miscellaneous

The Show That House Never Built

Posted in miscellaneous, pop culture, science on August 15th, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Much as I like the show House I have to admit I grit my teeth until I get into the narrative. The formulaic characters, the quick-talk affectations, the fact that House is never wrong and the fawning sycophants are always wrong is a lot to navigate for the fun in their banter.

The show is at war with itself: It is supposed to be, according to its creator, a mystery, where the bad guy is the disease, but devolves to conventional “character” driven formulas, which then further deprecates into silliness — the cheap thrill of a good line — rather than revelation about the characters.

You never fully understand what the House characters are discussing medically and the final outcome where patient is saved and endearingly grateful to an indifferent Greg House (who cares only about solving mysteries) makes you want a site to go to where you can read about the medical premise and leave the ego laden crew behind.

Turns out the NYT has a more satisfying alternative, as a doctor recounts what are essentially medical short stories, which happen to be true. Informative. Provocative. Nutritive. No bloat.

These tales of medical sleuthing and the vagaries of diagnosis (often pure luck in that the right intern was there to see the presenting patient) leave you amazed at the cleverness — and feeling vulnerable that the successful outcomes hang by the frail thread of pure chance encounter.

From the moment Palomba first laid eyes on the wasted and febrile patient, she knew she had to do something fast. “It was clear he was dying,” she told me. Looking through his chart, Palomba concluded that he probably wasn’t having a recurrence of his cancer.She went back to the idea suggested by the medical student. Could he have HLH? In this disease, the balance between the body chemicals that suppress macrophages and those that turn them on is somehow lost, and as a result, these primitive fighter cells ramp up into a frenzy and consume everything in their path.

As it turns out, the doctor who writes this Diagnosis series for the NYT is a consultant for House. She should write the shows.

A Noodle Of The First Rank

Posted in miscellaneous, writers-poetry on August 14th, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

This NYT article about the OED explains how many archaic definitions are being buried in the graveyard of ancient meaning.

There is a sort of mourning mixed with understanding at such inevitable change, evinced in people who love language; the writer asked if, “the editors might feel a twinge of regret over…changing” some definitions,

Gilliver also pointed to the word prothodaw, which has had its spelling changed to protodaw and lost its definition of “a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank.” Eschewing the pejorative noodle and embracing brevity, the O.E.D. now defines it as “a complete idiot,” which I find a bit brusque. The original definition was the only instance in which the improbable phrase “noodle of the first rank” was used in this dictionary, and now it has gone, most likely never to return. Sadly, I expect that when the word boodle is revised, it will lose its definition of “a stupid noodle.”

Running, Douglas, Space Turtle

Posted in miscellaneous on August 11th, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Good running advice,

Just running quickly for 20 or 30 seconds or even a minute during a regular training run seems to be a great way to increase average running pace, and it avoids the monotony of just building miles. It adds variety. I advise it for the beginning runners I work with. Every run has something where they’re running a little bit quicker just so they aren’t slogging along. It’s different for the more competitive runner. They often have to force themselves to run slow.

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How does the son of a rich and famous man end up like this?,

[The son of Michael...] Douglas faces a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum period of life for two counts of possessing and distributing forms of methamphetamine known by the street names of “crystal meth” and “Ice,” which is smoked in a pipe.

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And a trip to another planet: Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles

Dear President Obama Of This Great Planet Earth

Posted in miscellaneous on June 23rd, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

A funny piece about well-meaning impulses encountering the cold splash in the face of reality. Obama wanted to have an open government online forum and let the people speak.

So they did:

“Please, as fellow human beings of this great planet Earth, disclose all known information on space/UFO’s because the world needs to know,”…

The Tale Of The Garden Cat

Posted in miscellaneous on May 23rd, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

When we go to the community garden nearby we sometimes see a cat. For the longest time the cat would walk right by us. Like we were a stump of wood. She didn’t avoid us, in fact she would pass right next to us. No matter how high pitched our friendly greetings, baby-talk to pets, she didn’t acknowledge us, let alone engage in a stop-and-pet.

Then one day we came into the garden and she came up and was chatty and looked up at us. She let us pet her and subsequently would sit on a bench with us and curl up, rubbing her head against us. She would spend quality time with her human friends.

Today we saw her and engaged in the ritual hello but she walked by. She was hunting. So we figured there is one primary channel in cat brain, and now it is in stalking mode. She didn’t look at us or talk to us.

As we were leaving we saw her ahead of us. She seemed smaller and lighter in her mottled coat. We realized: there were two different cats, from the same litter, coming to the garden, but by common agreement in cat contract law, never to be seen together — to ”trick the humans”.

Twitter, Flu

Posted in miscellaneous on May 2nd, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

At last, a use for Twitter. You can track the flu via Twitter.

Connecticut, Middlesex County: Second Confirmed Case of Influenza A (H1N1) Reported in Connecticut.#swineflu #H1N1
about 1 hour ago from web [That is, reported @ appx Saturday, May 2, 2009 - 2:11 PM PST]

Amazon. Not Good.

Posted in economy, miscellaneous on April 23rd, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

I’m kind of a fan of Amazon. For a big company they have been pretty smart. Much of their implementation, for example, the ease of returning items, is well thought out. I have a Kindle book that was a little more difficult to make available than necessary, but it was still, for a new deal, pretty good. I buy a lot of stuff from them.

But this article, saying Amazon.Bad, is definitely you-guessed-it, not good. As one commenter said, you tend to give credence to the reviews. But according to the article,

After buying an anti-snoring mouthpiece from a third-party seller on Amazon, reader Bob received an email from the company offering him a free mouthpiece in exchange for a five-star review. He noted this attempted bribe in his Amazon review, and Amazon deleted it. Twice.

If companies only understood how much their good name matters. Like the mother-ship itself, the economy, businesses run on consumer confidence.

What Everyone Should Know

Posted in miscellaneous on April 22nd, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Well, the scienceblogs.com email of the day or week or whenever it arrives, included a photo of,

Bark lice, order Psocoptera, on a tree trunk in Argentina.

Bark lice. I thought everyone should know.

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Also of note, on today’s Seinfeld repeat,

Seattle, it’s the pesto of cities.

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And finally, a NYT review of a survivalist book.

After informing us that his book is a distillation of eight years spent learning to “extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hot-wire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters” and so forth, he promises that when it all hits the fan, “you’re going to want to find me. And you’ll want to be doing whatever I’m doing.”

NYT Article Skimmer

Posted in miscellaneous on April 9th, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

People who still read newspapers, all three of us, should know about this: The NYT has — what appears to be from the URL “prototype” designation — an experimental site dedicated to easier skimming and reading of its wide-ranging pub.

The site is called — what else? — “Article Skimmer” in the browser title. It is free of distraction, ads, very well organized and low key techy in the way the subject categories sweep in — it makes the NYT almost homey, instead of its often off-putting attitude-laden-Yuppie feel. A great way to read what’s up wid dat? without feeling imposed upon…

Elevator Going Up

Posted in miscellaneous on September 21st, 2008 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

I once read a 100 page New Yorker article about the growing, processing and canning of Le Sueur peas. Well, it felt like a 100 page article. But I read the whole thing. Something hypnotic about the magic-realism, anal, detailed prose I guess. It is a form of escape into minutiae. Like watching TV. Or reading the text on cereal boxes. Or parsing political strategies. Or…

Anyway, here is another article, very long, very New Yorker, very good, about elevators in high rises, interlaced with one man’s horrendous experience being stuck in a high rise elevator for long enough for it to ruin his life.

Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed. If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. They work. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare.

A Tale From China

Posted in miscellaneous on May 19th, 2008 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

I don’t think I can make it, he told his wife…his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.

She sensed he was giving up. If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away, she said. But since we’re still alive, we must be fated to live.

This touching tale about a couple that survived the disastrous earthquake in China at first sounds like a TV drama. The fact that China has opened enough to accept help, and let the world in to see what was happening, that its leader is committed and involved — as distinct from the gang that runs Burma — says something for a genuine, heartening change in China.

They lay entwined on their sides, not knowing whether they were bleeding or any bones had been broken. A large chunk of concrete loomed inches above their heads. Shifting their bodies, they knew, could cause it to drop down on them.

An incredible story.

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