Monthly Archives: February 2009

Updated Blogroll

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It’s been a while since I updated my blogroll. A “blogroll” is a list of links to blogs that I read regularly. I took a few old ones out and added these:

  • Aaron TenHarmsel’s photoblog: Aaron is a friend from Rush that takes amazing photos. I recently convinced him to start a WordPress-powered photoblog. He’s an awesome photographer.
  • Binary Impact: My old pal Jon Saed from UIUC has a new WordPress-powered blog with lots of techy goodness.
  • Flickin’ Spit: Chris Byrne (Sadie’s cousin) has a pretty good site of music reviews. It’s got a lot of not-so-mainstream stuff, and it’s the first place I go if I find a new group I like, such as Fleet Foxes.
  • Smarterware: Gina Trapani recently stepped down as lead editor of one of my favorite tech websites, Lifehacker, and started her own blog.
  • xkcd: This is just silly because it should have been on this list long ago. xkcd is the best webcomic, and it comes topped with a heap of geeky goodness. It covers everything from escaping from velociraptors to linux to science and space to school to DRM. It’s simply amazing. I wouldn’t blame you if you went and read the entire archive right now!

Do you have a blog or website I should be reading? Let me know and I’d be happy to add you!

Strange Diseases, Oh My!

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We were learning about a few strange diseases in Microbiology today. Sadie loves to read books on weird diseases like the ones we were talking about. Most of them are nonfiction, and they all sound pretty bizarre. I’ll add a short list of books she has read or reviewed and their corresponding diseases.

Before you ask, yes, my girlfriend is a huge nerd when it comes to books like this :-P Practically every time we’re at borders she’s got something like this in her hand with a more “normal sounding” fiction book. I don’t think some of those books could keep my attention long enough, but if you’re interested, check them out. I stick to to her fiction recommendations!

M3 Clerkships Lottery

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Rush has a “lottery” to determine what order everyone’s M3 clerkships will be in. For those who don’t know, our M3 and M4 years are entirely clinical. We’re supposed to rank them from best to worst depending on our preferences, and a computer program will crunch the numbers and determine which order each student will get. Here’s my top choices:

M3 Clerkship lottery

My picks for the M3 Clerkship lottery

You can’t see the end of my list, but I essentially put everything at the bottom where Internal Medicine and Surgery are last. I prefer to have Medicine in the first half of the year. Surgery is supposed to be the most intense, so I attempted to pad my schedule before and/or after with a break or Psych (a notoriously laid-back rotation). I doubt I’ll change it any before tomorrow. Feel free to suggest changes or let me know what you think!

Copyright and the Internet: A Personal Example

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I don’t normally watch SNL. Occasionally, Sadie and I will flip it on randomly and watch a skit, but I can’t tell you the last time I watched all (or even most) of an episode. I follow @davidsiegel (a software developer) on Twitter, and he tweeted a link to a YouTube video of a recent SNL musical performance by a group I’d never heard of called Fleet Foxes. I liked the song (Mykonos) so much that I had to hear more by them. I checked out Sadie’s cousin Chris’ blog, Flickin’ Spit, for a review, and he listed the newest Fleet Foxes album as one of the Top 50 Albums of 2008. So, I decided to buy the album from Amazon MP3. I went back to the video a few days later to find that it had been removed from YouTube per NBC’s request due to a violation of their copyright.

Without that video, I wouldn’t even know who Fleet Foxes were. I liked their performance so much that I bought one of their albums. You would think this is the point of NBC inviting them onto the show. But now I can’t share the same performance with others so that they might also buy the album. The performance is not available on Hulu or the NBC website. Whose copyright is NBC protecting here? Is it “for the artists’ own good” that the clip has been removed? Obviously not. Who exactly was it hurting to have that clip on YouTube? The answer is exactly no one. This is a perfect example of good advertisement, both for SNL picking a good artist and the artists themselves, squandered by malicious use of copyright power. Gimme a friggin’ break NBC. The online world would be a better place if companies started to see the importance of adopting a pragmatic approach to copyright enforcement.

EDIT: For those wanting to hear the song, you can hear the album version on YouTube.

Dumbass, M.D.

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You have Some Terminal Condition, which necessitates taking two pills a day: one Pill A and one Pill B. If you neglect to take either pill, you die; if you take more than one A or more than one B, you die. If you don’t take them at exactly the same time, you die.

This morning you are going through you usual routine. You pick up your bottle of A Pills and gently tap one into your palm. Then you pick up your bottle of B Pills and tap it, but two pills accidentally fall into your hand. You now hold three pills (one A and two Bs), you don’t know which are which, and they are completely indistinguishable from each other. The A Pills are the same color as the B Pills, they are the same shape, same size — they are identical in every respect. Man, your doctor is a dumbass. But he’s a rich dumbass, because he’s charging you $10,000,000 a pill! So you dare not throw any away.

Thus, the puzzle: what can you do to ensure that you take only one A Pill and only one B Pill today, without wasting any pills (either today or in the future)?

Copied entirely from Defective Yeti [via xkcd wiki]

DO NOT POST ANY ANSWERS, HINTS, OR IDEAS.

Also, I have not solved this yet.