On March 6, my birthday last year, I was up in Vermont with my family. At the time my son was working for a big biotech firm. About five days earlier, that firm had had a meeting of all of their big players in big hotel meeting room in Boston…

I’m not going to call it that, but… — Soon after we ended our summer a kind of malaise settled over me. I noticed I was feeling a bit uncomfortable and bored with the things I planned to do and the people I planned to do them with. It’s embarrassing. …

Thanks Mike, I have been thinking about this since the turn of the century. Before I retired I gave several papers about how to use computerized algorithms to predict patient’t behaviors. I predicted the computers would be able to find patterns and make predictions that no clinician could. I got booed off the stage. It was a lot of fun. What if all of our personal data was gathered by a personal AI database. Could we consult it before we made major decisions? Would it make predictions of probable outcomes? Would we want out governments doing this? It could’t get much worse.

Good fortune left me on Cape Cod and not in Ukraine We came across the bridge on June 20th, and except for four days we have been here all the time. It’s been a strange summer in many ways, but basically, I still love being down near the water all…

From what I’m reading, they need an old man’s perspective — After I wrote my previous post about how new medical technologies will have profound effects on the lives of people, I began to wonder how I could be a part of this process. I have a Ph.D. in Psychology, which could help me, but I am in my late 70s…

Thanks for spelling this out. from your POV. It has been clear for a long time that saving the planet has become a battle of lobbyists who want to protect their profits. I am not saying that all of them are deceitful, just that too much is driven by money and it is very difficult for an old geezer like myself to sort out the best solution. It is even more difficult to believe than there will be any consensus that will lead to real change.

Specific treatments for complex problems I was a practicing Clinical Psychologist for almost fifty years. I felt it was my job to help people find ways to make better decisions so that they could live happier, healthier, more productive lives. Of course, that was easier said than done. I went to graduate school at a…

I don’t want to hear or read anything about Republicans until Trump goes on trial — I am writing this two days before the so-called Republican Debate. There will be eight candidates who want to find a way to push Trump aside and lead the Republican Party into a new, but similar, era. I will not watch the debate. I have better things to do with…

A long time ago, as I was leaving college, I read a book that explained the world more clearly than anything I was taught in college. The book was Catch-22. In it, ( I am paraphrasing ) there is a part where one high ranking office is being driven by a low ranking officer and they are talking about the war and who benefits. The driver realizes that the son of the officer is now on the front lines and may get killed. The officer’s response is “that’s the cost of doing business.” Destruction and death are just the sidebar to profits.