this week i

celebrated my father's seventy sixth birthday.

drove to david and marcie's.  connecticut avenue a reverse george orwell: two lanes bad, four lanes good.

suppose wikipedia does not offer a translated auto-option in lieu of a completed entry in the specific language to encourage the human translation of articles.  click a random wikipedia entry and under "languages" you'll see either english only or maybe an assortment from tongues with one million articles.  but if you don't speak any of the article's human-translated languages, google translate is probably your first stop.  wikipedia forces an extra copy-paste step on those users in order to encourage other (bi-lingual) humans to manually add content.  wikipedia made a conscious decision to dig a moat, defend a perimeter against artificial intelligence.  relying on automated tools hypothetically means that a completed article in any of the encoded languages should near-instantly generate the same content in every encoded language.  someone at wikipedia considered, rejected this.  is this a protest against artificial intelligence, or merely an indictment that it simply does not work yet?

4/25

this week i

met howard and teresa in manhattan.  we shared umbrellas with rupak after his lecture, inquired about restaurant wait times, two and a half hours.  bistro seated us immediately, we sampled snail, then starcraft till three.  eight hours sleep, skydiving home movie, beer on ferry, two and a half smorgasburg cuban sandwiches, two arnold palmers in compostable cups.  we walked to transmitter park, then queens no backtracking.  spring and summer wrestled for the day.  overfull with hell's kitchen brussel sprouts and pizza with the perfect char, we found our seats.  all-american prophet, spooky mormon hell dream my favorites, this is american culture concentrate.  hello!  bumper sticker from bus home: do you follow jesus this close

read two hundred years of surgery by atul gawande.

"this yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow," liston exclaimed.

it would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. despite the advantages of anesthesia, liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. the butler's operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to hollingham. the patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)

4/18

this week i

discussed income, poverty, and health insurance changes to the current population survey, section 2a.

watched woman at war, she shoots a drone out of the sky like mortal kombat's scorpion.

cooked pesto with mozzarella dressing after a long boil.

resisted eating national gallery nachos and guacamole left by a steven spielberg lookalike, despite seven dollars saved.

thumbed through our dumb century.  stirring symbol of human spirit difficult to clean out of tank treads

4/11

this week i

published big numbers on medicare insulin spending.

climbed one hundred three floors and then some.

 

 have white hairs, not grey.  give me your hat.  today chicago, population 2.

demonstrated in-flight sinus safety.

never like airport chauffeuring but nailed this one.

4/4