The Checklist

In Gawande's "The Checklist", he writes about the modern marvel that is the Intensive Care Unit. The I.C.U. is the place where miracles happen at most hospitals, and somehow they are able to save people when the odds are stacked against them. In his article he writes about a patient who was rushed into I.C.U. when a surgery went horribly wrong and his liver and kidneys failed. He was under close watch by hospital staff for 10 days and showed signs of improvement, but suddenly on the 11th day he started experiencing severe complications, because the catheters, I.V. lines and dialysis tubes placed inside him were all infected. This caused him to spend another 2 months in the hospital, the entire time wondering if he would even be alive the next day, much less worrying about when he would be able to leave. The author writes that these complications are exceedingly common in hospitals today, and out of all the patients that spend time in the I.C.U., nearly half experience a serious complication. This is to be expected, when you are dealing with these life or death situations. However, most people would prefer to deal with a complication in a hospital than simply die without a fighting chance.

Polymers are Forever

Weisman's article, Polymers Are Forever, presents an interesting point. Humanity has always tried to invent things to be durable. Who wants to buy a drink and have their plastic cup decompose around it before they can finish? However, this quest to make products with longer lifespans has had a negative effect on the world's ecosystems. Consider the fact that most of the synthetic compounds used industrially today have lifespans into the thousands of years. Now consider that every bottled water you have ever thrown out (not recycled, obviously) is still not only in existence as a water bottle, but is most likely floating in the ocean, or sitting in a massive pile of other garbage. This trash has been the major impetus for the development of new recycling and waste management technology, and hopefully we will find a way to get rid of trash, if we can't re-use it. (Of course, by get rid of I don't mean leave in a large pile on the side of the interstate, or dump into the waters of developing countries.)

Twilight of the Books

This article presents us with a simple fact: less and less Americans are reading every day. However, today it is far more common to see people sit down with their laptop and blog or tweet, than it is to see them sit down at a coffee shop and read a book. Interestingly, the article completely and totally disregards the idea of reading online, which leaves one to wonder how the author thinks most people will read his article in the first place, as well as leaving out the increasingly popular and seemingly unstoppable giant that is the internet, which has for the most part engrossed the entirety of American culture. Did the author intentionally leave out this monstrous detail? The article, written in 2007, fails to make any reference or acknowledgment of the internet's existence, even though it would make the article significantly more accurate if it had pointed out some sort of statistic relating to the number of present-day internet readers, compared with the number of book readers in the past.