The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Inputting Narratives

By: Ann Finkbeiner | November 6, 2014

You’ve probably done this already or if you haven’t, you will: you sit in your doctor’s office and look at your doctor, your doctor sits at a desk and types on a computer. Your doctor apologizes for the lack of eye contact and explains something about health records now being electronic and tied to reimbursement. You hear “Electronic Health Records” and stop listening; it’s like “Health Policy” — who knows who makes that stuff or why.

Your doctor complains about the non-intuitiveness and frustrating illogic of the program’s interface. You yourself know those bossy sites that force you through useless steps, sites on which you click five times on meaningless words to get one thing done; and you begin to sympathize, but it’s hard to express that without eye contact. Your doctor says these programs aren’t even interoperable, and then you remember the time you and your husband showed up for (minor but serious) surgery before dawn at the famous hospital and the hospital had no such surgery scheduled and had to call a surgeon out of bed; and later on, explained that your doctor’s computer and the hospital’s computer don’t talk to each other.

Your doctor, who is seriously pissed-off, winds up the office visit; she says she’s using an excellent medical education to do data entry and she’s spending more goddam time looking at the screen than at the patient. If you happen to have gone to more than one doctor in the past year or so, you’ll have heard this more than once. Everybody agrees that electronic health records are necessary and inevitable but a website devoted to them, reporting on a RAND study, says they’re causing the medical profession to have “high levels of disgruntlement.” No kidding. Continue reading →

Dear Time: Would You Please Stop Being So Stupid?

By: Helen Fields | November 5, 2014

It doesn’t seem right that something as basic as time should be so annoying.

No, it’s not time itself that’s annoying. I’ve more or less made peace with the fact that it’s marching on. The thing that’s annoying is when the stupid time keeps changing.

In college, I appreciated that extra hour of sleep in the fall, even if I lost an hour in the spring. The longer it goes on, though, the more ridiculous it seems, this whole business of switching clocks twice a year.

Last week I left work in daylight; this week it’s pitch black at quitting time. I hear that the change is even more annoying when you’re working with children or animals who keep soldiering on, waking up at ungodly hours expecting breakfast. Even for those of us who can read clocks, it can take a bit of time to adjust. Giving billions of people jet lag twice a year is just silly. And, darn it, I like my evening light.

Time zones make it even worse. Sometimes I call people in the UK or Europe to interview them. They do daylight savings, too, but they don’t switch at the same time as us. For a week in the fall and a week in the spring, we’re only four hours apart behind Britain instead of the usual five. Great if you remember to check or if you let computers schedule your meetings for you. Less great if you don’t.

Continue reading →

Gotta Have Faith

By: Erik Vance | November 4, 2014

I’ve been traveling a lot recently. I spent the month of August in China and Vienam, I went to Sweden in October, and of course I’ve been bouncing between my home in Mexico City and the good ol’ US of A. And you know what all this travel has gotten me thinking about? Institutions.

I assume that since I didn’t say beaches, cartels, or communism I just lost about half my readers. That’s fine, for those of you who stayed, let me lay out what experts call the “Vance Paradox.” I mean, they don’t yet, but they will by the end of this post.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Affair of the Heart: V. A Family Matter?

By: Colin Norman | November 3, 2014

Six weeks after intricate surgery to replace an aneurysm at the juncture of my heart and aorta with a polyester graft, I’m almost back to normal. I’m walking a lot, about to start biking again, and I’m well on my way to a complete recovery. But there is still a nagging question: Does my family history of aortic catastrophes have implications for the next generations of the Norman family?

My paternal grandmother died from an aortic rupture. My father was felled at the age of 67 by what was diagnosed as a heart attack, but some of the symptoms sounded like an aortic dissection—an aneurysm that eventually resulted in a breakdown of the aortic wall. And in 2002, my brother survived an aortic dissection, thanks to an astute diagnosis and skillful surgery at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It sounds like a family affliction, but it could all be coincidental. Continue reading →

The Last Word: October 27 – 31, 2014

By: Richard Panek | November 1, 2014

In the beginning: The week started with Part IV of guest Colin Norman’s every-Monday series on undergoing heart surgery. (Spoiler alert: He lives to write another day.)

Next: Craig went looking for a creature from an extinct species—and saw one, sort of.

Then: Christie got her gun and went looking for creatures from non-extinct species—and saw them, for real.

And: Jessa offered notes from underground—safe havens, including entire cities (you read that right), that literally have never seen the light of day.

In the end: The week concluded with a prose-and-photo essay from guest Chris Arnade on his second career—documenting the life of street addicts. Not for the faint of heart. (See “In the beginning,” above.)

* * *

Guest Post: The Three Quarks of Life

By: Chris Arnade | October 31, 2014

This is a tough post to read, tougher to look at. Some background might help. In 1993 Chris Arnade got a PhD in physics and then went to work on Wall Street. Starting in 2007, Chris started taking long walks with his camera through New York City, where he found a lot of ambiguity and unsolvable problems. By 2010 he was spending all of his spare time in the Hunts Point neighorhood of the Bronx, documenting the stories of street addicts. In 2012 he quit his job to dedicate his full time to the project. His collaborator in the project is Cassie Rodenberg, who writes the Scientific American blog, The White Noise.— LWON eds

(Shooting up)

My first career was studying the rules that drive the material world, theoretical physics. Physicists use extremes to learn how nature works: They take stuff and smash it together at really high speeds to strip matter of the ancillary fluff and expose the essential core.

My current career, of working with homeless addicts in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, is equally revealing. It is seeing life stripped of ancillary fluff, leaving what is essential. It exposes the things often forgotten when you have a steady job, a supportive family, and own lots and lots of stuff.

Gone are the material and social pleasantries that mask our perceptions of being human. A street addict’s life is about hustling for the next meal, the next place to sleep, the next fix. About staying alive.

For physicists the essential core is composed of a handful of particles, of which the most essential of the essential are six quarks. Six particles that combine and interact to make up everything. Six varieties of Lego pieces.

In Hunts Point three rules dominate: The three quarks of life. Continue reading →

Forward by Failure

By: Christie Aschwanden | October 29, 2014

A few years ago, I decided to take up hunting. This was kind of a big deal, because I’d spent the first decade-plus of my adult life as vegetarian. I became a big game hunter for the same reason I raise chickens — to know where my food comes from and ensure that it’s raised and harvested humanely. I figure if I’m not willing to kill it myself, I have no business eating it.

I quickly learned that hunting red meat is much harder than raising chickens. First of all, I had to acquire a hunter safety card, which required attending a one-day class on firearm safety and hunting regulations. The class included several videos demonstrating what not to do (like shooting from a vehicle or across a road), practice handling firearms and primers on hunting regulations. It ended with a written exam and a trip to the shooting range to fire a .22 rifle.

The next summer, I focused on learning to shoot. It took me multiple trips to the firing range before I felt comfortable handling the 30-06 rifle I’d chosen. And there was still the issue of actually using it to kill something. Continue reading →

Seeing Mammoths

By: Craig Childs | October 28, 2014

Seeing a mammoth is not the same as looking over a zoo wall at a modern elephant, or even standing next to a live, gray, wrinkled wall of flesh with scant, coarse hairs. Watching the flexible, prehensile reach of an elephant’s trunk and the slow cross-wise chewing of hay, I’ve found it hard to see the larger mammoth inside.

Elephants and mammoths are obviously related, both proboscideans evolved from a trunked African animal the size of a pig some 60 million years ago, eventually becoming the largest land animal on earth. The earliest version of the mammoth, Mammuthus subplanifrons, originated in the African tropics about 5 million years ago. A later mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis, entered forests and grasslands in Europe and Asia about 3 million years ago, eventually leading to the famed wooly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, which adapted to cooler, more arid treeless conditions in the north from the British Isles to eastern Siberia and into North America. The wooly mammoth was a latecomer to the New World, arriving from Siberia across the land bridge only 100,000 years ago. A previous mammoth species had arrived in North America a million years earlier and moved into warmer more southerly parts of the continent where it evolved into the what is known as the Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi. This was one of the larger proboscideans to have ever lived, up to 13 feet tall at the shoulder.

In museum collections, I’ve looked for this animal by running my hands along the arcs of their tusks, 10 or 12 feet of solid ivory, colored chestnut from time in the ground. In the clean lighting and gentle hum of air ducts, I still couldn’t see the actual beast. Taken out of the context of its environment, I saw paleontologists and plaster jackets more than I saw mammoths.

The best view I ever had of this animal was in the gypsum wastelands of a bombing range in southern New Mexico where mammoth tracks have been repeatedly discovered. Continue reading →