Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
G.K. Chesterton
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13,600 Service Lines
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has… enumerated and identified… more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies… But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
Atul Gawande, Stanford School of Medicine 2010 commencement speech
Read the whole thing on The New Yorker [newyorker.com].
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RIP Gulf Shores, AL 2010
I ran across these photos (here, here and here [boston.com]) via Boston.com’s The Big Picture [boston.com] article from June 11th. See the blue umbrellas and beach chairs in photo #12 [boston.com]? Yea? Well:
I used to spend every other summer vacation on that beach. My grandfather had a house on the lagoon at Gulf Shores… that is until Hurricane Ivan destroyed it in 2004 [confusion.cc].
I haven’t been back in some time. I guess it’s a good thing I got some photos of the clean Gulf water.
And the beautiful beaches at sunset.
It’s hard to appreciate the scope and devastation of the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe from halfway around the world. Though the news talks about it everyday, there is no 24-by-7 discussion of it. Even though Singapore had a smaller oil spill just a short time ago [nytimes.com]. Seeing pictures of birds and turtles covered in oil make me feel bad. But seeing photos of the beaches I played on as a kid covered in oil bring it home in a much more personal way.
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Pulau Ubin, Singapore, April 2010
Mud Crab at Chek Jawa [wikipedia.org] on Pulau Ubin [wikipedia.org] in Singapore. You can see the full Pulau Ubin, Singapore, April 2010 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].
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Good requirements, bad product
The Consumerist [consumerist.com] has a short article on the Pentagon’s recipe for brownies — no not the happy-fun kind of brownies, the military stopped testing that in the ’70s. We’re talking K-Ration, nuclear-war proof, post-apocalyptic edible, made from shit cockroaches won’t eat, cardboard brownies.
The article on the consumerist [consumerist.com] is basically the following two quotes, but they are so perfect, I’m going to reproduce them here:
Shortening shall be a refined, hydrogenated vegetable oil or combination of refined vegetable oils which are in common use by the baking industry. Coconut and palm kernel oils may be used only in the coating. The shortening shall have a stability of not less than 100 hours as determined by the Active Oxygen Method (AOM) in Method Cd 12-57 of the Commercial Fats and Oils chapter in the Official and Tentative Methods of the American Oil Chemists Society. The shortening may contain alpha monoglycerides and an antioxidant or combination of antioxidants, as permitted by the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and regulations promulgated thereunder.
I like it! A well written, clear and concise, technical requirement… Of course there is one tiny little problem with this requirement:
[NPR] asked Penny Karas, the founder of Hello Cupcake bakery in Washington, D.C., to whip up us a batch. And to be honest, they weren’t too good: dry, crumbly and dense. But they did taste as if they might last quite a while if boxed up and shipped to a war zone.
Yep. This situation is a familiar problem to me as a Solution Architect… Well defined technical requirements that produce technically correct products that, due to the business requirements of the various stakeholders, no one wants to use…
I can’t tell you how many projects I have been on that I have had to fight some MBA holding sales|product|operations (delete as appropriate) weenie over their insistence on the inclusion of some brilliant business requirement like “It has to be good after a NUCLEAR FUCKING WAR!” Don’t get me wrong that might be a valid business requirement for military rations. It might even be a lofty goal for a mobile phone network. It is not, however, a useful or necessary requirement for a value added service in the mobile industry. No one cares if their phone can download music after the first strike! Well… Ok, maybe the guy who launched the bomb wants to download “We will rock you”.
Anyway, thanks to S****** for the link, head over the original article on The Consumerist [consumerist.com] with links to the actual recipe and the NPR article.