Lisa Sanders, the diagnosis columnist for New York Times Magazine (and, I should disclose, my close friend), has just published a truly interesting book, Every Patient Tells A Story, on how good doctors go about making difficult diagnoses.
With the current installment of Indexed, Jessica Hagy wanders firmly into Freakonomics territory — the economics and politics of oil and of fear. She calls this pairing “Slippery and Magnetic.” (Here are her past posts.) Is breast cancer a fatal disease that should be vigorously prevented and treated? Of course. But it is a good example of a “cause” disease . . .
(Photo: Scott Adams) Last week, we solicited your questions for Dilbert creator and author Scott Adams. Here are his answers. They are great, and so were your questions; thanks to Scott and thanks to you. Here’s what I found most interesting: 1. From his answers, Scott Adams would appear to be a poster boy (poster man?) for the Anders Ericsson . . .
An interesting article written by Jeremy Hsu on Scienceline.org does further damage to the Spinning Dancer’s already damaged reputation.
When someone writes a comment on this blog, it goes into a moderation queue — where, if everything is working right, it gets promptly approved and shows up on the blog. (The moderation process is the Times‘s measure against spam and outrageousness.) Usually it is our site editor, Melissa Lafsky, who moderates the comments, but occasionally I do it too. . . .
For the record, I do not hate Wikipedia, as I tried to make clear here. As a showcase of communal knowledge, it is astonishingly interesting and useful. But it is also, alas, a showcase of communal knowledge, which can lead to complications. There are other issues too. Back in July, Stacy Shiff published a really interesting piece about Wikipedia in . . .