Archive for May, 2007

Better

Monday, May 21st, 2007

hat tip to Jim McGee

Atul Gawande’s Better is going on the reading list. From the above blog post:

Many of Gawande’s stories shed light on the reality that we often must make decisions on the basis of imperfect information and knowledge. We may not be able always to meet a gold standard of evidence, but we still benefit from a methodological commitment to hypothesis, experiment, and measurement.

That benefit, I think, is that we get “better” at the stuff we’re doing.

And in the interest of sharing my full set of distractions and as an example of synchronicity, two posts from the Freakonomics blog:

Things that are just wrong

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

The local rodeo parade is today, and as I was bringing the camera to my wife, I saw:

  • 5 clowns getting out of a minivan
  • a guy in full western fancy duds, on a horse with a saddle with lots of silver, talking on a cell phone
  • a girl trotting down the street on her horse, carrying two medium coffee drinks. She held them off to the side so that the spilling coffee would not land on the horse’s back.