Writing on health, technology, and business
I was reminded today by my social media brethren (thanks Jesse) that bananas are radioactive. They contain roughly 450mg of potassium and the isotope K-40 has a natural abundance of 0.01% which translates to 0.01 millrems per day. The radiation is split between 80% beta decay, 10% electron capture and 10% gamma rays.
Perhaps this explains my wife’s strong aversion to bananas? Continue reading “Holy Radioactive Bananas!”
I just returned from spending a day with the team working on the Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N) who are part of the amazing ImproveCareNow (ICN) network of clinics as well as some very creative visionaries building the Anderson Center of the Cincinnati Children’s hospital.
ICN/C3N is focused on helping the families of children with Crohn’s disease or other IBS/IBD diseases like Ulcerative Colitis. In recent years the team has focused on improving care delivery by showing how a network of centers can systematically improve care delivery by being disciplined in measuring and sharing outcome data. They actively seek to translate learnings from over and under performing centers or sub-populations to change care delivery across the network and effect a shift in the mean outcome curve for chronic disease.
More to the point, they are actually implementing the data collection, cross-institutional transparency and systems processes we all talk about. Continue reading “The Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N)”
The new movie Limitless is based on the premise that a drug can enable us to use “100% of our brains” because according to common wisdom, we currently only use 10%. This claim has been used in innumerable science fiction settings to provide a hypothetical source of magical cognitive abilities from super-intelligence to extra-sensory perception and is one of the most ill-informed and silly pretexts I’ve seen. Of course, this realization is not new but I felt like writing a short rant.
I recently wrote a plugin in Clojure to add to the Cloudera Flume framework. As it was my first time writing a full java class interface I had to learn about the proper use of both proxy and gen-class. Given the poor error reporting at the java-clojure boundary, figuring out what you did wrong if you don’t get every detail exactly right (particularly when loading a class in the plugin’s final environment) can be difficult.
Continue reading “Writing Java plugins for Flume in Clojure”
Frumious Abstractions 