Blogborygmi

blog blog blog

The thesis will be defended in less than a week. Correctins and changes have got to be done by the 18th. Then... clerkships! Editing for worcester medicine magazine! I should be using my free time to re-learn medicine or work on other people's articles... will there ever be time to write my own stuff?

My best bet is to make all kinds of short observations here, and then when the opportunity presents itself (sometime in 2004, it would seem) to try to gather it up and write some articles... on the patient interaction, new technology, whatever else I find kind of interesting.

Andrew Sullivan warns: "I think bloggers do well to take time out. We can lose perspective, stop thinking in longer form, and also get exhausted. "

Eh. Thinking in 'longer form' has never come naturally, and my randomly scheduled blog entries are never exhausting. I do wonder, though, if opinion writing is even something I should aspire to. Maybe I can make a career out of just pointing to the latest David Brooks piece in the Atlantic and saying "Look! Read this! It's sparkling, well-researched, well-written, and makes a provocative point! Damn, he's good."

If you can't join 'em, cite 'em?

Smart Mobs vs. Silly Mobs

Some stories on internet-directed gatherings:

Using mass e-mailing, the organisers bring together what their invitations describe as 'inexplicable mobs' - large crowds that materialise in public places and suddenly dissipate 10 minutes later.

"It's a spectacle for spectacle's sake - which is silly, but is also, as I've discovered somewhat to my surprise, genuinely transgressive, which is part of its appeal, I think," said the mysterious Bill in an e-mail exchange. "People feel like there's nothing but order everywhere, and so they love to be a part of just one thing that nobody was expecting."

San Francisco, Minneapolis and Phoenix have all staged their own events, while the first European mob took place this week in Rome, when 300 people entered a music and bookstore and asked for non-existent titles. The idea has also been adopted and given a more political agenda by other groups.

In Detroit, a group of gays and lesbians organise the 'Detroit Guerrilla Queer Bar', which targets a local straight restaurant or bar for 'swarming' on a designated night. And in Boston, Reggie Cummings, a black software developer, coordinates 'friendly takeovers' by crowds of black yuppies of downtown bars with a traditionally white clientele.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s913314.htm
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http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0801oddpranks-ON.html :
So far, flash mobs have claimed to be apolitical, but that could soon change. What started as a prank could blossom into a social revolution, according to Internet watcher Harold Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution."

Rheingold's book outlined the use of wireless technology in helping people around the world organize. As an example, he cited the use of cell phones and pagers by activists who demonstrated against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.

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Seems to me that this fits in along with the success of meetup.com in organizing Dean rallies and other events. And of course, the dating sites are doing well. The internet and email, long accused of encouraging antisocial / anonymous / secluded behavior, is now bringing the masses together, face-to-face, for fun and social causes.

It's one thing to find a discussion board for fans of Marlin Fitzwater or some other underground cult hero. Those are far-flung groups that need the internet to organize, because you've only got a few fans per city. These new mobs are different -- there are plenty of people who want to do something silly, they just need a coordinator and one happens to be online.

They could've just joined a frat, though. Or a fight club.

Levitt's cleverness

In the New York Times magazine section, Stephen Dubner describes a Chicago economist who thinks of clever ways to measure previously unmeasurable things.

Are real estate agents encouraging lowball offers, because their take doesn't change much and they just want to make a deal? He answered this by looking at how agents sell their own homes (those houses stay on the market longer, and go for more).

How much does money matter in elections? Hard to say, because the challengers don't get a lot of money unless there's a good chance they'll win, and incumbents don't spend a lot unless there's a good chance they'll lose. So Levitt looked at repeat matchups -- same people, different races. It's kind of like how scientists trying to tease nature vs. nurture look at separated twins. Levitt found that money mattered a lot less than expected.

Levitt's big take home message: the data is out there, the hunches are out there, you just have to find an interesting way to prove your point, and publish it.

Ancient Brains

For the second time, I've stumbled upon a reference that Homer, and possibly his audience, was colorblind. Sacks cites the Odyssey's "wine-dark sea" and other lines as evidence. Where did I see this before? Maybe in "The Future of Man", where Medawar discusses recent evolution trends.

It's neat to think that something so basic to our worldview -- true color perception -- might only be a few thousand years old. And our decendents will marvel that we couldn't see into the UV spectrum.

But I'm also reminded of reports about ancient thinking. I wish I had this blog a few years ago, when I was reading interesting books. I recall the notion that ancient Greeks and Romans didn't believe they could think -- as we do -- but rather, that the gods put notions into their heads. This might be Sacks as well, one of his footnotes?

Googling on this leads to http://www.thymos.com/tat/dreams.html:
It is likely that millions of years ago our waking life was not too different from our dreaming life. Consciousness in dreams is a series of flashes which are fragmented and very emotional... Today our consciousness has acquired a different profile: it has evolved to a more or less smooth flow of thoughts, in which strong emotions don't normally figure prominently... One could argue that ancient gods simply represent concepts. As concepts were forming in human minds, human minds expressed them as concepts. And their interaction yielded religions.

Not quite what I was going for, but this is closer (http://www.horuspublications.com/guide/ac10.html):
Everywhere else in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern area, knowledge was still based on the assumptions that nature and man's history, and much of what men thought, were ruled by Gods.

Where to go with this? Well, it's easy to imagine prehistoric and early historic people as being just like us, but without education or the security and convenience of civilization. It's more compelling to think that education isn't just learning facts but is necessary for an ordered consciousness, for making sense of the world.

One site points to: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

Single Guy Groceries

Lisa pointed out that more and more of what supermarket shelf space is geared toward the single guy. Today I noticed the first 12-packs of iced tea in long, "fridge-friendly" boxes. This is for the lazy shits that can't be bothered to open the box of cans when they come home, and instead just shove the whole box into the fridge (me). Thanks, people.

Other products I've noticed recently:
> Soup in a can -- just pop the lid, microwave, and drink. Nothing chunky, and salty enough to shrivel a slug, but not too bad.
> The Dilberito (ok, I haven't seen it, but I read that it's coming): one microwavable burrito with 100% of many of your nutrition needs. For people with no patience for fruit and vegetables and vitamins and whatnot.
> Pre-mixed stir fry in a bag WITH bits of beef or chicken. This started a few years back but god love 'em, Create-A-Meal deserves props.

OK, I could find more examples if I really looked. The point is, trending toward convenient nutrition is a good thing, since so much convenience food has been toxic in the past. Derrick Z. Jackson noted back in the 90's, the junk-food and frozen-food aisles and displays were muscling out traditional, healthy foods. Maybe those foods are making a comeback, with these convenient packages.

Find a way to work in the Hungry Man motto: "I know what I like, and I like a lot of it."

Damn.

Diversions

Just finished Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. It's memoir / reportage about a Greek WSJ writer who takes up competitive scrabble, moving his way up the rankings, taking a sabbatical from work to indulge in his obsession.

It's pretty well written and captures the weirdness and dedication of this Scrabble subculture. But more importantly, it reveals that following irrational dreams and writing books about your experience is doable, even when you're 37 and starting a family.

It helped that Lupo's and Brown figure prominently in the end.

Fatsis cites that figure of 10,000 hours for expertise in a particular field, whether it's golf or music or chondrocyte mechanotransduction (10,000 hours = a PhD, usually.)

Now that I'm a couple of weeks from my PhD, it's worth wondering how I'm going to carve out 10,000 hours for writing during the upcoming clerkships and residency. The school and the government make time for research relatively easy. Making time for writing is relatively hard. The good news is, writing is thrilling in a way chondrocytes never were.

Those survey people

Lileks took a mall survey (LILEKS (James) The Bleat: )
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This part didn't involve checking off a box; the guy had several lines to fill out, and he wanted a specific response. So I said exactly what the marketing people wanted to hear:

â€œLovable, Belushi-like loser Jack Black finds himself kicked out of his band and down on his luck - but then things start looking up when he ends up as a fish out of water in a world he never made: a stuffy boarding school where he teaches students and teachers how to loosen up and party down.â€� Pause; wait for the kid to stop scribbling. He's done. Drive in the knife: â€œHilarity ensues.â€�

'This is the best survey I have done all day,' the kid said.

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I did one of these, too, back in January. I was returning all the gifts I had purchased for my parents (very picky). I saw a preview for Daredevil and was also asked about my anticipation for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Got a check for $3.

But I'd give it all back if I could describe it like Lileks. That guy rules.

Nick

Toxic environment

Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe today on willpower and obsesity:
The only good news is that we are beginning to shift from describing obesity as a moral failing to describing it as a public health epidemic. We are beginning to shift at least some attention from self-control to environment-out-of-control.

This change is partly due to the collective, um, weight of scientific studies. Yale's Kelly Brownell, who coined the phrase ''toxic environment,'' sums them up this way: ''When the environment changes, weight changes.'' When, for example, immigrants from thinner countries come to America they gain weight while their cousins back home stay lean. When you give moviegoers a big box of popcorn instead of a small one, they eat about 50 percent more.
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You know, there was a time where this would put me in a tizzy. Power-of-the-individual, personal responsibility, etc. But it's hard to disagree with the data. And most people have to pick their battles -- grappling with your schedule, your responsibilities at home and on the job, your friends and family -- your guard is down from those battles and the marketers and media slip in, giving you bigger portions and strange notions and before you know it you're eating and drinking substances the human body was never meant to ingest.

It keeps coming back to the ideas in the Tipping Point by Gladwell. One experiment -- theology students were assigned to give sermons on the good samartian across the seminary campus. Some were told they're already 15 minutes late. Others are told they've got time to spare. Each student encountered a sick homeless person on the way to the sermon. Those who were late never stopped to help; those who had time, did. The actual character of the "samaritans" was irrelevant, schedule was everything.

Maybe I'm reading too much into one experiment -- there were others I can't recall -- but the point is, even the noblest of the noble, on their way to lecture about charity, can still forget their better natures.

I guess that's why we celebrate virtue and character when we hear it. But I'm still not good at noticing the absence of virtue -- it's rarely the jarring clang of "evil," but the quiet hum of acquiescence. To a toxic environment. God this got melodramatic.

Note to self:

In the year 2028 or so, when I'll be teaching a young new crop of med students, I'll look up into the crowd and think, the most common woman's name here is Emily.

And #2 will be... Madison.

And I'll shake my head and chuckle that Madison's daughters will probably be named Ethel and Peg, for novelty's sake.

HIPA absurdity

Track down that Risk Management officer who lectured us last week. HIPA is designed to protect patient's privacy, but some of the fine-tuning seems crazy. You can't say "A man in Worcester presented with a rash yesterday" because Worcester is too specific (you CAN say "508 area code" or "016XX ZIP") and you can't peg down a time like "yesterday" or "last week". Some ethnic and age identification is ok but not too much -- 41 year old black man, but not 41 y.o. Iranian or 96-year old black man.

Interview the officer and ask her if it's worth it. My first-choice slant is that privacy is a good thing but when you drive doctors so crazy with fear they're tipping info that's probably not going to ID anyone.

And Dusty's notion (rephrased skillfully here): When you start with the premise that a medical condition is a stigma, you devote more energy into hiding the condition than to fighting the stigma.

Lileks Knows

Lileks on the "whatever" point:
LILEKS (James) The Bleat: "2. Anyone who writes opinion pieces should consider whether their piece contains a YWP, or ï¿½Yeah, Whateverï¿½ Point. The YWP is the moment where half your audience automatically stops reading because they know exactly where this is going, and theyï¿½ve been there a thousand times before. Sometimes the YWP is triggered by a phrase, but itï¿½s usually a statement of fact that betrays a certain breathless hysteria in the author. In most cases the YWP is triggered by the assertion that we have gone far beyond the standard push-me-pull-you of politics, and have entered a dangerous age in which all we hold dear shall be snatched from our hands, torn to pieces and washed away in a torrent of tears. Sometimes it's the UN and the Contrail pilots who are responsible. Sometimes it's the undead Halliburton Zombie Army. Either side is perfectly capable of generating a YWP, and on any given day either side usually does."

2 Fast 4 Safety?

Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times:
2 Fast 4 Safety?: "So what's the answer? Over in congested, brainy Europe, some people think they've found it, and they're testing it: a computer gizmo that makes the car decelerate when it hits the maximum posted speed on any given stretch of road. The system is complicated, involving satellites and Global Positioning gear. It's a grand opportunity for new bureaucracies and the further infantilization of the public in the name of the greater social good -- objectives Europeans value as highly as Americans value four-wheel drive. Think of it: the automobile as governess, slapping drivers' wrists when they get sassy. The device should include a taped lecture on immaturity that automatically takes over the stereo when somebody turns up Eminem too loud. Over there, they might go for this system, but not here -- not west of Maryland, at least. Our cars are supposed to deliver us from our parents, our teachers, our rulers, not sit in for them."

Gizmodo : Picture passwords for cameraphones

Gizmodo : Picture passwords for cameraphones Instead of using a password to unlock your cellphone, a Japanese company called Earth Beat has come up with a way to use a picture instead. You just snap a picture of yourself with your cameraphone, then whenever you want to unlock the phone it uses face recognition technology to verify that the person trying to use the phone matches the photo it has in storage. Which also means you might be unable to use your phone if you ever change your appearance.

Yet another use! My article idea is getting unwieldy.

Features

The two killer features I need, need, are 1) to post from email and 2) to have a few perma-pages where I can quickly click on essays, whatnot. What blog program out there lets me do that, free? I'll pay blogger pro but their site is down.

Livejournal seems nice but no perma-pages and no ability to search entries, it seems.

Xanga lets you search entries, and you can email it in for $25 a year. Looks like Blogger Pro lets you email it in for $50 a year, plus BlogSend, plus Blog This button... Maybe there's a student discount. Leaning toward Blogger Pro, as soon as they revamp.