Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

• Wave heights are a whopping 26 feet off Cape Cod at tail end of current snow/wind storm – http://t.co/C7D210MS #
• Catastrophic Drought in Texas Causes Global Economic Ripples – http://t.co/WhBcK9PH #
• The cultural inflation of morbidity – http://t.co/gz83hCLZ #FakeCoachellaBandNames #
• Great title: Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning http://t.co/2cpNnUE0 #
• Bangkok's current floods are likely the largest to swamp a city so large in world history – http://t.co/U5SSgGxJ #
• Words cannot express the nuttiness of this Richard Stallman email offering to speak. http://t.co/WFvIRp3d #
• Today in new Halloween words: "freddy cougar" – http://t.co/EfoBQo3m #
• Good news: Siri now works on an jailbroken iPhone 4. Bad news: It's absurdly complicated to do. http://t.co/ZaWP4u95 #
• Graphic of travel time from Berlin, in days, in 1909 – http://t.co/vJCLVQqf #
• Superb Atlantic WWII photo series continues: After the War – http://t.co/Z9OMJcCP #
• If Alan Taylor's 20-part series in The Atlantic on WWII does not win a Pulitzer the award should be eliminated. #
• Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs' novelist sister, on his death – http://t.co/3UDESH87 /via @paulg #
• That Mona Simpson remembrance of Steve Jobs is absolutely devastating. I thought I had lost the capacity to be touched on this. I hadn't. #
• Aftershocks of real estate bubble: Ontario/LA International airport lost 1/3rd of its traffic from 2007-2010 – http://t.co/idzrlDGx #
• Water's for fighting: Massive California farm-to-city water deal snared in litigation – http://t.co/cu23C5Hd #
• Bizarre twist: Hackers threaten to expose Zeta cartel's secrets – http://t.co/l0WlBgtZ /via @nraford #

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Excellent David Gorski wrap-up on what we now now about Steve Jobs’ cancer. It is highly worth reading reading in its entirety. As Gorski, a surgical oncologist says in the closing, the lessons are more about the limits of cancer treatment than anything else.

Isaacson contrasts the fragmented approach to care at Stanford to the far more integrated approach at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, where Jobs underwent his transplant and where Dr. James Eason was portrayed as having “managed Steve and forced him to do things…that were good for him.” Although it is certainly possible that the difference could be accounted for more by the lack of a person at Stanford with a strong enough personality to tell Jobs what to do and get him to do, compared to Dr. Eason, who clearly had a personality as strong as Jobs’, the description of fragmented care rings true to me, as I’ve seen this problem myself at various times during my career. One wonders if there is a way to infuse healthcare with some Apple-like integration of care, to build it into the DNA of the system itself as it is built into Apple’s DNA, without having to rely on personalities as strong as Dr. Eason’s apparently was.

Steve Jobs’ eight year battle with his illness is remarkable not so much because he had a rare tumor or because he flirted with alternative medicine for several months before undergoing surgery. Rather, I see Jobs’ case as providing multiple lessons in the complexity of cancer, the difficulty of the decisions that go into cancer care, and how being wealthy or famous can distort those choices. I’ve said it before, but now is as good a time as any to say it again: In cancer, biology is still king. Perhaps one day, when we know how to decode and interpret genomic information of the sort provided when Jobs’ had his tumors sequenced and use that information to target cancers more accurately, we will be able to dethrone that king more than just part of the time and only in certain tumors.

via Science-Based Medicine » “And one more thing” about Steve Jobs’ battle with cancer.

From a new paper on the St Petersburg paradox and risk:

Excessive risk is to be avoided primarily because we cannot go back in time.

via The time resolution of the St Petersburg paradox.

The Atlantic recently wrapped up Part 20 of its magnificent photo series on WWII. Here are links to them all, in order. Highly, highly recommended.

• Before the War
• The Invasion of Poland and the Winter War
• Axis Invasions and the Fall of France
• The Battle of Britain
• Conflict Spreads Around the Globe
• Operation Barbarossa
• Pearl Harbor
• The American Home Front in Color
• Daring Raids and Brutal Reprisals
• Internment of Japanese Americans
• Battle of Midway and the Aleutian Campaign
• The North African Campaign
• Women at War
• The Eastern Front
• The Pacific Islands
• The Allied Invasion of Europe
• The Fall of Nazi Germany
• The Holocaust
• The Fall of Imperial Japan
• After the War

   

Novelist Mona Simpson on her brother Steve Jobs, who she first met as as an adult. A tiny excerpt. The entirety is intense, sometimes amusing, and, in its knowing totality, emotionally devastating.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

…He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

via A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs – NYTimes.com.

• If you want an excuse to operate on a healthy athlete, just get an MRI – http://t.co/FYcSUyWi /cc @jonahlehrer #
• My review of the new Steve Job biography – http://t.co/Sh0ezpMe #
• As a Jobs book review aside, I was pleased to get a bit of caps lock in there: "OMG IT'S STEVE JOBS!!!". No review complete without it. #
• Good post. RT @fredwilson: Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs http://t.co/81RClRLY #
• Weekend Barron's joins the bulls, talking up technology, etc one month into an epic rally. Nice pic tho. http://t.co/4NrYi6mP #
• I'm digging Instacast app on iPhone for podcasts. Recommended. What a cloud iTunes should do, but doesn't. #
• I think I'm only going to watch "making of" videos for First Round Holiday Videos from now on – http://t.co/g3ju0L9d #
• Catching up with A.J. Jacobs, the “healthiest person alive”. Turns out it ain't easy. http://t.co/YSNW0NDu #
• [post] tuart Kauffman on “The End of a Physics Worldview” http://t.co/9QnBY9Ug #
• Why shouldn't we be troubled by the reaction of the NYPD to this ticket-fixing scandal? http://t.co/Vhzn5v5g #
• I just had someone suggest I drop in next time I'm in Abu Dhabi. Does that happen? Feel I should counter with Mcmurdo Station. #
• So Who Needs Wall Street? Today's entrepreneurs don't aspire to be public – http://t.co/zTHjHr6N #

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Chao Praya river levels peaked this weekend in the unprecedented Bangkok flooding:

Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, is currently experiencing what is perhaps the greatest flood ever to swamp a city so large in world history. This dynamic Asian megalopolis has a population of around 10 million within the city limits and a metropolitan population of at least 20 million. The flood is affecting virtually every resident and many have evacuated to provinces outside the flood zones.

The worst of the flood was expected to occur on Saturday October 29th as the river that bisects the city, the Chao Praya, was expected to crest at its highest level ever recorded some 8 feet above normal and astronomical high tides were expected to peak, possibly causing the drainage of the cities canals and the Chao Praya to back up and push the flood waters into the heart of the city. Fortunately however, it appears that, so far, the dikes have held and the worst-case scenario is not playing out. This could change at a moments notice.

via Weather Extremes : The Great Bangkok Flood : Weather Underground.

Links to a  few research papers I have in various browser tabs this morning:

• Event-Driven Trading and the “New News” (Source)
• The ‘cultural inflation of morbidity’ during the English mortality decline: A new look (Source)
• All Scale-Free Networks Are Sparse (Source)
• Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning (Source)
• Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control (Source)

Impressive wave heights off Cape Cod right now in current storm. Check the buoy data:

And if you’re more of a snow kind of person, there’s this:

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