senortumnus

Eric Berger has had very informative articles over the years about the science of forecasting.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/the-us-weather-model... (2016) {hard to believe this one is 10 years old}

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-... (2025)

Bezos among them:

https://www.mddionline.com/business/jeff-bezos-others-comple...

Please do this, for science!

That’s interesting. Leftover from industrial era? Any specific contaminants that you would expect to find in the city soil?

Fwiw this is not typical, we don’t have alexa/siri type smart devices in any OR I work in, and suction is turned on off with a button and a dial.

Yes they are describing NPs and PAs. MDs are the PhDs of the medical world. Don’t get me started on “DNPs”

Surgeon here, in private practice. Agree with the article - all the stressors he mentions are typical of both residents and staff physicians. The hour crunch for me is better post residency but overall the stress is unchanged. Probably higher after training with the added responsibilities & risks.

My sense is that the field developed in the era of independent/private practice, where the grueling hours worked was justified by high pay and minimal bureaucratic/administrative burden. Add decades of stagnant/falling pay plus death by a thousand administrative cuts and the profession no longer justifies the difficult working conditions as convincingly. Some practices are still good, others terrible. Look at the rate of physician turnover to see which is which.

Oh and the “provider” discussion is worth paying attention to. Your doctor has this calculus worked out - years & energy invested, work environment & income expected, then the only viable option in your city is to be employed by a large hospital system (because hospitals get paid at least double for the same work, outcome is as expected.) But wait there’s more: you are now called “provider” by your large hospital employer who hires 2x NP employees to do the “same” work as you and pay half. Guess what direction the pricing pressure is going. In the future expect few MDs to stay in primary care because the system does not support that path. Specialty training is the future for MDs who invest time, energy, & money to excel in their field.

Termination Shock plot device

Is there something unique to your application beyond the parameters I’d expect are typical for mech keyboard use? Buy one, use daily, and expect to work indefinitely?

We live in America. We have an old house (>100 yrs). One bathroom had a tub. We renovated the bathroom to incorporate a shower head. Turns out we couldn't purchase a new tub that fit the old dimensions, as new tubs are smaller, reportedly to meet new efficiency standards. So we had to frame in a smaller recess to fit the new, smaller tub. Wah wah, I guess the answer is, old tubs used to be more adult sized, and new ones aren't because of efficiency / climate change trends? As others have pointed out, you can still get big tubs but they're more like jacuzzi or whirlpool types that take up more space.

And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end

Curious paragraph at the very end of the NYT’s article on this:

“ On average, it takes 28 flights per week to cover a 1,750-square-mile region, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department. To combat the Leimert Park outbreak, officials said they would divert two flights per week to target the affected neighborhoods.

Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said. “We really need to make sure there’s a lot more sterile flies out there, than the wild flies,” he said, “to make it more likely to work.””

Thats the end of the article. No mention of accidental release of fertile flies elsewhere in the article. Article burying the lede?

Odd question but are you reading Algorithms to Live By? This quote & a related anecdote features in the book. Or maybe this is just a really famous Knuth quote.

Proto hipsters in a good way

Citrate

*Lamarck tips his wig

One benefit of this transparency initiative is that patients will come to see how little of their bill goes to physicians.

This is surprising. You should consider other banks.

Antipersonnel mines absolutely should have an expiry date after which they are no longer triggered by the depression of their sensor. Issue is, these things are mass manufactured and probably have some defect rate which increases with time after deployment. So they couldn’t be trusted to be ‘safe’ after expiring anyway. But still would save lives & limbs to have a mechanism like that built in.

I appreciate your effort in this post. I am a practicing physician and also a person who majored in biochemistry, rather than the more pre-med focused biology/chemistry major offered at my institution. My opinion is that organic chemistry is a great window into the complexity of biologic chemistry that happens to be the foundation of medicine.

Is it necessary for all physicians to peer through this window in order to practice quality medicine? Perhaps not. But does it give us an appreciation, and humility for, the astounding complexity of biologic systems that underpin all clinical interventions? Ideally so. At some point during pre medical training there should be - to be blunt - a filter that separates adaptable and bright students from those who hazily wish to pursue medicine but do not have the capacity to do so at a high level.

There are many career paths for those who can not adapt and learn at the high level which has been traditionally been required to complete medical school. We can, as a society, either lower the standards or maintain that high level of requirement that has been the badge of "MD." My bias of course, having completed 13 years of education after high school, is to recommend that we do not lower the standards of the MD process. The system, as it has evolved to date, has plenty of opportunity for those who desire less rigorous training, for example nurse practitioner and physician assistant tracks. There is still a place in this world for highly trained and motivated individuals who wish to be the best in their field. Signed, a professional who benefited from the strong institutions that create medical doctorates.

Surgeon here who does the majority of my “major case” work robotically. Author of this article has a coastal-centric point of view. My residency was apprenticeship model and I graduated very confident in my capabilities to perform robotic surgery “skin-to-skin”. The phenomenon he references about trainees no longer being able to start a surgery without the “attending” surgeon present is not related to robotics. It is due to CMS or liability (lawyers) or hospital policy regulations (lawyers). Same reason medical students are pushed away from direct patient care until they graduate and become residents.

See the article on HN yesterday for which the comment section was chock full of “tear down the health bureaucracy” rhetoric. If the general public comes out saying “we want trainees working on us, if it creates better doctors and lowers health care costs” then the system can become much simpler and get back to the old days of higher autonomy for trainees in academic centers.

Until then, advice for future surgeons: if you want to learn how to operate during residency, consider a program in the midwest without a lot of fellows.

Well said

Interesting - I have noticed a distinct warmth in a deep station or two (ones with a huge escalator) while traveling there but assumed it was ground heat or something. TIL!

Slightly informed guess is that the highly productive but water-constrained farmland of the nile valley is better used for value crops, like fresh fruits and vegetable, than a staple such as wheat which is more cheaply grown elsewhere.

Edit: there’s a great writeup about “hoop” style greenhouse farming there and how productive and water efficient it is… but the article escapes me presently

Edit2: ah! Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/dining/norwich-meadows-fa...

Diving into this topic is a bit like poking a perfectly calm hornet’s nest, but it is humorous to look at this from David’s perspective. He didn’t need much, just a sleeping bag, a place to put his toothbrush, and a good burrito joint. Leaves lots of time to pursue extracurriculars. Poor David got civilized and now spends his time scrubbing toilets :P

Yes noticed as well. Not my inbox but my wife’s - the severity of which she is considering getting a new email address (& ditching gmail acct that is 10+ years old)

Can I have your autograph?

9 months in - pay attention to what makes your kid smile, challenge them to take the next [roll, lift up, stand, step], and enjoy the ride because it will change before you know it!

I do not know how much this is contributes but Nebraska has very low unemployment rates (<2% currently). Can be hard to recruit for difficult / manual labor jobs even if it pays well

#1 is a big thing - delete your links to FB, reddit, whatever it may be. Diminish your portals to the engineered attention sucks out there.

I aspire to a separate personal phone vs work phone. Have a lightphone but have not set up separate numbers for work & personal so I can't yet fully unplug from work when desired.