There are graceful, majestic sports played almost every week at the Capital One Arena; and then there is Monster Jam. Oof!
Being stuck at an airport doesn’t have to be bad. Nashville, for example, has more than one airport restaurant with live music at all hours of the day (and night). Last year we spent a few hours waiting for a delayed flight at Ole Red.
Continuing the daily cadence of one photo followed by a complaint about America’s most hated board of medicine, ABIM has once again shown its complete deafness of tone. With almost 10% of its customers — for we are not members of this private club — rebelling against its practices, it still sent out an automated extortion reminder threatening to remove certification if you don’t pay up. Well, I don’t think I shall.
As a prolific child fabulist, I very much appreciated @ayjay’s reminiscence. Most people are, in fact, reflexive embellishers, but not everyone can recognize it in themselves or turn it into a healthy skepticism. At least that’s what I tell myself!
I am reasonably quick at making decisions, and people occasionally ask me for input when they need to make theirs. This is either when they have already decided — and there are good and not so good ways of soliciting feedback then, but that is for a different time — or when they haven’t a clue about what to do. This latter situation is usually because:
My favorite part of the process, and the part I consider the most difficult, is defining the problem, figuring out the options, and mapping out — to the extent possible — the Markov chain for each; i.e. the first two items on the list. But once you do that, shouldn’t the choice be clear? Well, for some (many?) apparently not!
Wild problems aside, This is admittedly a very big aside, but most issues people ask me about are not, in fact, wild, just ill-defined. once you know the choices and their consequences, shouldn’t it be easy to pick the one that fits best with your priorities?
Well, not unless you rank them! Which is so banal I’m a bit embarrassed to waste even two minutes of your time for it, but seriously, for every 10 people I ask about their top priority (singular), nine will start giving me an unordered list of them, and start hemming and hawing about my follow-up, which is to pick just one. Because there can be only one: it’s right there in the name! And if only one choice fits, well, there you have it! If there are several, you go down your ordered list one by one and prune.
Of course, it is not always that easy. But the decisions people get paralyzed about are seldom in the Sophie’s Choice category; and for those that are, there are usually many more degrees of freedom to reframe the problem, the choices, or both, than poor Sophie had. For everything else, the choice is difficult because people haven’t figured out the priority, i.e. what they actually want.
NB: the list of priorities can be all-encompassing (“values”, but remember, at the end of the day it’s really just one “value”) or context-specific (“first, do no (net) harm” for doctors, etc.) I am sure there are whole industries ready to sell you their lists of priorities, or, um, empower you to make your own. I am by nature skeptical of anyone who too readily shares theirs. Caveat lector, as they say.
The Statue of Liberty is made of copper, which long ago oxidized into a green patina: the perfect protection against the harsh salty airs of the Hudson/Upper New York Bay. So of course there is a campaign to remove that protection and make it shiny again.
The campaign to end mandatory maintenance of certification is, as of yesterday, at 20,000 signatures. This is just shy of 10% of the people affected; what are the other 90+ percent thinking? Still, it was enough to make the professional societies pay attention.
From the National Aquarium in Baltimore, a non-fluorescent jellyfish. Its glow comes from background lighting conspiring with iPhone 15’s propensity to illuminate.
The Pacific sea nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens), if Google's image search is to be believed
📺 Season 2 of The Afterparty was uneven, with a couple of cinematic marvels wedged between a wimpy start and an oddly rushed last episode which seems to have been chopped off at the last minute from the penultimate. The Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock homages in particular were worth bearing the first 60 minutes of Aniq awkwardness.
Phrase of the day: digital dandruff. Thank you, Charlie Warzel.