Countdown to Christmas

As the last few days to Christmas approach, children no longer have dreams of sugar-plums dancing in their heads. They have dreams of tiny little devices used to play music or communicate with their friends. There's a Wall Street Journal Article, Kiddies' Wired Wish Lists which I unfortunately could not find online which talks about how kids today want, phones, video games, ipods and other very techy Christmas presents left under the tree.

The question I'm sure on many a young mind is, do the elves up in the North Pole have the sophistication to make these wonderful 'toys?'

Have a Happy Holiday Season! This blog will be on vacation until January 2, 2008.

Is Attitude Everything?

Does attitude play a role in their success? What about the attitude of the doctor? Does the doctor have to believe that a treatment will succeed for it to do so? I once watched this special about a medical trial where people with enlarged hearts were being treated by chopping out a piece of their heart to make it smaller. The procedure was developed by a doctor in South America, Dr. Randas Batista. The TV special was about an American doctor who wanted to try the same technique, but he could only get approval to try it on very high risk patients, at a much higher risk of dying than the people who were being treated in South America. So he rounded up the men who qualified for the trial and reduced the size of their hearts and they all died.

In my two previous posts, the patients who take things into their own hands are very young and strong and the most likely to survive from tried and true treatments, so is a doctor really going to advise them to take a very high risk treatment that has not been proved? Does attitude play a huge role such that these patients might benefit from many treatments that others would not such that their results shouldn't even be counted?

What if there were a device that could measure attitude and treatment could be advised based on attitude? What if your doctor came in and put the attitude thermometer in and said,
"Sorry, we are going to have to do something about your attitude before we continue." Or would doctors use this measure to determine who gets the 'soma' like in brave new world and goes out softly and who goes out fighting for every medical trial?

What's it Going to Cost?

Yesterday I referred to a Wall Street Journal article about some people who have managed to successfully fight cancer with a drug cocktail approach. One thing the article did not talk about was how much experimental treatments can cost. A few days ago in the San Francisco Chronicle there was an article that talked about this very subject: Insurer said no, so cancer patient pays for experimental treatment which is about Evanthias Pappas desire to participate in a very experimental study at a cost of $235,000 to fight her very aggressive cancer.

There are so many different experimental treatments out there and they all cost. Is a doctor being unfair in not supporting a patient who wants to go after an unproven treatment at exorbitant costs?

In Brave New World, the dying all hung out strung out on soma, but in our society that approach is pretty frowned upon. What does the future hold? Will health care plans eventually have Plan A. Fight fights that have a 50% survival rate. Plan B. Fight fights that have a 75% survival rate. And the top of the line plan.... Plan C. Fight regardless of survival rates. And what will plan C cost?

Excuse Me Doctor, Let Me Explain What I Need.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago: Lab Rat?
Sam Hutchison has cancer. His father is seeking a cure beyond the edge of medicine. The article talks about people who are doing their own research and finding their own receipes to cure cancer. It begs the question... do you need a medical degree to do research and make treatment decisions? With so much information now widely available and doctors having limited time to spend on each patient, is it possible that people who can devote several hours a day to investigating their own treatments might be able to come up with better solutions even than doctors that specialize? One of the interesting things about this article was the fact that the parent of a patient or a patient can make the decision to use untested drugs in combination whereas would a doctor be capable of taking such a risk?

Will all this new information that's available to patients with the time and the energy to the do the research open up a new type of doctor? Ten years from now will the be facilitator specialists. Will there be doctors who ask you to do research on your own problem and then help you treat yourself based on that research? And what about the people who don't have the time or the knowledge to do their own research? Will there be a new profession outside the medical profession. A personal research assistent? And will medical schools have to add a new class: How do you learn from your patient?

Is Anyone Getting Any Sleep?

I've decided to do a little series on medical treatments, practices, etc of today. And today's topic is Sleep Apnea or is anyone getting any sleep? I had two friends tell me that they have recently been tested for Sleep Apnea which is a disorder where a person stops breathing for periods of time while they sleep. I heard the story of how they had to go to a sleep clinic and go through a sleep test for a diagnosis. Then on the TV show 'Little People Big World' the dad goes in for the same test and for the first time I started to get an idea of what the treatment is. It's a mask that the person wears when they are asleep - a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine. It certainly doesn't look like something that would help you get a better nights sleep.

The only statistic I could find was that 12 million Americans have from this problem, but I wonder how accurate this data can be given that most people who have it are unaware that they have it.

As a species are we on the path to becoming more Borg-like? Instead of jumping into bed and getting a good snooze will there be a point where we have to 'regenerate' and plug ourselves into machines?

I'll Take a Side of Quality With That

I just bought myself a Christmas present at Brookstone, an ipod speaker so that I can listen to my tunes without having to close out the rest of the world. As I was checking out the cashier asked me if I wanted to get a 2 year guarantee with that so that if anything happens to the speaker they will fix or replace it.

Remember the days when there were actually guarantees that came 'free' with products? I remember my high school backpack. I sent it back to the manufacturer twice. Once they fixed it and once they just sent me a new one because it had a lifetime guarantee.

As technology improves, how come the quality behind products isn't improving as well? Are people happier to be getting a better price with less quality? Will almost every product become disposable? Or will we see a reversal where people only buy products that come with guarantees? Or will sales shops say the guarantee is 'included' as a new sales point?

That Looks Kind of Familiar

I think most sci-fi fans enjoy Escher pictures. There's a interesting Japanese artist making Escher-like pictures: http://www.pallalink.net/. Some of the pictures are made up of images of Tokyo and because I lived there, I recognize the scenes. Like vending machine in front of a brick building is such a classic Japanese scene.

Quality of the News

Before the internet age, big stories were a big deal. Reporters would work all the angles to cover the story and before you knew it, you knew details that you never would have even associated with that particular story. With the internet news items have to be cast or published immediately with little research or insite added if a news system wants to remain competative. A reporter can't even spend valuable minutes thinking up new angles. And now with the world of bloggers taking off, you have people blogging eye witness accounts instead of being interviewed.

We know more about what's happening in the world, but has the quality of the news suffered? The Daily Show is a favorite of mine because they are always spinning the news in amusing ways such as pulling clips of politians completely contradicting themselves. But why don't we see this type of detail in the 'real' news?

Where will the news be twenty years from now? Who will make the call as to what is important enough to be called news. Will there ever come a time where the journalists go back to asking hard hitting questions of our polititians? Will anything short of a disaster hold the news for more than a day so we can find out about the news 'behind' the news?

DNA Evidence

What DNA Evidence would you want to leave behind? According to a San Francisco Chronicle article Shrink-wrapped genes: DNA Direct of S.F. offers consumer service DNA Direct offers a service to freeze dry your DNA so that you could keep it in a sock drawer if you wanted and reconstitute it with water should the desire ever present itself. The question is, what would you really want to leave behind?

Some of the more normal things that people do with genetic material is check for predispositions for certain ailments. I could see where maybe people who die of unknown causes might want to leave their DNA behind so that it could be studied in the future. But there's also people who are taking DNA from their dead dads to check for paternity.

My grandmother left her body to science, but after watching one to many medical programs I don't think that's for me... too humiliating even if I am dead, but I could see the possibility of leaving my DNA to science (note to you vultures out there, this is no way represents consent.) I can just imagine, 100 years from now someone reconstituting my DNA and saying wow... can you imagine how blissfully ignorant this person must have been in life not realizing how many potential problems there were?

Thanks Bruce

I watched the movie Die Hard or Live Free yesterday. I'm a big fan of the Die Hard series. Lots of action. Never a dull moment and very memorable. I was thinking how the Mission Impossible series has a lot of the same sorts of action in them, but they never quite captured me.

One of the things that an action movie has over science fiction these days is that the special effects are there to make the impossible seem possible. Okay there were a few stunts that weren't completely believable in this latest movie, but for the most part, there's that surge of adrenaline as you think... wow, what if this happened. In science fiction, many times you have to put your disbelief so far out there that it's impossible to really put yourself in the action.

On the other hand, how many car chase scenes can we see and still be enthralled. I thought the movie could have had about 20% cut without losing a think. I watched it on DVD and I probably never would have made it through it in the theater... it was too long.

Where will special effects go in the future? Will a car chase never cease to be a staple in an action movie? I thought it was interesting that the movie had technology at it core, but having some kid hacking isn't a very visual image.

Sorry No Sniffles Allowed

Almost anyone who has ever had to work in an office environment can relate to the article on CNN: My coworkers are making me sick. Everyone I know seems to go into work sick, myself included. The problem is that you can never tell how sick you are going to get. Are you just coming down with a cold? What if it is going to be a seven day cold and you are going to be really sick on day four and five? Will taking days two and three off help or will they just drain your sick days which we all know have been merged with vacation days which means you are using potential days off where you could have been on a beach somewhere.

I wonder, did we all used to exchange our germs so readily or are we all stressed out and more at risk of catching every little thing? Or are the viruses so much stronger these days that we are helpless in their precense.

There are two things I see for the future. One, telecommuting when sick to avoid spreading germs will become mandatory. For a lot of office jobs, why not just work at home? Two, sickness sensors. I can see having to go through a security checkpoint that inhales your breath and if the machine sneezes, you are on mandatory sickleave. Or maybe someday we'll all have a completely opposite feeling towards being sick. Maybe a discovery will be made that it's very important to get all those little colds when you are young to avoid getting sick when you are old and people will exchange their germs happily.

It's All About the Money

One of the big discussions my family had this Thanksgiving was about the nearly invisible line of really tiny text on the new ten dollar bills. Some of my family could see it, others couldn't. It's that tiny. Even with a magnifying glass it was still really, really tiny.

According to Wikipedia the average ten dollar bill only lasts 18 months and then is taken out of circulation due to wear.

I wonder how much the country spends making money. Will all these new technological advances of using ATM cards instead money to buy everything from Starbucks coffee to McDonald's be a cost saver for the government?

In the future could it be possible that we'd have to buy the right to use cash?

Childcare Specialists Requires Medical Degree

You may have read my previous post that talked about some of the severe allergies that are becoming more prevalent among children. A few days ago I was reading a CNN article My son's food allergies: danger every day and what struck me was not what the parents had to go through, but what daycare providers would have to cope with to deal with a child with severe allergies. Where young folks with little training would have at one time been fully prepared to care for a 3 year old with just a little babysitting background, now they have to be able to deliver a shot of epinephrine. How do child care providers cope with the rule rather than the exception that they will one day have to rush a child in their care to the hospital.

Will day care providers of the future have some sort of medical training? Will there be computer programs that help coach these specialists to diagnose when to take their young charges into the hospital.

Identity Theft vs Marriage

I saw an ad the other day on TV about how some children are going to have their identities stolen and their credit ruined before they are even old enough to think about credit. There's another ad about a young man who is living in his wife's parent's basement because he didn't check his wife's credit score before marrying her.

It's horrible how many lives can be ruined by identify theft. Will it eventually lead to changes in culture? Will marriage become a huge financial risk (well more of one than it is today?) Will people end up living together instead of getting married because they to have a fall back back in the event of identity theft? Or will the laws change making it harder for companies to give out credit without really verifying a person's identity.

What will be our forms of identification in the future?

In the Event of an Emergency Stock Up on Poptarts

The first time Moffet Air Field opened to the public, I planned to meet my parents there. I didn't know what the food situation was going to be since although there were likely to be thousands of people, there weren't necessarily going to be concession stands. So I went to the little market near my apartment and bought a box of poptarts and a bottle of water. The interesting thing is that I NEVER buy poptarts, but in this situation it seemed like a perfect food. They taste good. They keep forever. And I knew that if my mom or dad got hungry they wouldn't mind a poptart.

I was watching TV the other night and there was a special about how Wal-Mart has tracked the fact that people buy strawberry poptarts in the event of an emergency. If there's a hurricane coming, Wal-Mart will order extra strawberry poptarts. This is all due to more sophisticated tracking of products with relation to external events like hurricanes.

Wouldn't it be interesting if in the future instead of having the survival goods arrive after the hurricane, if they arrived before? If the bottles of water, poptarts, canned goods, and other necessities to make it through an event like Katrina arrived before the hurricane did. Logistically speaking would it be more difficult or less difficult? More expensive or less expensive?