CLEAN CLOTHES FOR DOCTORS. The article that I posted on yesterday on whether hospital personnel should wear clean clothes says that “American hospitals operate on tight budgets and can’t afford to provide clothes and shoes to every worker. In addition, many hospitals don’t have the extra space for laundry facilities.” I don’t understand this resistance to trying to provide a sterile environment. Clean clothes are routine in nuclear facilities and places where computer chips are made. The importance of eliminating germs in hospitals has been known for over a hundred years, since the work of Semmelweis, Lister and Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father). (Holmes, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, is a model for this blog.)
Archive for September, 2008
CLEAN CLOTHES FOR DOCTORS.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008CLEAN SURFACES (REVISITED).
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008CLEAN SURFACES (REVISITED). I have posted several times, including here, about efforts to reduce hospital infections. This article by Tara Parker-Pope describes how the British National Health Service has imposed a “bare below the elbows” rule against doctors wearing neckties and long sleeves. As reported here, a commentary in a British medical journal has questioned the rule because there is a lack of data. Ironically, a quote from the commentary says that the available evidence is “mostly in obscure medical journals.” I think that questions of hospital cleanliness don’t have a great deal of intellectual interest, so that it is not surprising that only obscure journals consider them. I also think that the controversy is a good example of the gulf between frequentists and Bayesians that I posted on here. There is evidence that germs can live a long time on fabrics. A Bayesian would give that fact, plus the fact that germs cause infections, a great deal of weight. But there is apparently no controlled experiment on the issue. As the Parker-Pope article says, “there’s no evidence that clothing plays a role in the spread of hospital infections.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF ERROR–PURPLE STATES.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF ERROR–PURPLE STATES. After the 2004 election, I had some e mail exchanges with Dick Weisfelder in which I argued that there were–or could be– purple states. My position was that whether a state was Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) depended partly on the where the Presidential candidates came from. (I was deeply impressed by what happened in 1960 when the Massacusetts Democrat Kennedy carried most of the states that the Eastern Republican Dewey had carried in 1948, and the California Republican Nixon carried most of the states that the Midwestern Democrat Truman had carried twelve years earlier). Now, the Democratic candidate comes from a Midwestern state, and yet the electoral map seems not to have changed very much. Larry Sabato says here that: “We now are fairly certain that a minimum of 42 states will keep the same partisan color that they chose in 2004. We would not be shocked if this number topped 45. That’s right: After expenditures in the hundreds of millions, all the controversial events of the past four years, and the marathon two-year campaign of 2008, the map may not be radically altered.” There are some weeks to go, and a decisive victory for one candidate might change the colors of some states, but I acknowledge that I was wrong.
BAM–A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST.
Sunday, September 21st, 2008BAM–A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST. I have done some more research on Bam Margera.This wikipedia article collects quotations from reviews of JACKASS: THE MOVIE. Here are some of them: “Maybe the best way to look at Jackass: The Movie is as a piece of conceptual art”; “a leading example of the decline of Western civilization”; and “a disgusting, repulsive, grotesque spectacle, but it’s also hilarious and provocative.” The young man who called himself Bam said that he has other houses, but he was looking for an additional house in our neighborhood. He also said that he was “a little wild.” Nick said that it’s hard to believe that we met the real Bam Margera, but I think it’s nice to think that there’s a possibility he might become a neighbor.
BAM
Saturday, September 20th, 2008BAM. Mary Jane and I were out for a walk in our neighborhood the other night when a car stopped us and the young man on the passenger side asked for directions. He was a nice guy, and we chatted for a while. Then he said that maybe we knew him. Did we know who Bam was? We answered that we thought of BAM as the Brooklyn Academy of Music (which has a lot of good theater). He laughed and said that he was Bam. He pointed to his close-cropped Mohican haircut and that we should know him from JACKASS (we didn’t). The kids explained things to us. Here is who Bam Margera is. Nick pointed out to us that some of his friends had just been watching a show where Bam put on a glove filled with fire ants.
IRIDESCENT DOVES.
Friday, September 19th, 2008IRIDESCENT DOVES. John Ruskin agreed that the pigeons added to the beauty of Saint Mark’s Square. He wrote in THE STONES OF VENICE that: “the St. Mark’s porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.”
GRAND CENTRAL STATION AND PIAZZA SAN MARCO.
Friday, September 19th, 2008GRAND CENTRAL STATION AND PIAZZA SAN MARCO. I wrote here that: “The interior of Grand Central Station reminds me of Saint Marks Place in Venice, with human figures taking their angled paths across the giant space, continually changing the space.” The pigeons in Saint Mark’s Place would also take angled paths across the space, creating constant motion against the facades and, I thought, adding to the beauty of the space.
VENICE–DON’T FEED THE PIGEONS.
Thursday, September 18th, 2008VENICE—DON’T FEED THE PIGEONS. Judith Martin (Miss Manners) had an article in the weekend Financial Times about the ban that Venice has now imposed on feeding pigeons in Saint Mark’s Square. Apparently feeding pigeons anywhere else in the city has been illegal for ten years. Even throwing rice at a wedding has been banned. At one time the city encouraged their presence, providing free food for pigeons for many years. After World War II, Venice gave war orphans hereditary licenses to sell corn in the Square.
Our children came to know one of the ladies who sold corn and spent many happy hours in the Square feeding the pigeons.
SCOTT FITZGERALD, CRITIC.
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008SCOTT FITZGERALD, CRITIC. I have been reading Bryant Mangum’s edition of THE BEST EARLY STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. Fitzgerald had remarkable range very early. It’s startling to find such wisdom in a young man who went on to lead such a troubled life. From the beginning, Fitzgerald combined lyricism with analytical distance. The Biographical Note contains a brilliant sentence which summarizes Fitzgerald’s writing as well as his life: “It was as if all his fiction described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the prettiest girl…and as if he stood at the same time outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.” The quotation is from Malcolm Cowley, but you will note that Cowley is quoting Scott Fitzgerald.
BENJAMIN BUTTON–THE IMPOSSIBLE PLOT.
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008BENJAMIN BUTTON—THE IMPOSSIBLE PLOT. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, has been announced as a Christmas movie with Brad Pitt starring as the man who is born as a 70 year old man and lives his life backwards until he becomes a baby. I have known what the story is about for years, and never wanted to read it. I could never imagine how anybody—even a genius like Fitzgerald–could make a successful story with that plot—too grim, too many inconsistencies, too implausible. We just read the story in our short story group. To my amazement, Fitzgerald pulled it off. The story is charming, and powerful. Now I have to wonder how the movie can ever pull it off. It seems to me that it’s impossible to make a successful movie of the story.
