A geek met a gal online. After they had been dating for a while she brought him home to meet her family. Her uncle seemed amazed that they had met over the Internet and asked the geek what kind of line he had used to pick her up. “I just used a regular 56K modem,” he replied.
Yes, last year’s joke was better.
About two years ago, I was worrying about whether I could fly to DC to go to a great conference. To my enormous good fortune, I was snowed out.
As a result, when my aorta burst on Feb. 12, 2010, I was home, and the drive to the hospital to find out why I felt like I had been stabbed in the back was quick and easy. And as a result of getting care quickly, I survived an emergency aortic dissection, serious surgical complications, and the implantation of a metal aortic valve. It would be 11 days before I was recovered enough to be allowed to emerge from my induced coma. And it would be five weeks before I returned home, much enfeebled, barely able to walk with a walker.
Today I feel almost fully recovered. I tire a bit more easily than I used to. I have to watch what I eat in order to avoid the foods that counteract my medicines. But I’ve returned to a pretty full schedule. Things are basically good.
There’s quite a lot I probably will write about the experience someday, maybe on the anniversary of my return home, which seems to me to be a much more significant date than the date I collapsed while filling out forms outside the local emergency room (a good place to collapse, as it turned out).
For now, four statistics:
(1) People whose aortas burst have at most 60 minutes to get treated, or they die. After a little dithering, I made it to the hospital in about 20 minutes or so.
(2) The survival rate for aortic dissections is not great. Wikipedia gives the statistics for aortic emergencies as “80% mortality rate, and 50% of patients die before they even reach the hospital.”
(3) The rate at which people make a full recovery without heart or brain damage is, I gather, even worse than that. (Much aortic surgery is planned, when a problem is detected before the crisis; the success rate for that surgery is much better so don’t panic if you are diagnosed with this problem — be grateful it got caught in time.)
(4) I do seem to be one of those very lucky people. And people who survive two years past their valve replacement surgery generally have a life expectancy almost equal to what they had before — the “almost” being due largely a greater propensity to die in accidents because the blood thinners one must take to keep the metal valve unclogged increase the chances of bleeding out internally when hurt.
As I said, I’ve been very lucky. I beat some bad odds. And people have been so very supportive during my recovery.
I am very grateful.
Juan Cole:
Houston’s death was front page news in many Arab dailies, and elicited an outpouring of grief from her fans. Arabic newspapers said that the suddenness of her death magnified the shock. Her passing was also commemorated in Arabic on Twitter and Facebook.
Yemeni political activist and dissident Hind Aleryani ( @Dory_Eryani ) tweeted, “When I was a teenager in my room in #Yemen wondering what’s love, #WhitneyHouston was the voice that introduced Love 2 me #IWillAlwaysLoveYou.”
This recollection is a powerful reminder of the reach of American popular culture, and its influence in shaping ideas about, e.g., romantic love in the global South, including the Arab world.
The tragedy was marked in Beirut, the center of Arab pop music. …
Egyptian director Khalid Hagar went political, expressing his grief that Whitney is no longer with us, but Egypt’s military dictators still live. “We will always love you, Whitney, and we will always hate them.” Houston thus stands, for this supporter of the Arab Spring, for beauty and potential cut short.
Houston’s meteoric career made her part of what Joseph Nye has called American “soft power.” The love of world publics for American popular culture translates into favorable views of the US among many people who otherwise would be tempted by anti-Americanism. Nye cautions that the militarism and torture of the past decade threaten that soft power, creating a negative image of the US in the place of the one creative artists often project to the world.
Daily Kos says it’s Undisputable evidence of Obama’s socialism.
Of course what it really shows is that Obama is a Rockefeller Republican.
We’re clearly moving towards a tipping point on total traffic surveillance. Here’s SF’s contribution:
Big Brother will be watching you.
Within the next 15 months, every one of Muni’s 819 buses will be outfitted with cameras capable of snapping photos of vehicles illegally travelling or parking in The City’s transit-only lanes. Any car caught on tape will be subject to fines of up to $115.
Since 2008, about 30 Muni buses have been equipped with the cameras. And even though the rollout has been modest so far, the results have been telling, said John Haley, transit director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni.
“The cameras have been instrumental in changing driver behavior,” said Haley. “When cars see a bus coming, they get the hell out of the way now.”
— Muni expanding camera program to nab drivers in transit-only lanes
Spotted via Slashdot, San Francisco Enlists Bus Cameras For Traffic Law Enforcement.
So both government and private industry (insurance) will be watching us. Parents following kids are next (cellphone based apps already provide a form of this service, but it’s easier to ditch the phone than the car). Then we start monitoring people parked near bars. Eventually we move to predictive models of traffic violation. Then maybe we start modeling other crimes, like drug buys and curb crawling. (Pity it doesn’t work for insider trading.) Meanwhile the huge databases are constructed for use by law enforcement, and discovery in civil suits. Even if all this remains on balance benign in rule-of-law democracies, it invites small-scale abuses.
And in autocracies we can expect large-scale abuses on a grand scale. That’s a serious problem that doesn’t get thought about nearly enough as we build and then export the technologies.
I am so busy doing interesting things that would be fun to blog about that I do not at present have time to blog about them.
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