I’ve always suspected that physicians have a narrower breadth of knowledge than the average professional, especially in non-medical issues. After all, college and medical school for them consisted of learning organic chemical processes and bizarre diseases.
My suspicion was confirmed recently during a friend’s wedding. A portion of the wedding lunch was dedicated to “wedding trivia”. It wasn’t the typical trivia about the bride and groom one would know from being their acquaintances, but rather hardcore minutiae a la trivial pursuit.
Topics included politics:
What is the term used to describe unintended civilian consequences resulting from covert operations from an aggressor government?
And science:
What is the name used to describe the first primitive bird considered to be descended from dinosaurs?
The teams were divided by dinner tables. My table consisted of internists, nephrologists, and other physicians. We placed near the bottom of the competitor list, behind the lawyer table (trivia nights at the pub must have given them an advantage) and all of the tables with PhD’s.
Conclusion: We spend too much time studying diseases that have no cures.
Note: The answers to the aforementioned questions are “blowback” and “Archeopteryx”, respectively.
medicine
humor, medicine
I noticed this logo on one of my boxes of table salt. I guess I should use salt the next time I want to shoo away a pigeon.
misc
humor
Damn, I don’t want to know what’s behind this door…it may cause bilateral cataracts, however.
misc
humor
Many years ago on March 13th (the day before Pi day), I interviewed for a summer position at Microsoft. I was a freshman in college, and was two months into my first computer science course ever. I knew little about computing at the time, and had a desktop computer built mostly from parts I found in the dumpster. My operating system was Debian Linux 2.0, since I didn’t have a copy of Windows. Indeed, it was ironic that I was interviewing for a M$ position.
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computing
humor, tech
I used to toss sensitive documents in the hospital shredder bin. The bin is usually a locked cabinet that is emptied occasionally by a professional shredding company.
Several weeks ago, I noticed that a few of the hospital maintenance workers were digging around the “locked” bin. Since then, I’ve acquired a cheap-o-shredder for shredding purposes.
What I’ve discovered is that the standard 6-8 page vertical shredders are junk. You can’t aggressively shred anything thicker than 5 pages without jamming the grinder. In addition, the papers shreds could actually be reconstructed without too much difficulty if all the pieces were available.
I guess I have two alternatives:
- Buy a nicer, cross cutting shredder with larger blade.
- Burn my documents.
Or shred AND burn them. That would be entertaining and most effective.
misc
humor, work