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.

First Entry

For this blog entry I'm supposed to write about how I became interested in engineering. To be completely honest at this point in my life it doesn't look like I'm going to pursue a career in engineering, but when I applied to the University of Miami it seemed like something I wanted to do. I've since become much more interested in entrepreneurship and am in the process of starting up a small business with a friend of mine and his father.
When I began applying for colleges the first question I asked myself was "What do I want to study?", because it would be a big factor in what colleges I applied to. My grandfather was an electrical engineer for a few years before FPL offered him a grant to study law and work for them as a lawyer. It seemed like an interesting field and jobs in engineering tend to pay pretty well. To be completely honest money is very important to me. I don't see any reason to settle for a job where I'm not going to make as much money as possible because I don't want to live a normal life. It seems boring, quite frankly. My grandfather came to this country from Cuba when he was 7 years old and came from a family of 7 brothers and an alcoholic mother. He was still able to make himself an extremely successful businessman through hard work and perseverance. My ultimate goal is not to be an egalitarian who helps everyone at their own expense. That might be what other people want to do with themselves but I'm looking out for myself first. I'm just trying to do what I want to and it doesn't really make a difference in the grand scheme anyways. My priority is to make sure I'm happy with where I am in my life, and I'm doing a pretty good job of it so far.
I guess I kind of strayed from the topic of the blog post, but it asked me to speak about some problem in science that interests me and I don't really have any, so I wrote about what does interest me. I'm sure there are plenty of people that don't agree with me and it doesn't really matter. The best way to lead your life is to make sure you're happy with what you're doing, and I can definitely say at this point I'm doing better than I expected I would be.