Deep Freeze alert

Last night all of th local news stations and internet outlets carried a deep freeze alert for the city of Tucson.

The projected temperature was 33

On hospitality

We're heading home tomorrow--after six months in the desert. well ok, maybe it hasn't been all that bad--it just feels that way after the tests I've had over the last few days. Talk about a brutal experience.

But it is done, 1/8 of the way there. And we're coming home. But before we do I would like to offer a word of gratitude. Our family here has reached out to us and made our time here thus far an enjoyable experience. I don't know if we could have made it without them. So if you are reading this (and you may never do so--my readership is pretty low) thank you. In particular I would like to thank Poppy and Grandma for having us over whenever we call. And Aunt Ginger and Uncle Dave, who have treated us like their fourth child and made a consistent effort to include us in everything (last weekend we had a great time going to the tree farm and picking out a tree with them, we didn't get to have one this year).

So to those of you I will see soon, I have missed you, and look forward to seeing you. and to those of you here--thank you..

Things I wish I could have seen

I was driving home, talking on the phone to Adrienne. She was distracted, we hung up...five minutes later she called frantic. She couldn't find her keys...I calmed her down a bit, and talked her through it. She was convinced she had thrown them out with the trash. I tried to talk her out of it, but she was insistent. She climbed into the dumpster. In the process of climbing into the dumpster she took off her jacket. When she got out, she realized that her keys were in the pocket of her sweater, and had been concealed under her jacket.

Oh how I love her...I just wish I could have seen it.

Adrienne's

rough and tumble driving style requires a high coefficient of friction--if you can't hear the squeal when you hit the brakes you weren't driving fast enough right.

she called from the corner--less than a hundred yards from the house. Slid through the stop sign.

don't worry I drove the car home--luckily there weren't any cars moving the other way.

Ice

lowers the coefficient of friction between rubber and asphalt...as any engineer worth his salt will tell you...salt being a handy tool for increasing said coefficient of friction...at least at certain temperatures.

Salt was also used by the Romans to lower the coefficient of fertility in the soil around Carthage.

Which brings up an interesting question....why does anything grow in this state?

it is finished

I am officially done with my first two classes: Gross Anatomy and Histology

My scores were 648 and 643 respectively. I'm not sure what they mean, but I think they're ok. I do know they're not percentages, but I've been told that percentages don't matter anymore. All that matters is how you do in relation to everybody else. so if you get a 90 and everybody else gets a 95 you lose...or something. Anyway, I don't know what anyone else got so I can't tell if I did well. So what I'm left with is a pair of relatively meaningless scores.

So in protest I'm going back to the good old days of just worrying about how I did. That is 93% and 95% respectively. See that looks so much better to me. It actually carries meaning. Even given that the testing system is rather arbitrary and given my ability to guess better than basically every other person in medical school, it still carries more meaning than those other numbers.

Anyway. The two new classes are Biochemistry and Physiology. To be honest...I don't have a clue what's going on in eithe one. Actually that's a lie. Physiology is interesting, and I can keep up with the professor at least half of the time on a good day. Biochemistry is a whole different beast. She's from India so she says things like methial for methyl or and jen for gene and you can forget about words like adenine and guayanine. Listening to lecture is like a guessing game.

Suffice to say that my stellar(as far as I can judge) record thus far is about to make a swirling exit

Christmas List

As readers of my blog may know, I'm not very good with Christmas lists.

I am sorry

On the other hand...

I am very gracious no matter what you give me...

And I will be thankful

Happy Thanksgiving

What a wonderful day thanksgiving is. We had snow today. It was fun to walk through the snow. We're not used to that.
I'm thankful for lots of things, but I'm not going to list them all here.

One of my favorite parts of thanksgiving dinner is the cranberries. Something about cranberries mixed with turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes is spectacular.

I was a little disappointed today though. I'm used to Thanksgiving being an all day affair. Everybody spending time with each other in the morning then helping with dinner and eating together. So it was a little strange to just be invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. The whole day I didn't know what to do. I just kind of sat around waiting until it was time to go to dinner.

And I missed my family. My favorite thanksgiving I think, was when we went to the ranch. That was fun. My least favorite thanksgiving was when I was in Egypt and I didn't even realize it was thanksgiving.

So we'll have an easy quiz so everyone can be thankful for quiz points

for one and a half points...where was the first thanksgiving celebration on this continent?

For another point which president proclaimed the first official day of thanksgiving?

and for half a point, which president made it a permanent official holiday?

Pop Quiz

So we're going to start a new quiz feature. I will pose a question and then put the answer under comments. If you can answer the question without looking it up, then you get to add a comment giving your point total for that question.

So over the weekend 3000 people died in and around Dhaka.

one point if you know where Dhaka, another one if you know what killed the people and 3 if you know what language they speak.

On sports

We went to the UM/OSU football game yesterday. It was to say the least, an interesting experience.

I have to admit, I don't really enjoy sporting events for the most part, or at least I'm beginning to think that I don't. Crowds aren't really my thing. But aside from that, being a spectator really isn't my thing.

I love playing sports. Pretty much any sport. Granted, I'm not very good at any of them, but I enjoy letting my competitive nature free for a while from time to time. But watching sports is the worst. It's like playing, in that if you're not careful you'll become invested in the outcome, but you don't have any control over the outcome. In the case of the game I went to ysterday, I could only sit and watch as Ohio State beat Michigan. Luckily, I'm not as invested in Michigan football as a lot of other people or it would have ruined my whole day.

Over the years I've been to a few professional baseball games, and a few college football games, and even a college basketball game. And they've all been fun, to a point. My best experiences were when I was a child sat in awe at the outsized nature of big time sports. As an adult the chief pleasure in going to a game has been derived from the company. Perhaps I've become inured to the grandiose after 26 years in the US.

Inevitably, at some point during the game I begin to ask myself...what's the point. Why am I here? What is so compelling that 110,000 people would gather in one place? A bunch of young men throwing a ball around? Is that really so gripping, so important that it draws more people than church, or than the symphony, or even than a rock concert?

Besides that I always feel a little a little guilty. For one thing there is an association between big time sports and alcohol. Walking through the rows of tailgaters at 10 in the morning the alcohol flowed freely. Even on the high-school campus every car had a table set up with rows of bottles.
Besides that, there's the money issue. It would be hard to justify the money that goes toward sports in this country if it went towards buying food for homeless people. But as it is it goes to television stations, agents, owners and guys with big guns.

So anyway,

Happy Birthday

this is a fun picture









and this is so I don't get disowned

On Tests

I just had a test today. It was a final exam. Tests make me feel so inadequate.

First the teacher presents material. I learn it. Then the teacher tests me on that material. Nothing on the test is new. Everything is something i was expected to learn. So every question I don't know represents something I failed to do. And realistically, how often do you get a 100% on a test?

Every question I get wrong is an expectation from the instructor that I didn't fulfill. So tests just make me feel like I'm not good enough. That's why I don't like tests

I haven't posted in a month

Apparently I haven't been inspired

but that's ok...maybe things are looking up

supermarkets

Farmer Jack's used to be the only supermarket chain operating in Detroit. When Farmer Jack's went out of business, they sold their supermarkets to Kroger. Kroger decided to buy all of the stores except for the ones in the city of Detroit. This left Detroit without any supermarkets.

So Detroit has no supermarkets. Why? It seems like at least one supermarket could make it in a city of 800,000 people. So why didn't Kroger pick up any of those stores? Well to start remember that grocery store operate on the slimmest profit margins in retail. So you have to sell a lot of stuff consistently and not have any extra operating costs. So what did Kroger say?

1. Theft: Theft rates are significantly higher in Detroit than anywhere else. That's a big cost and security gaurds are expensive.

2. High slip and fall liability: Detroit residents are more likely to sue than others. This is obviously a big cost.

3. Food Stamp cycles: food stamps aren't really stamps, and when those little cards get refilled by the government on the 1st of the month everybody goes out to buy groceries. This cycle makes it harder to do business.

This kind of thing fascinates me. So what can we learn from this.

1. Crime breeds poverty. Lots of people think the reverse is true, and they are certainly mutually reinforcing. Rudy Guliani's one great insight was that if you stop crime, you reduce poverty.

2. Lawsuits are dumb. This is the same kind of "They owe me something" mentality that leads unions to destroy this state. They also hurt the entire society.

3. Relying on the government to fix poverty doesn't work. (ok that's a stretch...but it doesn't)

On Unions

This state's economy is a joke. There aren't any jobs.

Why?

Last week GM employees went on strike. they all got up and walked off the job. GM can't make a profit because it already pays 30 dollars an hour more an hour for labor than Toyota.

This week Chrysler employees are going to do the same.

There aren't any teaching jobs, not because teachers aren't needed, but because schools can't afford to hire new people. They can't just hire new people at a lower salary because the union would strike.

The state employees union started a lawsuit against the state when it shut down for four hours because lawmakers couldn't agree on a budget.

It's a joke. Every day when I'm driving to school I listen to the news, and every day on the local news there's some story about how unions are ruining the state economy.

If I were in charge of GM I'd fire all union employees and start over. And I'd move most of my production to Mexico. Sure it might cost a lot at first, but it would save the company in the long run

Is that Christian?

Colorado Christian University recently fired one of their professors. He openly questioned one of the schools core tenets. He denied a key aspect of its theology. And so he got fired.

The interesting part is what got him fired:

He said that capitalism isn't an essential part of christianity. He didn't say we need communism, or lets all go out and join a collective. He just said that capitalim isn't a "Christian" idea...as in it doesn't come from the Bible.

Hmm...what does that even mean

I walked into the living room, and Adrienne was watching TV.

"Why did you go to India to study meditation?"

"I wanted to develop a lifelong relationship with the voice I met on the bathroom floor."

It is finished...and I didn't cheat

The test is over.

It was a tough test. There were actually a couple questions where I narrowed it down to two, but didn't have an inclination either way and had to just guess between the two answers. That doesn't happen very often. I think I did ok though.

All of my life I have had teachers impress upon me that cheating is wrong. As I grew older more and more teachers emphasized the issue of trust. It is unprofessional to treat someone as a cheater, unless they have shown that they are. As a teacher I learned that the more you tell someone by your actions that they are cheating, the more likely they will be to cheat.

In short, I'm used to teachers trusting me to not cheat, and I'm used to rewarding that trust by not cheating. So the testing in medical school is strange to me. It's a little dehumanizing. They take everypossible step to ensure there is no cheating. They assign seats, and change your assigned seat every time. They go with you to the bathroom. They herd you around like cattle to ensure that there is not even momentary mixing of the two groups of students. There are five or six people watching you all the time. The people from testing services are rude and sour (as I guess anyone who devoted there life to keeping students from cheating would be).

It is insulting. And it is strange to be receiving this treatment in medical school. From there behavior you would think they're training us to be criminals rather than professionals.

Happy Birthday

To the pretty lady in pink

On being the slowest kid in school

Next week we start a new class: Clinical Medicine. For this class we are divided up into small groups and we work with a primary care physician over the next year. An interesting twist to this is that the groups are not assigned by the school.

Friday we got an email announcing that we could select our group starting Monday at 12:30 and that if we hadn't selected a group by Wednesday we would be automatically assigned to one. Attatched was a list of options including the name of the physician and the time of the class.

I didn't recognize any of the names on the list except for Dr. Roe, who went to school with my father. I figured I would choose him since he and my dad got along well together and I thought I would like him as well. I figured most people would just let the computer select their physician for them, since none of us had any way of knowing who these people were. They were after all just names on a page.

So 12:30 Monday found me eating lunch in the lounge. I was a little confused because none of my friends were there and the lounge was pretty empty. About 12:40 they came in and asked me if I had chosen my group yet, since I had forgotten about it I got on the computer and signed on to the page. Out of the original 25 physicians on the list, only 5 were available to choose from 10 minutes into the selection process. I didn't get to be in the group I wanted, which I was a little disappointed about, but I don't really know anything about any of them. I just hope I didn't get an obstetrician.

I was amused by the whole episode. I can't figure it out. Why the rush? How were all these people making this choice? Did they pick based on the time? Or did the randomly pick? I know that once Dr. Roe was gone my choice was pretty random.

It is a little depressing. It just hits home how much I don't really fit in in medical school. It's a Type A world out there.