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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| Friend of mine sent me an article in the New York Times earlier this week called The Power of Negative Thinking. Pretty interesting. It was talking about how everything good that was going on in the VA hospital Walter Reed (which has had so much bad press) came from negative thinking. That positive thinking tends to gloss over bad things that are happening and when that happens, the bad things get overlooked.
Consider how Walter Reed helped lower the death rate for wounded soldiers. It was 25 percent in the first Persian Gulf war; today it is less than 10 percent. Trauma care did not change. Medical personnel are actually stretched thinner than before. But they have tracked weekly data on injuries and survival rates, and actively looked for failures and how to overcome them.
Nothing was too trivial. During a visit with colleagues at Walter Reed early in the Iraq war, I was struck, for example, by their attention to eye-injury statistics. Instead of being proud of saving some soldiers from blindness, the doctors asked a harder, more unnerving question: why had so many injuries occurred? They discovered that the young soldiers weren’t wearing their protective goggles. Too ugly, the soldiers said. So the military switched to cooler-looking Wiley X ballistic eyewear. The soldiers wore their eyegear more consistently, and the eye-injury rate dropped immediately.
Kind of ironic. | | |
| I am trying to get a Second Life, but it is proving to be difficult. I signed up, but I can't access. All I really want to do is make an avatar for myself. Ah, well. Perhaps I should work on my first life. (That is, my actual life.) | | |
| A friend of mine came out with a book. I haven't finished reading it, but I am over half way done and I hate it. I think it is awful. I would never buy this for anyone, even me if I weren't supporting a friend. Now I am going to have to say something nice about it to him and his mom et al. What is a friend?
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| So, it's been a long time. No reason, of course, just didn't feel like
updating. Then I forgot about the whole thing. I am sure that tons has
been happening, but nothing real, not really.
Keep meaning to do more, but don't.
At least the winter is over.
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| This is how much mothers annoy their children:
[Michael] Bloomberg's father was a bookkeeper for a dairy who died of heart failure in 1963. After his death, Bloomberg's mother, Charlotte, went to work as a secretary. His parents were never all that consumed with material success, he says, adding that his 92-year-old mother has refused his offers to treat her to a nicer home, preferring to stay in the family split-level in Medford that Bloomberg's parents bought for $11,000 some 50 years ago. Mom, in fact, is still so independent that when she uses a car service at night that's billed to her son, "she sends me a check!" the billionaire says with incredulity. "It drives me crazy."
Can you imagine. I mean, seriously, can you just picture him saying, "Ma, I got it. No, really. Look, I am really really rich. I have more money than almost anyone else in the world. Let me pay for something, please." Do parents have children solely to annoy them? | | |
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