I have a very low-key teaching style. Today I was teaching a chemistry class and I made some comment about gas molecules zooming around, which made one student laugh and ask me if that was a technical term. I probably could come up with fancy-sounding words (though maybe not while thinking on my feet), but I think it’s more effective to use simple words if the fancy ones don’t add anything different - the easier it is for people to understand the vast majority of what I’m saying, the more likely they’ll be able to focus on the parts that are actually new material, rather than spending time deciphering blather.
People say doctors are really bad with the jargon, and it’s totally true. Half my classmates have already started up with MI for heart attack, hyperlipidemia for high cholesterol, diapheresis for sweating, and “Please move medially” instead of “Move to the middle of the row” to accommodate latecomers.
I realize that some of these offer more precision than the lay terms, and so they’re certainly useful in technical situations, but I’m amazed at how quickly people forget what is actually going to make sense to a normal person who doesn’t spend six hours a day listening to medical lectures.
And some of the terms appear to be replacing other technical terms: evidently, saying “urination” for what the less couth might call peeing isn’t technical enough! We have to call it micturition.
Every couple of months, each first-year medical student spends an afternoon with a primary-care physician in the community. The doctor I’ve been following around is really awesome. He has a wide range of patients with varying health problems, and his interactions with them are great to watch. I learn a lot from my afternoons in his office, and I try to remember what he does so I can use the same skills someday.
This week was the first time that he had me do things somewhat independently - I had just been shadowing him, but now he sends me in to talk to the patient and find out how they’ve been doing and what their current problem is, then I summarize that to him and he examines them, asks further questions, makes a diagnosis, and makes whatever decisions need to be made.
I had never talked to a real patient without a physician in the room before, and it felt great! I thought I would be really nervous, but he just pushed me in there so I didn’t have time for that. I was also surprised at how easily the patients talked to me - they listed all their symptoms and asked me questions about what was wrong. I was even able to answer a few of their questions, though of course I said something like “Well, that could be due to X; we’ll see what the doctor thinks.”
Feeling like I was actually providing care to someone, rather than just observing and staying out of the way, was very neat.
OK, maybe I should have a Sappiness category. This made me choke up while driving home today:
Commentator Andrew Lam’s family recently got together for a birthday party. When they sang karaoke, they were able to communicate in a way they never could before.
Seriously, it’s a really sweet story about the emotional power of music.
I observed a birth last week. It was amazing! The mother had put a fair amount of thought into the sort of birth experience she wanted, and luckily everything went more or less as planned with no complications. She had a few close family members there as well as a doula, a nurse, and a midwife (and me, but I was in the corner). She also had some new-agey music hooked up to the baby’s heart monitor so that the baby’s heartbeat became part of the music, which sounds goofy but was actually pretty neat (and it gave me a little more information when I couldn’t see the screens).
The birth itself went pretty smoothly; obviously it wasn’t painless but the pushing part of labor was pretty short. I was surprised at how much emotion I felt when the baby was born - it really seemed miraculous. Right away, the midwife did whatever suctioning thing they do to its nose and mouth, then placed the baby on the mother’s chest. That changed the whole mood of the room - the mother and baby were so wrapped up in each other and so peaceful, it was amazing. There was still quite a bit of action in the rest of the room (all the medical sorts of things that have to be done after the baby emerges, and the grandmother taking pictures and all that) but the mom and baby seemed completely separate from all that.
The next day I went to visit them and thank the mother for allowing me to be there. There were a few more family members around, and everyone was so happy and fascinated by the baby. It was neat to get to see something really happy in the hospital.
Yesterday I found myself in front of the freezer section in the grocery store, trying to select some ice cream to make root beer floats with. In just the one brand that was on sale, I could choose from Vanilla, French Vanilla, Homemade Vanilla, or, if I wanted to go low-carb, Vanilla Bean.
I’m all about ice-cream choice, but isn’t vanilla supposed to be the boring default option?
Via Adrienne, a disturbing bit of news: New York City Starts To Monitor Diabetics
New York City is starting to monitor the blood sugar levels of its diabetic residents, marking the first time any government in the United States has begun tracking people with a chronic disease.Under the program, the city is requiring laboratories to report the results of blood sugar tests directly to the health department, which will use the data to study the disease and to prod doctors and patients when levels run too high.
OK, so New York City decides it wants to figure out how well its diabetic population is controlling their disease, which areas have it worst, and that sort of thing. Seems like a fairly reasonable thing to study. There are procedures for doing studies that involve collection of many people’s information - largely focused on making sure that necessary consent is obtained and confidentiality is respected. If they just wanted to study the disease distribution, and collected test results without any identifying data, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. That’s not an unusual thing to do.
But the city also, apparently, plans to inform patients and their doctors when the patients’ test results aren’t up to snuff. Obviously, this means that the city is collecting personally identifying information; otherwise they’d never be able to find the patients. I sincerely hope that the lack of any information about informed consent to this monitoring was an omission by the newspaper and not the city. But given that the article quotes lawyer Robin Kaigh saying that “they are not even required to tell you this is happening,” I’m skeptical as to whether there is any consent involved. Admittedly, I’m not a lawyer and spend only as much time with HIPAA regulations as I need to so they’ll let me in the hospital, but I can’t see how that isn’t a violation of some sort of privacy regulation. And if it’s not, it should be.
Beyond that, I don’t even see the point of this. Presumably, people who are going to the labs to have their recommended tests done are managing their illnesses. I know medical paperwork is notoriously awful, but it seems to me that most of the time, when people have lab tests done, they’re sent there by their physicians, who get a copy of the results, and they fill out a form with their address, so they get a copy as well. Obviously this doesn’t always work out. But if the city wants to try and improve this process, perhaps it could require that a physician’s address be provided before any test is done, or patients be given a number to call to get their results with no voicemail runaround, or whatever it thinks might streamline the communication of results. Having the city insert itself into the process seems like the worst possible idea - the only thing that could be more difficult than dealing with health-care red tape is dealing with government red tape on top of it.
Besides, I’d imagine that the people who are going to the trouble of visiting the lab and getting poked have some idea of how their disease is progressing, and their doctors probably do too. The people who “don’t take it seriously” or “are not paying good enough attention” are most likely the ones who aren’t visiting the labs.
Hmm. I bet the next step will be to identify people with diabetes (once you start yoinking people’s private health information, it won’t be that hard) and start harassing them to get their tests done. It sounds excessive, but then, once we wouldn’t have thought that public health departments would use intrusive tactics justified by the need to control epidemics for diseases that aren’t even communicable.
I’m slightly late, but I liked Joel Spolsky’s post on why he hates CS programs that teach in Java.
Years of whinging by lazy CS undergrads like me, combined with complaints from industry about how few CS majors are graduating from American universities, have taken a toll, and in the last decade a large number of otherwise perfectly good schools have gone 100% Java. It’s hip, the recruiters who use “grep” to evaluate resumes seem to like it, and, best of all, there’s nothing hard enough about Java to really weed out the programmers without the part of the brain that does pointers or recursion, so the drop-out rates are lower, and the computer science departments have more students, and bigger budgets, and all is well.
I think he’s right - you do need that part of the brain to be a really good programmer. There’s certainly a market for competent Java programmers, but it seems to me that that’s the sort of thing technical schools teach - a good university CS program ought to give its students a thorough grounding in the difficult and important theoretical concepts that are needed to do hard-core programming.
At Case there were a lot of students who complained that we weren’t taught any Java or PHP or whatever. I always took note of these individuals as people I didn’t want to end up working with after graduation. If you are a programmer and you notice that Java or PHP knowledge is an asset in the job market, the obvious thing to do is to buy yourself a book (or bookmark a couple of good web sites) and learn it. Write a couple of programs, and add it to your resume. If you can’t do that, you aren’t really a programmer and might want to consider moving to the business school.
I don’t think it works in reverse though - if you’re a smart programmer who’s being taught Java, even if you’re aware that deep knowledge will be useful early enough to obtain it before going on the job market, teaching yourself pointers and functional programming isn’t at all the same thing as picking up Java in a couple days once you know C. I don’t understand why CS programs would put their students in that situation.
I guess I’m an official Missourian now - over the break, I registered and titled my car here, and got a Missouri driver’s license. I can’t say I’m entirely thrilled to be a citizen of the Show-Me State, but actually, life here is pretty good.
There is quite a bit to do. This past weekend, I saw a play and a movie, went out to dinner at a pretty good restaurant, and spent part of Sunday at the zoo. Having a free, excellent zoo is really nice, and it’s open year-round.
Wine is cheap in Missouri! While I was in Cleveland for Christmas, I went to Trader Joe’s to buy wine to bring to a New Year’s Eve party. Then this weekend, I went to TJ’s here to buy wine as well as other ingredients for dinner, and noticed that every bottle of wine whose price I could remember was $2 or so cheaper here. (And these are under-$10 bottles of wine, so that’s a significant difference.) Evidently Missouri has less confiscatory alcohol taxes than Ohio, or something.
And because I can’t bring myself to write an entirely positive post about my new home, I have to say that the mail service here is worse than any other place I’ve lived - it’s even worse than the student-delivered campus mail at my alma mater. I regularly get mail meant for other people. Sometimes they’re other people who live on my street, sometimes they’re people who presumably used to live on my street or in my apartment, and sometimes they’re people who live on completely different streets but happen to share my house number - those individuals are lucky I’m the one who got their misdirected Netflix DVDs, because I returned them. I’m pretty sure there are some things I never received at all. Most of my forwarded mail eventually shows up, but it takes weeks. And last month, I got a phone call from my landlord wondering where my rent check was - 5 days after I’d dropped it into a mailbox a mile away from the destination, it still hadn’t turned up. She wasn’t surprised that it was delayed in the mail; apparently this happens often.
I’m fairly sure that the Ugg boots trend is one that I will never join, because even now my first association with Uggs is not some trendy celebrity or fashionable classmate, but Rush Limbaugh, who I clearly remember shilling for the boots in the mid-nineties.
Not sure what that says about me, but I’m fairly sure it’s something that Ugg wouldn’t like me saying about their boots.
I’m not sure what the reviewers and the gay community are smoking, but Brokeback Mountain isn’t a love story. It’s a tragedy.
As someone who’s frequently disappointed with the heterosexism of the mainstream media, who wishes that a broader spectrum of human experience would be presented for those who don’t fit the standard mold and for those who need to understand that others don’t, I was really looking forward to this movie. A mainstream homosexual love story - with cowboys, no less? What a wonderful step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. It was an excellent movie, don’t get me wrong - all the praise you read about the windswept scenes, the perfect performances, the exquisite depiction of forbidden love is all on target. (Though I do wish Heath Ledger had mumbled a bit less - his spot-on portrayal of a laconic cowboy was slightly marred by the fact that I often couldn’t understand him.)
But the movie is not a love story. Yes, the love between the two men is central to the story, but both men neglect their families and their work. Ennis del Mar’s wife finally divorces him and evidently finds happiness elsewhere, but not until she’s lived through years of disappointment and sadness, and their children have witnessed fights and their father’s willingness to take time off from work to go on “fishing trips” but not to spend time with them. The two men are never able to be together on any sort of permanent basis, and eventually Jack Twist is brutally killed.
Of course, a large amount of the tragedy is a result of homophobia - they didn’t really have the option to make the choices that might have made them happy, and the culture they lived in pushed them into marrying and procreating with women they evidently couldn’t love. And obviously Jack’s death is completely due to violent homophobia. The film gives a glimpse, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, of “the damage done to so many lives by the powerful, suffocating evil of homophobia.”
But despite the tragic circumstances in which the characters found themselves, I can’t quite buy that all of the results are ascribable simply to homophobia. No, there weren’t really any good options open to them, but I guess I hold the old-fashioned belief that once you’ve married someone and had kids with them, you have to do the honorable thing and stick it out, or at least end it in the least painful manner possible. Rushing off with the person you really love a few times per year isn’t OK, at least not when it makes your spouse miserable and keeps you from fulfilling your obligations to your family.
Dale Carpenter has a really excellent article, in which he makes a similar argument to mine (except much more eloquently).
The film speaks powerfully to the sense of lost love and opportunity every closeted gay person must feel. “Heartbreaking” is not too strong a word to describe the loss this film confronts us with. But it’s difficult to buy the widespread idea that the love between Jack and Ennis is an unvarnished good thing made tragic only by a homophobic world.
…
But the deeper reason their love doesn’t completely register is that every time they go off together one is left wondering, what about the kids? What Ennis and Jack experience as an exhilarating liberation from the mundane and the stifling is for their families an abandonment. Ennis at least talks about living up to his familial obligations, but in truth he’s checked out of them almost from the start.
(The whole thing is really worth a read.)
I really hate agreeing with Focus on the Family, but this is pretty close to what my reaction was:
“If you read what Hollywood is saying about it, they’re calling it ‘an achingly beautiful love story,’ ” Price said.“But I don’t see it that way at all. You see two characters obsessed with a type of bondage that they don’t know what to do with. They don’t know where it came from, and they don’t know how to resolve it. And they both end up experiencing tragic consequences in their lives.”
That’s the film I saw.
And that’s why I was disappointed. Rather than an uplifting love story, we got a tragedy that plays right into the hands of the people who think that gay people are hedonistic homewreckers, and homosexuality is a one-way ticket to unhappiness and despair.
On the other hand, I think my expectations were unfair. It isn’t right to expect particular members of oppressed groups to serve as paragons, and it’s no more fair to expect a film to act as an ambassador for acceptance just because it’s one of the first to feature homosexual lead characters. And I don’t think the parts that bothered me are any worse than what’s often found in movies featuring heterosexual love interests - certainly when I saw Walk the Line a few months ago, I couldn’t be very happy for Johnny Cash and June Carter, given what I’d seen happen to his first wife and children. Singling Brokeback Mountain out for painting an unflattering picture of gay people makes no more sense than claiming Walk the Line gives a bad impression of heterosexuals.
Brokeback Mountain isn’t a gay love story, any more than Romeo and Juliet is a teenage love story. It’s a tragedy with gay protagonists; an extraordinary story featuring characters who aren’t. It might not be the film I was hoping to see, but it does a wonderful job of being the film that it is.