that God created the world" but rather almost any statement that makes more or less concrete claims about the role that God had in the universe). The GSS data is very strong in this regard, showing that there's a strong correlation between having a large vocabulary (which is a us
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Great post. Wish I could mod it up.
Re:Cannot be killed by conventional weapons (Score:5, Funny)
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The GP was using an adjective to modify the noun in the sentence- 'creationist.' If every creationist were snide, he wouldn't have used the adjective because it would have been redundant. He chose to call the creationists in this scenario 'snide' because they were asking rudimentary questions to a man for whom communication is a great chore.
I don't know if it was intentional or n
Re:Cannot be killed by conventional weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
So? If there weren't snide evolutionists asking questions at the event on which the description was based, the fact that they exist elsewhere is irrelevant. The use of a adjective along with a noun usually suggests that the adjective is adding additional information that is not implicit in the noun, and also usually does not mean that there are no instances where the same adjective would apply to other nouns, even ones that are semantically opposed to the one being used in the present sentence.
If it did, the phrase "snide creationist" would be redundant, so the mere use of the phrase suggests, indeed, that the GP realizes that.
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Don't get upset with creationists for putting forth poor arguments. Encourage them to continue. It will only make them more irrelevant.
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It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!
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Since English is not my first language, I had to consult a dictionary on this: snide - sly and malicious, which got me to sly - skillful at trickery or deceit
Well, yes, "snide" pretty much describes every creationist person I ever knew or heard about.
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No it is, because it is HIM, not one of the other one-in-a-hundredthousand who suffer from ALS at a certain point in time and die within 2-5 years after the first signs.
Full recovery? (Score:2)
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So he's going to be up and out of that wheelchair in no time, eh?
The brain transplant went well.
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MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
That is EXACTLY what I thought.
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And even funnier. I have mod points and didn't realize it. DUH.
Hopefully I will make a full recovery as well. ;^)
--
Toro
They finally checked on him (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They finally checked on him (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe the anti-Hawking is merely employing the newly-discovered form of tunneling, as discussed in a prior article. We need to establish a Casimir Effect such as to exclude the anti-Hawking particle from being a valid state. Do you think if we made him a tinfoil hat, it would work?
Re:They finally checked on him (Score:5, Funny)
AntiHawking fell into a black hole, and we're recovering Hawking.
Wait a minute... Stephen Hawking didn't used to have a goatee... We saved the wrong one!
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If he's anything like Spock, we saved the right one. Leonard Nimoy looked fresh [galaide.org] with a goatee.
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Finally, unified field theory in terms I can understand!!
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Something sounds fishy... (Score:2)
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Recovery (Score:1)
Ok, two things (Score:5, Insightful)
Comfortable and expecting to make a full recovery --- As comfortable as a dying man can be I'm sure. Makes me wonder why he'd even want to recover.
First thing - we're all dying. Right now. Sure, Mr. Hawking has a name for what he's dying from and you don't (yet), but mortality is pretty much a constant. Just because your fate hasn't been given a label yet doesn't mean you don't have one. You do, just like everyone else. Including Mr. Hawking. I hope you're "as comfortable" as you can be too.
Second thing. Any sick person wants to recover. And that means you too. I guarantee if you were in a similar state you'd want to live just as much as...well, as anyone else. There's more to life than being able to walk around the block. There's art, music, science, math, and a host of other things you don't need a functioning body to enjoy.
My best friend from college has crippling MS. He's wheelchair bound. And he's one of the craziest and most fun people I've ever known. And at the time had an astonishingly hot girlfriend.
Life has far bigger parameters than you imply.
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First thing. The label you're looking for is "senescence." Not everyone has it. It only occurs in older people. It will develop in everyone, but the key processes involved in aging do not happen in the young. So, no. Not everyone is dying of something right now.
Second thing. You're so remarkably far away from reality that I'm just going to leave you with two words that you can google at your own leisure. Euthanasia. Suicide.
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What about sex?
If sex was a person's only reason for being alive, the highest UID on /. would be in the low 100's. And marriage would be illegal.
BTW, Mr. Hawking has fathered three children, [wikipedia.org] and all after his diagnosis.
Obviously he will recover (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously Dr. Hawking will recover - he has not yet found a full Grand Unified Theory integrating quantum mechanics and gravity. That's the deal he made with Death - he gets to have that theory published before he dies.
A much better gambit than challenging The Grim Reaper to chess. Or Twister, even.
-------
Seriously - get well soon sir, and keep on thinking free.
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Similar to this [xkcd.com].
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The deal requires that Death be listed as co-author and gets 25% on the movie rights. Oh, and the movie is to have a major role for Binky.
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The deal requires that Death be listed as co-author and gets 25% on the movie rights. Oh, and the movie is to have a major role for Binky.
[SQUEAK]
Oh, and the Death of Rats too!
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I GET 100% OF EVERYTHING.
Bloody good show (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
rj
sweet zombie jesus (Score:2)
Any day in which Professor Farnsworth makes for two front-page tags is a good day.
Funny tags (Score:1)
I wish I would make those saves when i come down with a flu, but then again i'm not as badass as Stephen Hawking.
Cheers.
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I laughed pretty hard at "natural20" as well. Very fitting and well chosen, tagger gods.
So much better than... (Score:1)
I'm glad he's going to be okay! And this is so much better than putting him in a completely isolated box and thinking, with uncertainty, "well, he's probably...".
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Good! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm glad to hear it.
These things are relative, of course: Professor Hawking's "good health" is a serious illness by most usual standards. He's not a young man, either.
Nevertheless, I wish him well.
...laura
"Fuck You, Death!..." (Score:2)
"...I win again!"
(Title track on the next MC Hawking album.)
Back off, Grim Reaper! The Hawkman has business to take care of.
He's back and badder than ever... (Score:1)
Run for the hills [b3ta.com]
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Au contraire.
Professor Hawking is the living proof that there is a god and that he gets thoroughly pissed from time to time.
I suppose it's time to look into the living brain [wikipedia.org] project.