My patient had been feeling unusually irritable lately. Nothing had changed in his home or work life to bring on such a shift in mood. He wasn’t taking any medicines that could cause such symptoms either, being a strappingly healthy young guy. A weightlifter in fact. “Are you taking any kind of steroids?,” I asked…
In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
I came across an interesting quote in the New Yorker recently, reflecting on the US banking system. It reads: The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and credit capital of others. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold. Pretty timely thoughts,…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…
Leibniz once described music as an “occult exercise in mathematics performed by a mind unconscious of the fact that it is counting.” As someone currently working through some late Beethoven piano masterpieces, this description makes a lot of sense to me. Now if I can only find enough practice time to make my performances more…
Interesting picture on the Vox website from Sarah Kliff, showing an increase in the number of health insurance companies planning to compete on the exchanges next year: So much for the rumors that Obamacare will quickly kill the health insurance industry. (Click here to view comments)
“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.” —John Durham Peters (Click here to view comments)
A great cartoon from the Kaiser Health News website that pithily captures the “wonders” of the American health insurance system. (Click here to view comments)
I have been writing a bit lately on the need for healthcare providers to talk with their patients about healthcare costs, if for no other reason than to enable patients to determine whether they can afford to pay for the healthcare that their doctors are recommending them to receive. I have been criticized for this position, on…
Schmidt once said: “In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. … If we get this right, I believe we can…