Nitin Khanna:

I love that Anne calls the very first draft of what writers write as “shitty first drafts”. I love it not because I write shitty first drafts and then better second drafts, but because I only write shitty first drafts, and then hit publish.

Which is exactly what I’m doing. Long live blogging!

We are three weeks into our clinical trials course for the UMBC graduate program. This remark will surprise absolutely no one, but: it was refreshing to see a classroom full of attentive, engaged students, interrupting, asking questions, having a dialogue, others jumping in, etc. Alas, I cannot take any credit for the interactions, as we have guest lecturers on for most weeks.

Regardless, the course has reminded me about how absolutely wrong I was back in December 2019, when during a post-conference [Note: The link is for the 2019 ASH Annual Meeting abstract book, ASH being the American Society of Hematology, and I am only now realizing that — in what could be described as our profession’s version of burning man, which is actually quite fitting for an organization called ASH — they tear down the conference website each year to make a new one. So, the 2019 version is no more, but here is one for the 65th annual meeting in December 2023 although if you go to the website after December 2023 I am sure it will point you to the 66th and beyond. I could have linked to the Internet Archive version of the website from 2019 instead — in fact, here you go — but why relinquish myself of the opportunity for that burning man’s ash pun? ] dinner I stood on my soapbox and wondered in amazing why we were still wasting our time meeting in person once per year like barbarians, when we could in fact be having continuous virtual conversations on Zoom. Timely spread of scientific information and all that.

Well, I have apologized — in person! — to everyone who had to suffer through my Orlando diatribe, because the last 3 years have shown that while video conferencing may rightfully replace most business calls and other transactional meetings, it is absolutely abysmal for education for all parties involved. And it’s not just that any kind of non-verbal communication is lost, it is that even spoken language is stilted, muted, suppressed. With the slide-up-front, speaker-in-the-corner layout that is so common for lectures, you may as well be pre-recording it. It makes absolutely no difference.

And, attending a few online lectures every month myself, it is hard to decide what is worse: having it be completely online and trading off the quality of the lecture for more opportunity for interaction, or watching a live/hybrid lecture and being completely shut out from the discussion (because the in-person attendees take priority when it comes time to ask questions, and rightfully so).

Even at the most basic practical level: technology failure with an online lecture means no lecture; technology failure in-person means, at worst, using the whiteboard and interacting more, which actually makes me wish for more technology to fail. And if you absolutely need to have the slides to make your points, just print them out for your own reference, and share them beforehand for the students to view on their own screens, of which they will have many.

Craig Mod had similar thoughts this week about work in general:

After the last couple of weeks of in-person work, I have to say: Some things simply can’t be done as efficiently — or at all — unless done in person. The bandwidth of, and fidelity of, being in the same room — even, maybe especially, during breaks and downtime, but during work periods, too, of course — of being able to pass objects back and forth, to have zero latency in conversation between multiple people. To not fuss with connections or broken software (Zoom, a scourge of computing, abjectly terrible software (I prefer … Google Meet (!) by a mile)) or cameras that don’t allow for true eye contact — where everyone’s gaze is broken and off and distracted. To dispatch with all of those jittery half-measures of remote collaboration and swim in the warm waters of in-person mind-melding is a privilege for sure, and a gift.

Education is one of those types of work that can not easily be replicated online. ⊕ [Note: AR/VR being a big and obvious caveat here, but that will take a while. ] For evidence, look no further than the persistence of the physical university campus despite the plethora of free and paid online options. Were it not for the in-person factor, the higher education equivalent of The New York Times would have gobbled up the market by now. I’ll know the tide has turned once Harvard and Yale — which would be my first proxies for the NYT and WaPo of higher ed — start investing more in their online offerings to the detriment of in-person experience.

Duvel would certainly have been my favorite beverage if it weren’t for the existence of coffee. It’s hard to come by in DC, so imagine my delight when I found it at a random grocery store in Maui.

Kudos to the two physicists who plotted all objects in the Universe onto a single 2D plot, most of all for the breadth of their ambition, but also for planting their tongue firmly in cheek with a tiny, sub-Planckian-sized quip:

Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7m.

Someone please update Wikipedia! (ᔥJason Kottke)

The sun flares up the sky over Lake Mead, then at a record low (note the white strip just above the water), which was soon to be broken.

I don’t hide my disdain for Eric Topol, and of course one has to wonder whether professional jealousy plays a role; he is, after all, a high-profile doctor with thoughts about technology. But this morning I found an excellent counterfactual in Peter Attia who is slightly closer to me in age, moves in high-profile circles, and spends time “creating content” about what I think is a bit of a time-waster for rich people: prolonging lifespan healthspan. In other words, he carries the perfect confluence of properties to create even more disdain on my part; and yet, I think that overall he is an upstanding guy who is smart, no-nonsense, and great at communicating complex ideas.

This was a long-winded intro to my recommendation for today’s episode of EconTalk, which has confirmed my priors and reminded me that it’s never too early in the week to call Topol a hack. Him and Attia are so similar on paper, so different in reality.

A mural from the rust belt. Obscured by the gas-guzzlers in the bottom left corner is the slogan: “Without Labor Nothing Prospers”. Indeed.

While assembling slides for the UMBC clinical trials course I’m helping with, I was reminded that Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill never received the Nobel Prize for medicine despite conclusively showing by the way of a new-fangled method called a prospective cohort study — it was the late 1950s — that tobacco kills. They both did the work in their early middle age and lived into their 90s, so it’s not like they didn’t make it to see their work validated (like, say, Oppenheimer not being there for the confirmation of his black hole theory). Of course, the committee is not infallible — they did hand out the prize to a lobotomist — but the errors of omission are so much worse.

My same slide deck also mentions Barry Marshall and Robin Warren who (deservedly!) won the medical Nobel for another disease pathogenesis discovery: they showed that the helicobacter pylori bacterium — and not stressful living, bad thoughts, lack of dietary milk and butter, or whatnot — is responsible for gastritis. Marshall conclusively proved this by ingesting the bacteria himself back in 1985; the Nobel Committee was impressed enough by this feat of IRB avoidance to hand him and Warren the prize — in 2005, the year of Dr. Doll’s death!

He died in July and the prize was announced in October so I shall refrain from making any inferrences about the cause of death.