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I had RF ablation surgery 12 years ago, to correct recurring episodes of tachycardia. My heart rate would take off to 200 bpm. I was awake during the procedure, with only very mild sedation. The scope probe was inserted in one side of my leg and the tool was inserted in the other.

First, the cardio electrophysiologist triggered the tachycardia and mapped the electrical path of the short circuit. Next, he burned the short circuit connection with the RF probe, just like cutting a wire. I could feel my heart take off during the testing.

There was no pain with this procedure. I don’t recall how long the surgery took. After it was over, I had no more tachycardia events.

About 6 years after the surgery, I developed an occasional irregular heart beat. This was found while I was preparing to have rotator cuff surgery. This problem was deemed to be not serious, and I was cleared for anesthesia on this and a couple of other occasions since.

I chose the RF ablation option instead of trying medicines, which might or might not have worked, to control the tachycarda. The doc said he could fix the problem, and he did. I would have the surgery again.

Good luck with your condition and with the surgery if you decide to have it.

USN40VET

Someone forwarded this email to me. Apologizes if you have seen it:

An email from Ireland to their brethren in the States...a point to ponder despite your political affiliation:

We, in Ireland, can’t figure out why people are even bothering to hold an election in the United States.

On one side, you had a pants-wearing lawyer, married to a lawyer who can’t keep his pants on, who just lost a long and heated primary against another lawyer who goes to the wrong church and who is married to yet another lawyer who doesn’t even like the country her husband wants to run.

On the other side, you have a nice old war hero whose name starts with ‘Mc’, and who’s married to a good looking younger woman who owns a beer distributorship.

What in the Lord’s name are you lads thinking over there in the colonies??

Actually, the Liberty survivors would be in in their very late 50’s to mid 60’s now, some possibly a few years older. There are many Liberty survivors still living, including one of my best friends.

I agree with you. I am not sure what motivated the attack. I am pro Israel,and have always been puzzled by this.

One of my best friends (CTR) was on the Liberty when it was attacked, and he was transferred to my duty station when it was over. He does not believe it was a mistake.

USN40VET ex CTR

Alicewonders:

It is approximately 50 miles or so from Ramage in Boone County WV to the KY border with WV at Williamson. It is Pike County KY when you cross the border. Jenkins KY is about 100 to 110 miles from Ramage WV, driving through Williamson and Pikeville KY. This is Hatfield and McCoy country!

If you have ancestors from anywhere in the SW VA, E KY, or S WV area, I have access to a huge gen database which one of my cousins maintains; it probably has over 100K individuals listed. If you are interested, and you want to me to look up some surnames, I would be pleased to help. Alternately, I could arrange for you to get access to the database. More than likely, if your great grandmother lived in the Ramage area, there will be info available.

Alicewonders: In case you are not familiar with Ramage,WV noted on the photo, Six Mile Creek discharges into the Spruce Fork of the Coal River at Ramage. My grandparents lived no more than 3 or 4 miles from Ramage, up Six Mile.

I see the picture says Ramage WV. My maternal grandparents were from Six Mile (Hager).

USN40VET

That is a Hammarlund HX500 ham radio transmitter, circa the 1960’s. It was a very nice transmitter,designed for single sideband voice and CW. Hammarlund was primarily known for their receivers. The Hammarlund SP600 military series receiver series was replaced by the R-390. When I was in the military, we still had one or two SP-600’s in use, in non critical applications. I also used to own a Hammarlund SP600.

Old transmitters are even more prone to damage by powering up if you are not a tech. Even if they don’t have electrical problems, a transmitter that is in working condition must be adjusted properly and connected to the proper load (dummy resistor or antenna)or smoke will likely fly. A ham license is required to connect one to an antenna.

These are nice receivers. I spent nearly 4 years behind a bank of at least 4 and sometimes 6 of them. If you are not technically inclined, I would not power the unit up to test it. Although it is not as old as the pre-WWII Hallicrafters I like to work on, it is always best to power up an old tube receiver slowly with a variac (variable voltage source)if it has not been energized for a long time. I have seen many old receivers with blown RF coils caused by a short circuit after someone powered them up to see if the radio would play.

DX for the deserving. Sounds good to me. Time to finish my tower at the new QTH and install the C31XR’s (to be stacked) that have been in boxes all summer.

Force 12 rules!

How many tens of thousands of these terrorist clowns have been killed in Iraq? Many. If we were not in Iraq, would there be no terrorists? No. They would be attacking us somewhere else, eventually here, but there would be thousands more of them to do so. It amazes me that rational people can’t see this. I guess the left is irrational.

We are lucky the terrorists are just as irrational as the left. The smart thing for them to do is lay low in Iraq,so we will leave. Instead, they behave like hornets that have been provoked in the nest. They irrationally attack, making them easier to kill.

Every terrorist we don’t kill in Iraq is one more we will have to kill somewhere else later, likely here.

“Here’s the deal: I was an Economics major and not a brilliant chemist. From my understanding, RF waves are not the same as electricity. Correct me if I am wrong on that.
You can say it is the same theory but RF waves and electricity are not the same. Please show me (since this is such common knowledge) where someone has previously used this method to the same effect. Rememeber - not electricity but RF”

The issue is energy efficiency. Man-made radio frequency waves are generated by electricity. There are losses in the process of generating RF. In order for salt water process to be viable, the power output from the salt water device must exceed the total power used to generate the radio frequency, which includes some conversion losses. The coupling of the RF to the sea water will not be 100% efficient, so there will be some losses there as well.
Energy out versus energy in is the test for viability.

Perhaps he could do what Dr. Mahlon Loomis proposed in the late 1800’s, and harness atmospheric electricity as a free energy source. /s

I agree. Thompson came across very well at the Iowa gathering that was just televised on CSPAN.

The call buyer is out the money he spent to purchase the option if he does nothing else.

If this is not a hoax, it is likely the other side of a hedging strategy.

“I’m sure the old WLR-1 faceplate is still in place”

Probably a good collection of R-390’s as well.

What branch of engineering is your degree in? I am surprised you are having such difficulty finding suitable employment. If your degree is mechanical, civil, or electrical you should investigate the mining industry.

A friend of mine was convicted of OWI after an officer found him sleeping in his car on a parking lot. He was not behind the wheel, but had the keys. This was in Louisiana.

Thirty miles south, I had another friend who every weekend would frequent the same bar/club out in a camp/resort type of area. The Parish Sheriff Deputy would pull him over, and take him home. It got to the point where the Deputy would come and pick my friend up at the bar every weekend.

I don’t condone the behavior of these two friends. I think both have now seen the error of their ways.

My son spent a week in this hospital two months before Katrina. My wife stayed with him. He was within 3 weeks of having major surgery here when Katrina hit.

The conditions at this hospital after Katrina were, if anything, understated in this interview. I agree it is unconscionable that in the USA patients and staff in a hospital like this could be left so long in these conditions. Hospitals were not high enough on the priority list of those in authority to allocate resources. This is not second guessing, it is a factual statement. I never before have witnessed government incompetence on such a scale.

IMHO, if anyone should have been indicted,it should not have been this poor doctor. I would trust her to be my physician any time.

How do you mine away a pillar if the roof is going to simultaneously collapse in the same location?

When the pillars are extracted, temporary roof supports are installed to keep the roof in the immediate area above the miners and equipment from falling. The miners and equipment are also positioned to keep the caving roof more ore less in front of them, with supported top over them and behind them. Keep in mind they are retreating, or backing out of the section as the pillars are extracted.

The temporary roof supports are withdrawn as the miners retreat, allowing the roof in front of them to cave.

This is a simplified explanation. The entire process is methodical and accepted practice, but it is the most risky part of the mining process. A miner operator must have nerves of steel when pulling pillars; the folks behind him (helper, haulage operators, etc) have to have big ones as well. As the pillars are removed and before the roof caves, you can hear the weight of the overburden trying to compress the remaining part of the pillar, and the adjoining pillars. The roof makes loud popping and thumping noises, and the coal pillars start to pop and snap. You can see coal popping off of the pillars due to the pressure. It is quite unnerving until you get used to it. When the roof falls, it creates this huge burst of wind and noise. More than one newbie has had to go outside and change his clothes after experiencing pillar extraction for the first time.

For the most part, the media coverage of this event has been about as accurate as it could be, given the lack of knowledge about mining in the reporting corps. You saw what may have been a first, TV coverage underground in the midst of a mine rescue effort. MSHA leadership is going to take some serious flack over this risky behavior in the aftermath of this multiple disaster.

I have been in the mining business over 34 years. After a disaster, you usually see the same group of “experts” and politicians on TV criticizing the operator, criticizing MSHA and calling for more regulations, without regard to the real facts of the particular situation. I listen to their positions, but filter their conclusions through the prism of my own experience. Rarely do I agree with the usual cadre of instant “experts” and always wait for the facts to come out, but in this case I find myself in general agreement with some of the critics regarding the mining plan.

The map of the Crandall Mine is posted on the MSHA site. The mine was developed out to the boundary with main headings using the room and pillar technique. The pillars are blocks of coal that are left to support the roof and overburden. The rooms are formed when the coal is extracted. The rooms in these main headings were the main travelways, haulageways, and ventilation ways.

Having reached the mining boundary, the Crandall Mine was pulling back, using a technique called “retreat mining”, or in the WV coal fields “pillaring”. During retreat mining, the roof support pillars are mined. The pillars can be removed because the main headings no longer need to be maintained. There is no need to get through them after all of the coal is mined. Another term for this technique is “robbing” pillars.

This is a technique that is commonly used in the coal industry. As enough of the roof support pillar is mined, the roof collapses “inby” where the miners are actually working. You want the roof to collapse to relieve the stresses on the pillars that remain where you are actually working, and in the travelways between you and the outside of the mine. The pillars support the roof, or the overburden. The deeper below ground (vertically)the mine is, the greater the load (stresses) on the support pillars. If the roof does not cave (fall) after the support pillars are removed, the load these pillars were supporting is transferred onto the remaining pillars, increasing the load on them.

In the eastern coal fields, where the cover is relatively shallow over the mine, the roof caving after pillar extraction generally is effective in controlling the load and stress on the remaining pillars, so it is generally safe to mine using this technique. The type of rock strata above the mine is also a factor.

Out in Utah, the mines are much deeper, so the load is much greater on pillars. If there is a thick band of hard sandstone in the rock strata somewhere above the mine level, this tends to not fail when the rock below it might collapse after pillar extraction. Therefore, the load shedding on remaining pillars that usually accompanies roof caving during retreat mining is not as effective. You have two factors working against you during retreat mining in a situation like Crandall. First, you have high stresses in the support pillars due to the depth. Second, you have stresses building up in the remaining support pillars as pillars “inby” are removed. The bumps referenced at Crandall are caused by the mountain trying to find equilibrium. At some point when the stresses become high enough, something has to give. In some mines the floor cracks and heaves up. I have seen a room that was 5’ high on Friday be 3 or 4’ high on Monday. In some cases the stresses build up in the pillars. There is a lot of stored energy. Rock under pressure can explode, and it does’t take much to relieve the pressure. The shock wave from a mountain bump could do it if the stresses are high enough in the pillars. An earthquake could do it. A shock from blasting can do it. We call this sudden pressure release an outburst or rock burst. This appears to be what has happened at Crandall, on a scale that I have never seen. The mine roof did’t collapse, the walls and perhaps the floor have exploded inward and filled the mine main headings. This is what the rescue team was mining through when the second accident occurred.

To add complexity with the above scenario, very large areas on each side of the main travelways where retreat mining was being conducted were mined out using the longwall technique. Longwall mining differs from room and pillar mining in that all of the coal is extracted in a longwall panel. The roof is designed to cave behind the longwall unit as the coal is extracted. No support pillars are left in place. To the extent that roof caving behind the longwall unit did not fully relieve the stresses in the roof immediately above, the remaining stresses would have been transferred out to the support pillars in the main headings, increasing the load on them.

This third factor, longwalled areas immediately adjacent on both sides of the rooms where support pillars were being extracted, likely made a significant contribution to this disaster. It appears support was removed systematically transferring additional load to the remaining pillars, where they failed catastrophically due to the pressure.

Is there anything illegal about this practice? No. In fact, MSHA had to approve the written mining plan, and did so about a month or so before the disaster. However, to me and to others I have talked to in the mining industry, this entire setup seemed risky.

In the end it may turn out to be an earthquake which triggered the rockburst, but I think it is just as likely, perhaps more likely, the mountain shifting to equalize stresses created the shock wave that released the stored energy in the pillars.