Working with an Iranian colleague I like to talk a lot and we got along well. I did have the impression we were both educated moderates.  I do get excited about music. On the way into work I was listening to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and unsatisfied about not hearing the whole thing the first…

I was affected by asthma as a young child and was pretty short of breath a lot of the time, not able to run that well or keep up with my friends riding a bike. My determination to beat this physical limitation not only lead to a life in medicine,  but caused me to engage…

I just saw Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni at the Philadelphia Opera. I hope I am spoiling the opera for anyone when I say that Don Giovanni is sent directly into hell. He does not get the break that Faust does.  Giovanni is not what you would consider a nice person. He is mostly a rake,…

As a newly minted medical resident I wrote orders for antibiotics and cultures for a sick patient with pneumonia.  That night I happened to be on call.  I was chagrined when nurses awoke me at 2 AM to ask about something they had trouble deciphering. They had just gotten to taking off orders from 17…

If you Google a physician’s name,  you are likely to find as the first, second and third offerings, descriptions by doctor rating intermediaries. Those come well before biographies from the physician’s employer.  If your doctor is published or well- known, ratings by these agencies still  pop up first on web searches, because they have arranged…

As you may suspect from these wordy presentations, I also like to talk. Until recently if someone asked me a question, thinking that they wanted to know something,  I would expound.  That was when teaching medical students and residents but also on other occasions.  When I found people easily distracted or they would stop listening…

Computer scientists seek to create an artificial brain every bit as powerful as the human brain, maybe even more powerful, without the drawbacks of the human body, a disembodied brain. But the brain is quintessentially biological, an organ among organs. It is intimately and immanently connected with bodily function. Demise of the body immediately leads…

In previous posts I remarked that computers are taking over cognitive functions and how in many ways they have surpassed human abilities, especially with rapid calculations and data storage.  Computers have beaten human champions in such games as chess and Jeopardy. Given computers’ superior abilities in certain cognitive spheres,  it is fair to ask whether…

Recently, I asked college graduates to estimate the age of the earth. They had no idea. One initially gave an answer of thousands of years and wondered if humans had been on earth all that time. I am not talking about people who take the Bible literally. Although they may function well in their daily…

You must know where I am headed after discussions of death and Dante and Egyptian mummies that my next topic has to be the clash of cultures between Egypt and the Children of Israel especially at this time of year. The story of Passover is billed as a deliverance of the Children of Israel from…