http://www.withoutbound.net/blog Pontification on politics, health care, geek subjects, and my life. Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:44:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama: I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/10/20/and-he-was-an-american/ This evening I went to a performance by a band called Strawfoot at the downtown branch of the St. Louis Public Library. The library's newsletter billed them as "dirge country" but wikipedia calls them alt-country; I could go with punk-folk or just exactly the kind of weird that's right up ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/10/06/strawfoot/ I ran across a link to Beloit College's Mindset List for the Class of 2010. I've seen these before, as they're frequently forwarded around. This one is a bit bizarre. Some of them make me feel old: Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born. Caller ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/10/05/mindset/ I got to attend the VP debate - there was a lottery for student tickets, and I had #482 out of 521 allowed in. I think the most exciting part was actually standing around inside the security perimeter before entering the building, among all sorts of VIPs. I actually wished ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/10/02/vp-debate-thoughts/ I'm not a big protest or demonstration person; the large Midwestern portion of my personality frequently makes me feel vaguely embarrassed about such group efforts when I'm not rolling my eyes at certain protests that seem more an opportunity to pat oneself on the back than to actually do anything ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/05/26/day-of-silence-and-golden-rule-pledge/ One of the things you have to learn in order to sound smart while presenting a case (in other words, telling a patient's story) is how to make generous use of signs. In general, signs are objective manifestations of illness, as opposed to symptoms, which are subjective: for example, in ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2008/01/06/signs/ Tim and I got engaged! We spent the weekend with my family at Lake Hope, our traditional fall vacation spot. Sunday morning, Tim took me for a walk to a picturesque spot overlooking the lake, and asked me to marry him. Of course, I said yes! There's not a specific date yet ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2007/10/23/good-news/ Sometimes it seems like the emergency room at my hospital is a wormhole between two universes: one where I and the other medical professionals live, and one where the patients live. Some of the differences between these two were unsurprising to me: I already knew that our patient population tends ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2007/10/06/theres-a-whole-other-world-out-there/ The October Atlantic's Primary Sources feature has a bit titled "Mrs. Pascal's Wager?", about research into why women are consistently more religious than men; a new study contradicts the popular argument that women, being more risk-averse than men, attend church out of fear of going to hell. Researchers studied people ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2007/10/02/or-maybe-its-just-another-abuse-of-literally/ I'm halfway through my Emergency Medicine rotation, having already completed three months of Internal Medicine (general adult medicine). Unfortunately I don't think I'm any closer to knowing what I want to do with my life, except I guess that it's definitely some branch of medicine! My first month was ambulatory medicine ... http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2007/09/22/checking-in-outpatient-internal-medicine/