Attack of the Lynx, Death/Creepy Edition

Atul Gawande on end of life care: (A look at the role of hospice care and dying from a doctor that lends considerable light on things which have been called "death panels")

• “'Is she dying?' one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word 'dying' meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die."
  
• "A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.
• The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end."

This lengthy but highly readable story from Vanity Fair is kind of like a much creepier modern-day version of "Catch Me if You Can": The "fake Rockefeller's" chutzpah is something to be amazed and cautioned by. Also amazing and creepy but in a different way is the idea behind IBM's Watson, ready to conquer the field of Jeopardy! And because computers that are as "smart" as us can't go wrong at all, here's a look at the story behind the virus known as "Conficker."

Speaking of technology, this story from Wisconsin will make you think twice about talking to strangers online...Even strangers you know. And elsewhere in the realm of the reproductive, one wonders whether such a "toothy" anti-rape device might have the unintended consequence of increasing violence when the rapist gets a taste of his own medicine? Or is that a risk we're willing to take? And will cultural liberals cry "American Imperialism" when they learn India is picking up on our morning-after pill habits? Or do we like this kind of values-imposition?