I love to practice my golf game. There’s no pressure, you don't get all choked up and send one screaming off into the woods. Its practice, even if you do shank one right this your time to work out the kinks. But when a doctor has to practice, it’s a whole different story. In Atul Gawandes article “The Learning Curve” he writes about his early days as a surgeon, and the procedures he learned by “practicing” on humans. It brings up a valid question in the modern medical field. How can we let our young surgeons get the practice they need without it being a risk to the public?
When I think of practice, I think about grabbing my weapons (golf clubs) and going out to the driving range and launching some eggs down a fairway. Golf is the modern day witchcraft; it can be such an evil game. Practice is a necessity unless your golf game revolves around you snapping clubs in frustration over your knees. In my case of practice, the only person that I can hurt is maybe the acne infested range cart driver. When a young M.D. practices, he is not just swatting at some cheap golf cart. They’re practicing on testy, scared people, who have no idea what’s going on with them. Is this a good thing? Should we come up with new ways of letting them “work out their kinks”? Dental students use robotic mannequins (pictured above, without the skin) with replica teeth and nerve an ending that dramatizes the "practice". These robots will even jerk themselves occasionally to simulate a human in a chair.
With all that is at stake in the medical field and the finances invested in new medical technology, I think money would be well spent inventing new ways that could help our future doctors unnerving first day experiences. With malpractice suits at an all time high, and our health care insurance cost rising by the second. Instead of knocking out the prenatal care unit, maybe these hospital directors can fire some of those high priced lawyers representing the hospital best interest. As a member of an HMO (I know, being a member just means I will die quicker) frequently new doctors treat my common medical needs. While I've never been cautious about the treatment I've received. I would feel even more confident about their practices knowing that they've received some type of personal-mechanical training. I know they’re never going to get all the help they need to quell their first day jitters, but after reading Gawandes article on his first day blunders: I feel something must be done. I don’t want to be the recipient of someone else’s first day jitters.

T-shirts and jeans please

After reading “Looking alive” By Thomas Hine, I became scared of two things. Karim Rashid, and his “Designs for a world in which we won’t know where the body ends and the machine begins”(Rashid). This fear goes back to a previous blog of mine about “Can’t we leave well enough alone”? I was born in 1978 amid the drab tans and puke greens of the design world. Bad colors mixed together and earthy themes that looked boring in my baby pictures. That was 20 years ago and obviously our tastes have evolved into what they are today. But Rashid’s views on the evolution of fashion scare me. It's not his use of bright colors or his flare for dressing flamboyant that make me ponder whether he is sane or not. It’s his thoughts about smart fashion, implanted technology, and invasive bodily inputs that make me think this guy is crazy.
Let it be know that I am t-shirt and jeans guy. Nothing is more comfortable to me than cotton on cotton. So maybe I might be a little biased about some of his thoughts. But I am never intimidated by dressing up and putting of some “fly’ gear on for a night on the town. Rarely do I expose what kind of mood I am really in; but if I did, I surely wouldn't want some micro chip depicting my mood. “Clothing will react to its wearer’s moods, while incorporating temperature controls, databases, and telecommunications capabilities”(Rashid).
Lets just say for example that your girlfriend of 5 wonderful years broke up with you. You have wallowed in obscurity for weeks dredging yourself in lovers’ sorrow that only of few of us could ever recover from. Your pride has finally allowed you to leave the comfort of home. You dress yourself in the latest fashion being 2020 after all. You jump out of the house for the first time in weeks, open to any possibility of escape from the hell you've been through. You get to the bar to drink yourself into happiness, but your shirt screams sorrow. In a world where social life is challenging enough, your shirt really should never be.
One other concern I have with Rashid’s aspect on the future of clothing is his fascination with imbedded technology in fashion.” I see technology being embedded in our bodies so that we become digital within ourselves”(Rashid). Speak for yourself buddy. Depicting life as neurological impulses that are electronically passed throughout you, Rashid seems to think that this phenomenon will be what people are expecting from their clothing in the future. I strongly disagree. I, like my friends, want two things from our clothing: To fit, and look stylish. Do we really want our cloths to be smart? Speaking for the 20-30 somethings worldwide, I don’t think we are ready for this virtual fashion world. Clothing and style is so complicated enough, why do we need to add technology to the mix?
Whether its Rashid or any other futuristic designer. Every facet of our live will continue to be pushed around by the intrigue of smart technology. Styles will come, fade and then come back again. And surly Levi Strauss dreams of jeans will never die. But in a world where slowly our lives are increasingly digitized, the soft touch of a cotton sweatshirt or the warmth of a nice fleece are homely comforts that shouldn’t be reinvented. Because to me there is nothing wrong with them in the first place, they serve a purpose and they work just fine.

I am going to admit something I am not necessarily proud of. I somewhat-kind-of-maybe have a little addiction to social networking sites. I can’t exactly tell you the reason why, but what I can tell you that I have been known to check my Myspace and Facebook page more than I check my email.
I’m a musician; I originally was introduced to Myspace because of this. “A free website where I can network with other musicians”? I thought. “Web exposure”? ”What? You can put your own songs up and customize your page too”? “Awsome” I said to myself. “Where do I sign up”? I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Before Myspace ever became popular. I considered social networking sites for losers, guys who have problems meeting girls, and freaks who women laughed at. I felt confident that I was not one of these despised online characters. So I continued forth among the few who represented themselves virtually. "I'm a good looking guy, right? At the very least I should at least get some more play out of this"? And to prove my MVP status, I decked my flag of individualism with my best pictures and a nice black background. Not that I'm trying to impress anyones (yea right). I’m just using this as a tool to get some exposure. But social sites are like cigarettes. At first you get a slight rush or buzz from the experience, but after a while you're left with a boring addiction. I know people who will sign up, realize they're wasting their lives away and then delete themselves immediately. All within the span of a few of days. Three weeks later they're at it again. I used to think these people were nuts. But now I’m starting to get their point. I kind of liken it to a smoker who buys a pack of smokes only to throw them away once they got their fix. Lung damage not included.
About three months after I signed up, my boss and I noticed my work production was going down. Not that I really produce anything at work anyways. I’m a manger. But managers are not supposed to have their page minimized and logged in all day: constantly checking every chance they get to see if they received any messages or friend requests. I called it a “trifecta” when you received a friend request, a message, and a new comment notification. For some reason I became obsessed attracting people to my page. I would post tons of bulletins in an attempt to notice me. I would leave quotes like “what up fam” or "Lemme know what you think of the tracks on my page, any feedback would help" on the pages of the nobodies who added me. I even designed a picture of a half naked girl with a cartoon quote coming out of her mouth relaying how much she loved me (you should see how many profile hits you can get with a racy picture like that, perverts). All of this, in the name of profile view counts. That correct, I wasted a great deal of valuable in-the-prime-of-my-life-time, worrying about profile views. You can now laugh if you’d like to, its o.k...
About three months ago my addictively numb fascination with Myspace simply petered out. I was beaten to death with the endless march of accomplishing nothing. No one was noticing me, I am an obsolete blip in cyber space. One of 230,000,000 cyber somethings virtually (pun intended) saying, “Hey look at me, I’m cool too”. I felt tired, like some sort of cyber whore who had just got done with her nights shift. With my hat in my hand; I surrendered to the zillions of rap groups, people who really aren’t who they say they are, and the spammers persistently trying to get you to click on their “get a free Macy’s gift card” link. The rush just wasn’t there for me. But I couldn’t delete my profile; I am member 11,432,567. I have 1,378 fake friends who love me for the fact that I have a page too. Doesn’t all that work I put in stand for something? Can my life go on without me trying to impress a web page? For sure, no problem, I can kick Myspace. That’s why I have Facebook.

Can't we leave well enough alone?

I was reading an article in The Onion May 16th 2001 “New Technological Breakthrough To Fix Problems of Previous Breakthrough”. Even though this article is completely satire, one paragraph in this article really got my attention. It relates to the hydrogen bomb and the supposed breakthroughs in science it brought about.
“Not only was it a tremendous breakthrough in physics, it broadened our knowledge of everything from radiation containment to bomb shelter construction to hair loss”. Contemplating the irony I asked myself, “Why can’t we leave well enough alone”? Striving for a better tomorrow is the assumption most people have regarding science and its breakthroughs in technology. But with every right turn we have made, there are hundreds of mistakes that no one knows about or cares to tell.
Take the honeybee for example; in 1956 someone had a brilliant idea to crossbreed European honeybees with African honeybees in an effort to increase honey production. One problem, the bees escaped to form a hybrid colony of feral bees that infested other colonies and produced less honey than the native species. One day, North and South America will be infested with these non-native species, possibly crippling the "honey economy" and wiping out our "good" pollinating friends. Even with something so apparently trivial as honeybees, we can’t get out of our own way. I know you would be hard pressed to find anyone whom could have predicted such dramatic results. But as some point, can’t we just leave well enough alone?
Pushing the envelope is what has sparked positive innovation in so many important fields and I get that. But is there not a cause for concern that our innovation has done more harm than good? Have we advanced to far to soon? Do we fully understand our scientific actions and the repercussions that can happen? I am not an advocate for a return to the Stone Age; I am just a student asking a question.
Can we?

Word Association

"How has technology helped us" Ellen DeGeneres asks in her article"This is how we live". Better yet Ellen: how have the words associated with technology manipulated our views on how technology has really helped us. So many items are stamped with words used to describe “innovations” that are supposed to better our lives. Washing machines, HDTV’s and computers are branded with slogans like “new and improved” and “ultra” or “fast”. You read the words “plug and play” and you immediately think “this will make life easier”. The arrangement of these words can even have an effect on the buzz of the device, and its price. If you arrange a few of these in a row like, “ultra quad core technology”, you’re taken back with the sophisticated arrangement of words. It sounds so good you don’t even want to ask what it means. Your contempt just to say to your friends “It’s got 4 cores like yours, but mines ultra, and yours is not.”
The marketing execs know how fascinated we get with big terms like 1080i, or now high-resolution 1080p. They have an entire books dedicated to catch phrase manipulation. Studies are done, consultants brought in, no detail left unnoticed. Maybe it’s not the technology that can make us so mad; maybe it’s the imaginary bliss that is supposed to accompany its use. Maybe that is the real reason why some of us feel it can be more of a burden than a necessity.
We slap our cell phones in frustration when they don’t work right, “Damn thing, this is the latest phone from Motorola. Why doesn’t it work”? We expect from these products to have a joyful experience of ease and reliability. Commercials are full of these utopian worlds of technology feeding our brain that we can all organize our madness with one simple device. Even the actual definition of technology is kind of sketchy “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”. Since when did life ever have practical purpose?
Whatever the case is, technology has mad our lives easier in a complicated way. With so many devices in our lives, any break in the chain can cause innovation to turn to aggravation. Our laptops organize our lives and give us the information we want at our fingertips, when they work right. Cars get us from place to place working in harmony with our schedule, until they break down. And no one can do without a cell phone. The mess that ensues when a cell phone is lost can be cataclysmic . How are you going to call your phone insurance company when the only phone you have is the phone you’ve lost.
“A landline? I’ve never heard of it. What in the hell is that”?

Space, The "when we get this mess cleaned up down here" frontier.

When I was a child, my mother and I would go to the public library all the time. She would head for the home improvement section (we were remodeling our house at the time) and I would run to the "outer space" section, or at least that’s what I called it at that age. Growing up my dad loved planes, trains and automobiles. I especially grew attached to the planes part. We went to air shows, airports, anywhere were I could sit and be mesmerized watching these huge pieces of metal fly effortlessly through the sky. Fueled by movies like “Star Wars” my fascination with planes would cross over to space. I thought space was the coolest thing and I really wanted to be an astronaut.
Now at age 29, I have a very different feeling about space and I ask this question. At what cost are we going to continue to fund a program that is a drain on our government spending, while our country rots from the inside out? We have to many issues, and not enough money to continue to fund a program that yes, has made advances in science, but has not advanced our health care, our economy, or taught children how to read. Tang tasted good when I was a kid, but $20,000 for a toilet to piss that stuff out into? As struggling as our society is we could really use these, plus the other classically overspent government funded projects that consist of such things like a special space hammer, or over engineered showers that break down constantly. We need to use these resources for books, health care, and our slumping economy. Most of our shuttle equipment isn't even made here; to save cost it's outsourced to foreign countries.
In today’s overpopulated world we need to focus our wealth on more important things. It's just not good enough in my eyes that we support this under funded program that we half-ass believe in-and continue to be satisfied with the meager advances it has made. I am all for exploring but we need to fix what is down here, before we explore up there.

Carpal life

When was the last time you went to a "Rasputins" or the local music store? For me, it’s been about 8 months to-oh-my god-maybe a year. I can to this shameful realization after reading the "The Museum of Me" By Ellen Ullman. She really has some very strong points about how the "intermediaries" in our lives are slowly dissipating. What are intermediaries? They're in a sense are the mediators in our lives, service providers. Stockbrokers, travel agents, record stores; are all considered mediators. Intermediaries; like Expedia, are what the industry likes to call enabling technologies. Technology that’s supposed to convenience our lives: allowing us to conduct our personal business from the comfort of home. While I'm a supporter of such ideas as online banking and booking your travel online. We as a society need to look at the possibility that these sites that help enable our lives, could have repercussion by making our shopping, social lives, and work, really not sociable at all. Even the way we employ people and how we make money could be at risk.
A excellent example of this is iTunes. In the past year a very old and reputable establishment bit the dust. Tower records went out of business after 46 years of selling records. Even though the company still operates online and in foreign countries, all of the U.S. stores liquidated there inventory and closed their doors. One of the reasons, online music stores like iTunes were dominating the market. This caused thousands of smelly stoner's, goth heads and the occasional college student to be unemployed. I like iTunes a lot, I love it some aspects. The idea of buying one song is brilliant to an extent. Not having to waste gas, trees for C.D. covers, or produce waste like plastic for jewel cases are all very noble eco-causes. Having been a long time D.J. though, I miss going to the underground record stores and chatting it up with the clerk about what’s hot and what’s not. I miss flipping through isles of records and actually feeling the vinyl in your hands. Virtually all of the old vinyl stores are out of business or have been replaced by digital record pools and digital mixing programs like "Sorato". Meant to ease our lives by not having huge collections of records. When I was growing up this was a measure of how down you were with the scene. The more records you had, the more of a hardcore D.J. you were. I am not saying this is the end of life as we know it, but even something as sociable as being a D.J., has become less sociable by having our intermediaries taken away.
iTunes will stay here forever, so will the online banking and social networking sites that are meant to "convenience" our social lives. But there is one thing I miss. A sincere thank you and a handshake after purchasing music. Wait I'll take that back, my hand are sore from typing this blog and using the mouse too much. Dammit!!! I hate technology.