A working telephone, as seen in the lobby of the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco. Note that the dial is not, in fact, rotary and that the phone is digital — the physical equivalent of the faux vintage (fauxld?) photo filters that are themselves now quaint but used to be a new phenomenon.

• Casey Newton: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit. It fooled me as well. Interestingly, I would not have found out had I not boosted this Mastodon post and had Ivory notify me about the edit. Caveat lector!
• Brent Donnelly: It’s Not Just X, It’s Y. The article gives voice to the feeling I get reading much of the small-i internet. It ends with a tip sheet that includes this valuable advice: “Assume long form articles on Substack and Twitter are AI-generated unless there is reason to believe otherwise.” Indeed.
• Steven Bush for the FT: AI cannot take responsibility for human faults. But of course, AI doesn’t lie to people, people do. “Machines cannot claim moral agency. Even if a human’s role is just to come in at the end, tidy up the more difficult bits or adjudicate on properly knotty problems, they must accept responsibility for the outcome.”
• Derek Lowe: A Clinical Trial Nightmare. And it isn’t just AI we should we worried about, and not only online. Lowe points to a particularly horrific example of clinical trial misconduct, this time in a few drive-by research clinics in South Florida. And here I don’t know which is worse, that a small startup didn’t know better and fell for the scheme, or that they paid $35M for the privilege to be scammed. But that is what happens when the whole ecosystem is rotten.

A day full of meetings, so pointing out the update to my now page will likely be my only contribution. Busy times, still.

So says this NYT headline (gift link). In reality, and in the article itself:

The tool might also be more useful for trainee doctors than for experienced specialists, said Dr. Diane Simeone, a pancreatic surgeon at the University of California San Diego. Some of the tumors that the tool caught in the Nature Medicine study should have been “super obvious” to well-trained radiologists even without A.I., she said.

But she acknowledged that it could be a valuable backstop for hospitals where specialists are in short supply.

This is based on the data So yes, A.I. is finding deadly tumors that an overworked and/or undertrained doctor might miss. Which is valuable, but a different message altogether from the one that the headline was trying to convey.

Separately, is “in China” becoming the new “in mice”? ⊕ The link is to a PLOS One blog from 2021. The most recent post there as of the time of my writing this is a scathing and rather unfair review of the science of Pluribus. I refrained from adding it to my feed reader. What assumptions do writers have, and what emotions do they raise in readers, when they report about things happening “in China”? Was it the same with the Soviet Union? Whenever someone fans the flames of mimetic rivalry, I grab my wallet.

I take back what I wrote about Tapestry: it is not just a pretty face but a genuinely useful pan-media viewer that even takes cross posts into account (see below). Genuinely impressed!

🍿 Grizzly Man (2005) is peak Werner Herzog. What other filmmaker would voice over images of bears frolicking in a national park with:

“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder.”

Roger Ebert had a very good review to which I have nothing to add.

First things first: The Pitt (2025) is miles better than two other era-defining medical shows, ER and House MD. The conceit — one hour per episode, one shift per season — makes for a more realistic pace. The case selection is good, if on the extreme end of any possible presentation. The medical staff personality types are spot on, ⊕ They are all good, but I would like to highlight the charge nurse and the neuro-atypical first-year resident as commonly encountered phenotypes that TV shows never seem to get right.if not quite representative of the variety of English accents one would hear during rounds. And the battle between administrators and clinicians hit all the right notes, even if having the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer hover over ER staff at all hours of the day would be considered atypical for the role.

Kudos are also due for the use of prosthetics, sometimes quite grizzly, with an abundance of open wounds and mangled extremities. With so much exposed tissue I wondered why no one was wearing a mask during procedures even while, in a mid-season episode, admonishing an anti-mask patient about their beliefs. But that is, of course, another conceit, otherwise we would never be able to tell who was saying what. A more believable move was to have one of the medical students ⊕ More kudos for making the two students smart, competent and lovable all at once.present for most of the cases, requiring everyone to explain what they were doing at an 8th grade level (our own 8th grader who was watching with us also appreciated this). Granted, the historical reminiscences and calling out different healthcare-related statistics were much less plausible: they reminded me of the most self-important parts of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that its then-arch rival 30 Rock so successfully parodied.

Admittedly, it is an unusual hospital. More than 20 ORs and so much house staff with only one attending physician during a day shift sounds… implausible. It does make for great tension-building, and it was no wonder that Noah Wiley’s character — spoiler alert — by the end of the season gets burnt out to a crisp. Another oddity is how competent and unflappable all of the staff were during — another spoiler — a major traumatic event that no one wanted to experience but everyone was prepared for. Color me skeptical that operations would have been that smooth.

Still. As fanciful as they were, ER and the less-remembered Chicago Hope were, to me at least and I suspect to many others of similar age, ⊕ The less I say about House MD the better. a large part of the draw of medicine. It is good to know that there is a half-decent show out there that may keep the flame going.

David Bowie was born January 8 and died on January 10, so today is a fine day to remember his genius:

Bowie: I think the Internet… I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cups of something exhilarating and terrifying.

Paxman: It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?

Bowie: No it’s not. No, it’s an alien life form.

That was in 1999, long before widespread broadband, Web 2.0, YouTube or the iPhone. Do watch the whole thing if you haven’t yet.