I was surprised at the referral in the first place, but baffled after seeing the patient in the flesh. It was someone else’s clinic, and the note read that this 94 year-old man on androgen deprivation for asymptomatic low volume metastatic prostate cancer for many years had a climbing PSA. About 8. Please discuss combined […]
The British are fond of a condiment called Brown Sauce. The product itself leaves me unmoved, but the thing I find interesting about Brown Sauce is that it purports nothing about itself whatsoever, other than a description of its colour. It claims no link to any known product of nature, just a factual statement about […]
If you needed inspiration to pursue cognitive ergonomics as a career or hobby, you could do worse than starting with the book “Set Phasers On Stun” by Steven Casey. Presented as a series of bite-sized real-life vignettes, the book illustrates the inherent fallibility in humans who design and use systems in a very engaging manner. […]
Cast your mind back to college physics and recall that an interface is a boundary between two phases of matter, for example gas and liquid. The interface is where interaction occurs between the disparate parts, there may be an exchange of molecules, or a conversion of molecules from one state to the other such as […]
I was at an international cricket match, when during one of the very few lulls in the action I noticed a camera operator. He was riding a Segway around the field in order to get close to the action and vary his angle for the viewers at home. After observing the function of this Segway-Human-Camera […]
The man was unconscious on the operating table, in lithotomy position and fully prepped for the major extirpative surgery which he was about to undergo. Four of us from different surgical specialities stood around his nether regions with arms folded, having all done a very thorough bimanual examination. We were discussing whether his recurrent colorectal […]
In 1948 BF Skinner put a pigeon in a box. Unlike most of Skinner’s birds, this one did not have to learn a behavior, such as pecking a lever, to receive an edible reward. Food was automatically dispensed at fixed time intervals without fail, the pigeon simply had to wait. The fascinating development from this […]