Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
From an interesting book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. Debugging: Moreover, vacuum tubes made it possible for these digital computers to be reprogrammed. Mechanical gears such as those in a bombsight could only perform a single type of calculation because each knob was physically attached to levers…
These may or may not be published in 2023, but I read them this year. Fiction Too Like the Lightning and The Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. These are two books in the Terra Incognita series. These were the best books I read of the year by far. The world building is great. There is…
These are the favorite books I have read this year . They may or may not have been published this year. Relative to other years, I read a fair number of good, but not great books and thus my list is fairly short. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang. This…
If you want to learn more about what went wrong for America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a great book to read is Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. Gottlieb is a physician, a former FDA commissioner, and a member of the National Academy of…
I recently finished reading the book titled The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander. The premise of the book is very interesting. It takes a detailed look at a hospital in rural America, Bryan, Ohio to be specific. The book touches on the challenges a small-town hospital from…
In no particular order (except the first): Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. A book about fungi, yet fascinating throughout. The author is clearly passionate about the topic . This is an understudied area of the natural world and the author takes pains to…
I recently finish a very interesting book on drugs and addiction titled Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction. The book was written by Judith Grisel, who is a not only a professor and neuroscientist, but also a former drug addict. The book describes the process of addiction, and how different types of illicit…
A typical answer is that the cost of R&D is very high. However, an interesting book by–César Hidalgo titled Why Information Grows–offers a more conceptual rationale. Medicinal pills embody little information, as their active compound is usually a small and relative simple molecule. Yet medicinal pills can be extremely useful and valuable. Why? To understand…
The answer is not raw brain processing power, but rather it is our ability to learn from others. At least that is the argument from Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success. Slate Star Codex has an excellent book review. Consider the following graph comparing human, chimpanzee and orangutan intelligence. Another interesting quotation from…
In the book Overcharged, authors Charles Silver and David Hyman identify a number of problems with the current health care system. Third party payment under a fee-for-service system means that providers have an incentive to provide more rather than less care. Further, because the people receiving the services (patients) are not the ones who are footing…