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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right

We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the culture expects second looks instead of blaming first movers. The system works not by goodwill alone but by rules that force repetition and reputational memory: chart audits, morbidity and mortality conferences, and the knowledge that you will see the same colleagues tomorrow. That is how fragile human kindness hardens into durable care.

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Opposites End in a Vacuum of Ashes: Quantifying Human Compatibility

Five Thirty Eight is a new website that uses data quantification to make qualitative evaluations of our human lives.  A recent article concerning people really only wanting to date themselves captured my attention.

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Every Day We Fledge

When Nicola pointed me to Alessondra’s Great Horned Owl Cam a month or so ago, I was hooked.  Every day I would watch the live USTREAM video feed of the mother and father owl feeding and taking care of their two owlets:  Tigris and Teegra.  Every few days it seemed like the owlets grew twice their previous size. It was a magnificent experience watching how Great Horned Owls raise their own.

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Can Art Be Quantified?

When we have a national discourse about money and Art and the role of the artist in society, we are left with a massive hole of misunderstanding that cannot yet be bridged: You Cannot Quantify Art.

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Magnifying the Human Condition

The universal human condition is one of suffering and it is the Playwright’s moral duty to bring that condition to light on the live stage.

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Nina Simone and Cat Stevens

Nina Simone is one of our must unappreciated and undervalued Blues voices.  Evidence of such is found in the lack of instant recognition when you invoke her name and in the fact that her ovaric album of 50 songs and a video found in — “The Definitive Rarities Collection” — is currently selling for an incredibly cheap $7.99USD in the American iTunes store.  That’s less than 15-cents per song!

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Digitizing the Human

I was having a discussion the other day about the digital books movement and saving a university money, and when I took the next logical step in the argument:  “If we’re digitizing books to save space and money, why don’t we digitize librarians, too?”  I was given a look in response  intended to freeze fertile fields and euthanize rabid dogs.

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