Health
Pyramid
$2.5 million for a pyramid that isn’t even a pyramid.
{design, tufte, food pyramid}
Sleeptracker
In the comments to a post I wrote about various devices designed to get you out of bed in the morning, Tim May directed my attention to the Sleeptracker Alarm Watch.
The SLEEPTRACKER watch is unique in that while it tells you the time and has a built-in alarm like every other digital watch, this one […]
Queue
Ted Barlow reprises an old post about health care, and it is still just as relevant. Nothing new here: the Europeans do it better, our system is less efficient, with more overhead, and even the long lines. Quoting the Washington Monthly:
We should acknowledge the problems: waits for non-urgent types of care, and recent, damaging cuts […]
Discrepancies
Nathan Newman asks why the Republicans aren’t planning on fixing racial differences in health care, when they have so recently been willing to exploit those differences for political gain. He then goes on to highlight some of the most shocking discrepancies:
Sixty-nine percent of whites are insured through their employers, compared with only 52 percent of […]
Death
Death used to be viewed as a natural phenomenon. Now we know better. The average life expectancy of adult humans has more than doubled in the last hundred years, and shows no signs of slowing down. The obvious conclusion from this is that if anyone dies it is because they are lazy. They either failed […]
Complexity
One of the biggest problems with political activists - wherever they lie on the left-right spectrum - is the tendency to oversimplify. This is understandable, many believe that complexity can lead to Hamletesque soliloquies weighing the options rather than provoking action. On the other hand, simplistic views of the world can themselves be a barrier […]
Amygdala
In previous posts on stress I talked about how, while limited stress can be a good thing, the body’s natural responses to stress are not well adapted for long-term anxieties and pressures common to modern life. Long term stress can slow healing and create other health problems, such as reducing our ability to process fatty […]
Bagpipes
Talking about stress, one of the endlessly fascinating things about humans are all the creative ways we come up with to let off a bit of steam. Today I saw a businessman who plays the bagpipes in Bryant Park during his lunch break.
But somehow he didn’t seem too relaxed when I saw him walking home […]
Baboons
Robert Sapolsky has spent much of his life studying Baboon society. While Baboons are not human, they, along with other higher primates, share with humans the ability to be stressed out.
Like many of us, these primates don’t spend most of the day worrying about their next meal, and so like many of us, they are […]
War Stress
In Iraq, counselors are helping U.S. soldiers develop coping skills so that they can handle the stress of combat. But doctors are finding growing anxiety among Iraqi people who see themselves as caught in a helpless situation. NPR’s Emily Harris reports.
I’m glad to see a discussion of civilian stress in this NPR report, as this […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
