Life listed chronologically

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • Medbloggers

    Jon Udell has a great post on Medbloggers, something that I didn’t really realize existed until he wrote about it. Though we’ve got political bloggers, library bloggers, law bloggers, so it makes sense there would be medical bloggers.

    Medbloggers

    …

    The numbers are small. Starting with Pho’s blogroll, I began assembling a list of the medical bloggers who cross-reference one another. What I found confirmed Pho’s estimate that there are no more than 100 of these medbloggers, many of whom are aggregated at medlogs.com. Nor are these medblogs yet widely subscribed. Pho today has 14 Bloglines subscribers. One of the founders of the movement, medpundit, today has 58. Those numbers are one or two orders of magnitude shy of the readerships of many of the tech blogs I follow. But unless fear of malpractice strangles this baby in the cradle, that will be a temporary phenomenon. In the long run there will be many more people hungry for informed analysis of medical issues than for informed analysis of tech issues.

    This looks like a great opportunity to watch the blogging meme replicate throughout another community of practice. I’ll be fascinated to see how it changes, but also is changed by, that community. Corporate techbloggers, for example, are learning to walk a fine line between acceptable sharing of information and punishable transgression. Medbloggers face a different set of issues: libel, privacy, and of course malpractice. See this American Medical News article for a useful overview. [Jon Udell’s Weblog]

    As you can tell from some recent posts I’ve started following medical information on Pulmonary Fibrosis online, mostly inspired by this article. I even found a blog called Bronch Blog to subscribe to.

  • How to Crash IE

    Eric Meyer posted a test file that tends to freeze IE6 and in some cases even cause a reboot of the computer. So if you’re running that, don’t click the link below.

    Freezer Case

    Since a few people asked for it, I’ve created a test file that reproduces the Internet Explorer freeze reported yesterday. You can find it with the title “Internet Explorer Freezes — BEWARE!“. …(254 words | CSS Browsers | comments and pings allowed) [via Thoughts From Eric]

    Behold, the power of CSS.

  • Fantagraphics

    Mark over at Boing Boing points to a an Excellent article about Fantagraphics, the folks responsible for republishing the Complete Peanuts Collection (among many many other things).

    Saved by the Beagle

    A year ago, Seattle’s Fantagraphics was on the brink of bankruptcy. Now it’s in the black, thanks to good ol’ Charlie Brown—and a pair of dogged believers who turned a cranky fanzine into the most widely respected comics publisher in America. [Seattle Weekly]

    I picked up the first volume of the collection and it’s great. I plan on picking up a second copy of it to send to my nephew, because every kid needs to experience Charlie Brown. I remember when I’d visit my grandmother as a kid among my dad’s old books were a number of old Peanuts books.

  • A9 Bonus

    I’ve been playing with A9 a little bit lately, it is kind of nifty, but nothing that really made me go WOW. Though, someone did find out something interesting about it.

    Discount at Amazon for using A9.com

    A9 is the new search engine from Amazon and so far it seems good enough to use. It’s supposed to have all kinds of wizbang features, which it seems to. One important thing is that it’s hooked into amazon’s cookie system so it does know who you are and keep track of your searches. (blah blah big brother yadda evil corporate, DOWN liberal DOWN *smack* back in your cage.)

    If you can get over that for 5 minutes and use it, then go to amazon, you’ll notice this little “pi/2 discount” thingie. I clicked on it and, being a good little advertising target monkey, I’ll pass the resulting blurb on…

    since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional π/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don’t need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

    So there ya have it. [via The Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty]

    I just checked on Amazon and found that I had the same link there now. Pretty keen.

  • Maggots!

    Every time I hear about the use of maggots for healing I think “whoa, cool”, then I think about it a bit more and go “ew icky!” Though, I guess if it works that well I’d cope with it if needed.

    Maggot Band-Aid
    David Pescovitz:
    First used centuries ago to treat battlefield wounds, maggots are proving to be a useful treatment to prevent post-operative infections. Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) calls for maggot dressing to be applied to wounds twice a week for up to 72 hours each time. From the press release about a recent study on MDT in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases:

    “Debridement, or the removal of contaminated tissue to expose healthy tissue, can be done surgically. However, maggots that have been disinfected during the egg stage so that they don’t carry bacteria into the wound have their advantages. The larvae preferentially consume dead tissue (steering clear of live), they excrete an antibacterial agent, and they stimulate wound healing–all factors that could be linked to the lower occurrence of infection in maggot-treated wounds.”

    Link [via Boing Boing Blog]

    Now I just need to find the article I remember reading about the medical uses of slugs.

  • It’s Informative, But is it Useful?

    From over on engadget:

    Strange Sign
    Apparently the South Korean subway advertising system runs off of a 20GB hard disk. Add your own caption for extra fun! [engadget]

    Feel free to leave your own caption here or there.

  • del.icio.us links

    Yesterday I added the last 10 links I’ve posted to del.icio.us to the right hand column. I’m going to use this for stuff that just seems interesting, but I really don’t have much of a comment on. You can also subscribe to the rss for my links.

  • More Proof That Hartford Sucks

    I was looking through the list of places where Ghost in the Shell:Innocence was playing in the next month and Hartford, CT was nowhere to be seen. Heck, there wasn’t even anywhere in CT it is showing. I guess I’ll have to see it in the Boston area (where it is showing at two different places). Anyone up for going to see it next Wednesday afternoon?

  • Geek Misconceptions

    Kasia writes about something that annoyed me a bit. She points to “A Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys” and “The Guy’s Guide to Geek Girls, V2.0” and comments on some of the points they make.

    Let’s clear some things up.

    • The Star Trek thing.

      Star Trek is not a geek thing. Not all geeks like Star Trek, heck, most geeks I know never watch it. Would you people stop equating geeks with Star Trek freaks? Who the hell is Ivanova? The first guy to buy me a Star Trek mousepad as a cute gift would wear it as a collar in about fifteen seconds or less.

    • Branded tshirts.

      So people think geeks wear tshirts with brand names because they’re proudly displaying their loyalty? That’s cute and funny at the same time. T-shirts at conferences are free, t-shirts at conferences come emblazoned with logos and brand-names, ergo, geeks often wear tshirts with brand names because they’re free. Unlike the rest of you gap-labled yuppies, we don’t pay to advertise corporations.

      Unless you count my Free Software Foundation tshirt, I paid for that, but that was really more of a donation than a purchase. Sort of like the emacs manual, yah, i’ll ever read that!

    • Geeks can fix things.

      Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha — that’s all I’m going to say on the issue.

    [kasia in a nutshell]

    In general, I’ve always thought of myself as more on the geek side. But reading through the guide to geek guys it seems I was wrong. I’m barely geeky at all! Even though in humor, I just found that these were just so wrong and cliched that they weren’t even that funny.

  • My New Fangled Blogroll

    One of the first things I’ve posted to my wiki is a short article on how I did my new blogroll (down on the left). It’s a bit of PHP/CSS/Javascript code that all works to make the expandable folders. Comments are welcome and appreciated.