The refrigerator is a great place to extend shelf life of products, whether edible or not. Batteries or film will stay fresh for years in the fridge if kept in proper humidity. Storing preservative-free eyedrops or Forteo (for osteoporosis) in the fridge will also help maintain their efficacy.
I keep chocolate in my fridge. Large amounts of it. Right in the left crisper drawer. Ever since I started counting down the weeks before my move, I’ve been frantically trying to clear out my food items. I’ve amassed a formidable stash of European delicassies in my fridge and cabinet over the last year, and it’s been difficult whittling down my stores. The photo above shows about a fourth of what I had 2 months ago. I simply am unable to consume this stuff in large quantities because the chocolate is overpoweringly rich and it seems like a waste not to savor it. In NYC, the Leibniz cookies sell at $5 for 3.3oz. The Swiss waffle chocolates? $6 for 3oz. I bought 5 boxes of each earlier in the year. (The gold standard for cookie comparison is the Oreo, which usually sells for $3 for 16oz)
I’ve started distributing some of my goodies in the hospital, and they go like hotcakes. A box of Ferrero’s lasted 3 hours. I wonder how long a box of French schoolboy cookies (Le Petit Ecolier) will last…
I have a radiometer, or light mill, sitting on the windowsill at home. It’s one of the coolest gadgets I’ve seen. It is essentially a lightbulb-shaped partial vacuum that contains a set of rotating vanes. One side of each vane is black while the other is white. When exposed to light, the vanes rotate with the black face always trailing the white.
For the longest time, I erroneously assumed that the vanes rotate because of the impact of photons. However, a more detailed explanation can be found on Wikipedia. A more proper explanation for the radiometer phenomenon lies in the energy gradient between the black and white surfaces. Osbourne Reynolds theorized that gas particles tend to migrate towards area of greater heat. In the radiometer, cool particles travel from the white to the black side through the edges, creating a pressure gradient. This gradient drives the vane forward, with the black side trailing. The orientation of the four vanes allow for rotation of the mill. Physics is like magic. I’ve made a video of my radiometer in action:
Dozens of online music streaming options have cropped up over the past few years, and many of them offer well-conceived interfaces. Pandora and Last.fm are two of my favorite players, and I will be reviewing them on this post. Please note: I hold no stake in either of these startups, although I would not mind if I am offered a stake…
Although I am relatively technically oriented, Pandora and Last.fm appeal to me through their intuitive interfaces. When I am in the hospital scrolling labs or churning out discharge summaries in the middle of the night, I do not wish to be burdened with menu options. I only want to fire up my portable firefox browser, start up some music, and get back to work.
Pandora.com requires you to create an account. It will save your channel preferences, and automatically load the next time you visit the site. The interface is clean; there is a volume and a “forward” control. The active song is displayed with album art a-la Coverflow. The right column always displays a banner advertisement that can be [conveniently] removed with Adblock. If you want artist or album information, you can simply click on the links provided. The genre classification system works well to incorporate music of similar taste to that of your original search. Overall, it’s a great free online radio.
Last.fm offers identical content, although the interface is more distracting. A description of the band and song is provided on every track, along with a colorful background consistent with last.fm’s color scheme. You do not have to create an account to use the website, which allows for easier access. I think that last.fm’s genre algorithm may be slightly more accurate than Pandora’s, although I may simply have a preference for Last.fm’s licensed artists. I typically use Last.fm at work mainly because I don’t have to log into their website.
A third web player that I frequent is Seeqpod. Unlikely Last.fm or Pandora, Seeqpod doesn’t offer a continuous player that tracks similar types of music you like. Instead, it finds the exact song that you search for, and queues it into the player. Furthermore, it links directly to a website that contains the media file so that you can download it! This is the only music search engine/player that I’ve encountered with download capabilities. However, the service appears to be under renovation at this point. Hopefully it will return in due time.
From what I’ve seen, the most lucrative hospitals are those that you don’t typically consider to be academic powerhouses. On the contrary, many of them appear to provide care that is far from excellent. Based on personal observation and unfounded stereotype, I’ve created an action plot of the ultimate medical provider framework (outside hospital):
Update 5/5/09 18:30: I’ve realized that cardiac cath reimbursements aren’t what they used to be. The big revenue generators these days are the imaging modalities, like MUGA scans, and even ABI’s. Having a nuclear medicine lab would help pull in the big bucks.
Illness drives us to illogical decisions, and that’s one of my pet peeves in medicine. As doctors, we think that we know what’s best for our patients and frown when they disagree with us. We are even trained in medical school and residency to put ourselves into their shoes to help guide our decisions. Yet with such extensive preparation and almost a year of clinical practice behind me, I still am unable to rationalize some of the decisions my patients make.
Last evening I was paged by nursing that one of the asthmatic patients demanded to be discharged from the hospital, at 10:45pm. She was taking multiple anxiolytic agents, along with sedatives. She complained that her wheezing had not improved since admission, and that she “needed” to leave. Earlier in the evening outside of visiting hours, she had a visitor who demanded to meet her in the hospital lobby. When security denied their rendezvous, she threw a fit. I gave her a standard discussion about leaving against medical advice, and that I did not believe it would be ideal if she left in the middle of the night while she was ill.
Over the next hour, she demanded to speak to me over 5 times. I presented the AMA form that relieves the hospital of any wrongdoing if she left and told her that she could even die with untreated asthma. Around 2am, the nurse notified me that the patient had left the hospital.
I guess she was probably withdrawing from some illicit substance, like a third of my patients predictibly do (I am working at an inner city “Outside Hospital”). Afterward, I felt disturbingly relieved that my patient had left–I wouldn’t have to write a progress note on her in the morning.
Dozens of online music streaming options have cropped up over the past few years, and many of them offer well-conceived interfaces. 