In DreamWorks’ 2010 animated fantasy film How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup, the young un-viking-like viking prince protagonist, learns to cooperate with dragons through his compassion and engineering know-how. With his dragon Toothless by his side, Hiccup protects his village more than the traditional vikings before him could have ever imagined.
Now, I haven’t shot down my own artificial intelligence out of the sky, but I do have rudimentary cross-disciplinary know-how. Let me try to describe how we might unite computer science and radiology to usher in the future of automated radiology. Continue reading How to Train Your Rads AI→
I’m sitting in a stadium full of 60,000 Coldplay fans, the chilly and dark atmosphere tense with anticipation. In fades the ambient intro to “A Head Full of Dreams,” and sea of wristbands awaken unexpectedly and bathe the crowd in a warm red glow. Cheers echo across as Will Champion’s beats and Guy Berryman’s bass line begin, and Jonny Buckland’s guitar riff enters. The spotlight illuminates Coldplay onstage, rainbow fireworks explode, and Chris Martin dances forward spinning merrily and crooning “oh, I think I’ve landed / in a world I hadn’t seen!”
I’ve liked Coldplay for a while now, but I rarely attend (non-classical) concerts, so when one of my best friends scored Coldplay tickets for Saturday, we fulfilled a longtime dream: Coldplay, live.
The world record for fastest official single Rubik’s Cube solve is 4.69 seconds, set by Patrick Ponce earlier this month (edging out perennial champion Feliks Zemdegs at 4.73 seconds). That’s brain-meltingly fast, but the robot called Sub1 Reloaded holds the robot record at 0.637 seconds.
It’s the beginning of my fourth year of med school and I just finished my four-week sub-internship rotation in Internal Medicine. The rest of the year is filled with mostly research, random electives, applications, interviews, and unscheduled time. Thus, I’ve had an uncomfortable realization: this is it. This is essentially as mature as my medical understanding will be before I get “MD” stamped behind my name in June.Continue reading 18 weeks of practice→
It started last week because we had several moribund patients, patients who we knew were imminently going to leave the hospital through the back door. Every morning, when I walked into the hospital and check my team’s patient list, this awfully morbid game played through my head.
If we’re talking in programming terms, the “_Medicine Red” list is an unsorted set of entries of patient names representing the patients we are currently managing. Names are added to the list when they are admitted through the emergency department or transferred from other teams. Names are dropped from the list when we discharge them, when we transfer them to other teams, or when they die. In simpler terms, our list of patients tells us who to treat, and changes in our list are a big deal.Continue reading A moribund game→
As I’m working through my medicine sub-internship (the closest to on-the-job doctor training as we ever get in med school), I have met a handful of memorable patients that have forced me to ponder our place in medicine as doctors. Like, in a non-ironic non-philosophical way.Continue reading Doctor versatility versus obligation→
Imagine the city as a living body. In that body, the roads would be its blood vessels. Traversing those roads are us humans, wandering through the tangle of highways and roads like like blood cells pumping through a maze of arteries and capillaries. Among them — about 1 in 300 — are us white coat-clad doctors, like those 1 in 800 white blood cells wandering among the red blood cells. Like those WBCs patrolling and protecting the body, doctors are the city’s healers.
This post was written in retrospectively in July 2017 about a wedding that happened in August 2013. One of my closest friends from high school was getting married, so I made a big drive from Santa Barbara where I was working up to the Bay Area where we’re from.
This was within a couple of months of me getting my camera and within a week of me getting my macro lens. Whoa. This probably explains my excess of shots of table ornaments and food. Continue reading Wedding guest with a camera→
