Got home from the hospital at 7:45 PM tonight, but I actually felt great — we got our new medical students today, and luck has it that my patient load is on the lighter side of usual, so I spent most of the day teaching them. The agenda: how to round on patients in the morning, how to write orders and prescriptions, how to admit a patient to the inpatient unit, and how to present at work rounds. I actually love the teaching responsibilities of residency.
I’m pretty friggin’ amazed that baseball’s owners are thinking about eliminating teams from the league. Nothing would take place until 2002, but I think that it would be pretty cool to undo some of the dilution that expansion has brought to baseball.
I love the ingenuity of a good scientist. After the star-tracking navigation system died on the NASA Deep Space 1 probe, engineers shut down the satellite’s ion drive and then spent the last seven months writing new software that uses an onboard camera and reference stars for orientation. Testing went swimmingly, and the satellite has spent the last week with the ion drive back on, making its way to its target comet.
Last week, I tried to put a realistic spin on the completion of a map of the human genome, but it turns out that a few days later, in one of his diary entries on Slate, Dean Hamer put it much better than I ever could. As the head of the Gene Structure section at the National Institutes of Health, he also is one of the people who are working hard to understand exactly what the map shows us.
Of course this makes sense, but it still strikes me as a new and great idea: the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that prisoners can be forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration. Why shouldn’t they have to reimburse society for their own misdeeds?
After yesterday’s request for good links about the new features in Internet Explorer 5.5, Luke sent along an MSDN article on the newest DHTML features found in the browser. There are some supercool new things to play with, including editable page text (you have to be running IE 5.5 to do anything on that sample page).
Windows 2000 tip: if you have Terminal Services installed, upgrading Internet Explorer (either with IE 5.01 SP1 or IE 5.5) requires an additional step — changing into Install Mode, so that the installation root is shifted from the root specific to the interactively-logged on user to the system root. How do you do this? At a command prompt, type change user /install. Then run the installer for IE, and when it’s done, type change user /execute at the command prompt before rebooting. Each cheesy.
Interesting sidenote:
In the early scenes of Brazil, Sam Lowry, our hero, gives a check
to Jill Layton, the love interest. Her next door neighbor, Buttle,
was taken away by the police and tortured to death. The interesting
part about the check was that it was not restitution—it was a
rebate.
I feel that charging prisoners room and board is essentially another
punishment; to charge them fees without changes in the law is
unconstitutional. If the law were changed, it should only effect
new prisoners, not existing ones.
On a different tack, I feel charging prisoners the cost of
incarceration would be cruel and unusual punishment. While in prison, most prisoners make far less than minimum wage. If we were
to do this, I fear we would essentially be creating a large slave
class. At best, released prisoners would become indentured
servants. When would the majority of prisoners ever be
able to pay back the state?
In a way, I think this topic is also related to the purpose of
prisons? What does it mean to have a “correction” institution? How
much of the focus should be on rehabilitation and how much on
punishment?
At this point, we are spending far too much on punishment and not
enough on rehabilitation.
—Sam
• Posted by: Sam Greenfield on Jul 16, 2000, 4:50 PM