Auto Tune Once Again Allows Me To Be Lazy

Yeah, I'm just not into posting right now. But I saw this pretty old Autotune featuring debate in the House of Representatives as well as talk about Michael Jackson's death that was pretty freakin' remarkable. One of their best!

Good Old H2O

After a rather anti-climactic crashing of a multi-million dollar piece of equipment into the lunar surface, we finally find out that, apparently, it has done its job:

“Indeed yes, we found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference. “And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount.”

Here a recap of what happened, in case you didn't get to see the video live at 5 in the morning like I did:

The satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross), crashed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole a month ago. The 5,600-miles-per-hour impact carved out a hole 60 to 100 feet wide and kicked up at least 26 gallons of water.

“We got more than just a whiff,” Peter H. Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator of the mission, said in a telephone interview. “We practically tasted it with the impact.”

I was a little skeptical about this project, even though the nerd in me thought it was pretty freakin' cool. But now that we have the results, I'm totally stoked. I'm not saying we should do this now, but the set-up of a lunar colony, potentially to serve as a go-between to further manned space exploration, is now within the realm of reality. With water as the limiting factor in those missions, because of its storage logistics, we may have devised a way around it. That is, until all the water we mine out of the moon dries up and it throws off the entire tidal system of Earth due to some freak change in mass effect. But we'll worry about that when the time comes.

The Art of Science

Maybe I'm a nerd, but I think that science is quite beautiful. There is a common conception that scientists are nerdy, hiding behind microscopes and test tubes, interested only in numbers and facts, and understanding niches and microcosms.

I think there's some truth to that, for sure, and the disciplines in the natural sciences do tend to attract a caliber of people who spend lots of time studying the natural world while losing the bigger picture.

However, many scientists, when in appropriate moods and lightly prodded, are capable of stepping back and examining the beautiful impossibility that is life on our planet and in our galaxy and universe. Science, when you extract its core underpinnings from its infinite data, is as beautiful as the sunset that it seeks to explain.

Talking about science to the lay public, in particular, can sound like free-form verse, its message as finely put together as music. Which is why the downbeat autotuners at "Symphony of Science" have finally found a fitting marriage between the elegance of the scientific explanation and the emotional cadence of the arts. Granted, editing had a lot to do with making these tunes, but Carl Sagan in particular, who is heavily favored in these music videos, brings that gift of scientific storytelling and awe for all-things-universe that make these music videos truly work. A real delight. You can find more videos, and download the tunes, at Symphony of Science.


"A Glorious Dawn" featuring Stephen Hawking


"We Are All Connected" featuring Bill Nye, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson

Idyllic Paradise Lost

I'm not going to go into any details here, but something awful happened to one of our colleagues here. Fortunately nothing of serious consequence ended up transpiring and everybody is fine, but it has not only left a bad taste in all of our mouths, but has also resulted in many of us being uprooted from our living situations that we had grown accustomed to, including our new roommate the Surgery D.O. 4th year student who had previously been enjoying a nice large, quiet apartment to himself and now has to live with my roommate and I in a dingy bedroom with people he doesn't know (and, I suspect, does not particularly want to know, despite being a pretty friendly type himself). Furthermore, he goes to bed early (being a student in surgery and all) which cramps my roommate's and my usual routine of staying up late in the living room chatting and studying.

The living situation changes are really just the symptom. The precipitating event, however, has really colored a lot of our lasting impressions of this place. Quite unfortunately, too, because I have very much enjoyed living and working here. So it goes.

Redirection

Not too much to say today: our census is quieting down as we prepare to take more patients while we're on call tomorrow. Besides that a pretty quiet weekend hanging out, getting some studying done, and watching the Packers bring on the suck. On the plus side, I've been to the gym 11 out of the last 14 days and my knee pains associated with my running are just beginning to fall by the wayside as I strengthen my legs and stretch them out appropriately. Still can't quite run for 30 minutes straight yet without exacerbation, but I'm doing an alternating 2-min-power-walk with 4-min-run and that seems to be working OK. Probably a more realistic approximation of my usual running habits on the soccer pitch. Hopefully I can keep this up when I get back to Mad-Town when I actually have to work longer hours and have more distractions.

So, yeah, not much to tell about. Still enjoying my time in internal medicine, entertaining strong prospects of making her my concubine. And for now, just stoked that Zombies Among Us is posting again.

Not Sure This Captures The Spirit of Evidence-Based Medicine

I saw this L.A. Times article originally on Pandagon, and I'm kind of baffled how I missed it before. Oh, right. Medical school.

So any way, check this out:

Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

Let me get this straight: in a health care reform bill that is so completely concerned with streamlining medicine to finance only the best-established and absolutely necessary procedures, and considering a large chunk of the debate was reserved for arguments regarding the provisions of abortions (a well-established and important medical procedure), we let a measure like this go through completely unacknowledged and uncontested? Granted, the prayer "procedure" is only about $20-40 per day, but we would still be financing something that has absolutely no evidence supporting its benefit. Prayer is NEVER medically necessary or indicated, and charging the American taxpayers for other people's daily prayers, either for supplementation or, heaven-forbid, primary medical care, is just offensive.

Most of the arguments against this provision focus on the financial issues. But, who else, bioethicist and my main man Dr. Norman Fost (from University of Wisconsin. Woot!), gets the right idea:

Dr. Norman Fost, a pediatrician and medical ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said the measure went against the goal of reducing healthcare costs by improving evidence-based medical practices. "They want a special exception for people who use unproved treatments, and they also want to get paid for it," he said. "They want people who use prayer to have it just automatically accepted as a legitimate therapy."

I don't know what the status of this provision is, and my guess is that it's probably staying in. But it's so offensive and hypocritical to keep it in, and I kind of wish there had been more effort made to boot it from the final bill.

Jurustic Park

I wrote about Jurustic Park last week, which I think is now the number one tourist attraction in Marshfield. I knew from the moment I read about it and saw the information on-line that I wanted to go. However, it only holds hours in the spring, summer, and fall, and it wasn't entirely clear whether there would still be access this late in the year. Turns out, there was. My friend MC, MD and I even had the good fortune of getting the grand tour from the owner/artist himself, who ended up being a really wonderful guy. I just thought I'd post some of the many pictures I took from my visit and let you enjoy some of the cool stuff we saw:

This one kind of reminds me of Spider Pig. Except with wings.
Crushing despair. But the dog is so cute!
This one was called "Dandy." Kind of reminds me of...me...
This one hits a little too close to home: did quite a few of these during primary care.
Terrifying awesome raptor. I should get one of these for my living room.
Not sure why this dragon would need a club going into his fight. MC, MD thought he was just asking for a hug.
Monkey or panhandler?
Apparently dogs like to go hunting with double-barrel shotguns.
There were many others, but these are just some of the better ones that turned out. Pretty strange, but pretty awesome. Just the way I like it.

Pretty Much The Best Place In The Whole World

I must admit, I was pretty skeptical of coming to small-town Wisconsin. Marshfield was dauntingly small, and everything I had heard was that there was nothing to do here, nothing to see. So I thought I would just be a recluse in my room. Turns out, so far, that's far from the truth. Granted, I don't know that I would spend years and years here, but I have found plenty to do so far and imagine that the rest of my two and a half weeks here will yield a similar bounty.

In this tradition, I have found the awesomest place ever, courtesy of information garnered from my current attending. My friend MC, MD and I headed over there today. Here's a picture of the most wonderful place in the whole world:


It's called Weber's Farm Store, associated with Nasonville Dairy Inc., a local farm here producing milk, cheese, and eggs (and, unfortunately for the aesthetics of my picture, under construction). And yes, you see that correctly: that is a drive-thru window to purchase all of the fresh dairy, milk, cheese, egg, maple syrup, and other sundry farm goods that you could ever want. Fresh cheese from a drive-thru: who could possibly ask for more? I got myself a huge block of three-year aged sharp white cheddar and a big bag of fresh cheese curds for the staggeringly low price of seven dollars. Apparently heaven put up shop in Marshfield.