Category Archives: Science/Medicine

Today's NYT has an op-ed article by someone who had heart surgery fairly similar to mine. In My Heart's Long Surprise Rick Hamlin describes his surprise at the slow pace of his recovery. They told him he'd be fit in weeks. It took over a year.

Mr. Hamlin's surgery seems to have differed from mine in four important ways:

• His was planned, mine was an emergency (he probably had a leak; I had an eruption).
• He got a bovine valve, I got a metal one. As I understand it, a bovine valve is a lot easier to take care of and doesn't require the blood thinners and strict dietary regime I will be subject to the rest of my life. It's a lot better than metal … until it wears out in 10-15 years and requires another surgery to replace. Which is why for middle aged people such as him and me, my surgeon chooses metal valves which are supposed to last indefinitely and don't require a surgical rematch when one is pushing 70.
• He wasn't unconscious for 11 days after surgery due to complications.
• His doctors were ridiculously optimistic about the expected speed of recovery. When I was flat on my back and weak as a couple of kittens, mine told me I'd feel a lot better soon. I did indeed manage to stand up on my own in a matter of weeks, which improved matters greatly. But they also warned me, I hope accurately, that it would be six to 12 months before I felt really normal. His didn't.

I think, despite my post-surgical complications, I may have gotten the better deal. Or the better doctor. It's been almost six months since surgery and I still have a ways to go. My stamina remains less than it was, my ability to concentrate on work isn't yet back to par. I'm not pulling my weight at home. But at this rate I'll get there before a year has passed.

In the finest traditions of science, Ed Felton experimented on himself to gauge the effects of “digital drugs.”

Read the full shocking account at My Experiment with “Digital Drugs”

Kids, don't try this at home unless you fully understand the risks.

According to this Really Cheerful Post, Why time appears to speed up with age, time really does seem to pass more quickly the older you are. Thus, from a subjective perspective, half your life is over at age ten.

And by age 50, as the years go by faster and faster, you have experienced 89% of your subjective life-time.

Happy Bastille Day.

Guardian, Psychic octopus Paul predicts Spain to beat Holland in World Cup final

The octopus had, we are told, correctly predicted a string of world cup matches. And, indeed, Spain won.

Suppose for the sake of the argument we could satisfy ourselves that the claims about earlier matches are all true and there was no experimenter bias here, no Clever Hans phenomenon. Would one be justified in risking money on the cephalopod's next football/soccer prediction?

Most of the social science I ever learned (not to mention common sense) says no — if there's no underlying theory (and I for one don't believe in psychic octopuses) then it's rash to rely on a correlation this is likely spurious. The argument for “sometimes” holds in some systems there may be correlations between thing you can't see, for example A and B may be correlated because both are caused by C, and if you think that might be the case you might be wise to rely on the correlation even if you can't see the link,

I can't stretch that to the octopus. But it seems some folks made money off it. Will Paul move to Las Vegas?

Update: Octopus Paul is hanging up his spurs retiring.

Apparently, I'm not the only person on the planet oblivious to much of what goes on around him:

Found via Boing Boing.