Matthew's Blog
My Disney Ambivalence
There are two of the definitions of ambivalence in the Oxford English Dictionary: Psychoanalysis and Psychology. The coexistence in one person of profoundly opposing emotions, beliefs, attitudes, or urges (such as love and hate, or attraction and repulsion) towards a...
Is Healthcare Really a Service Industry?
Most people are familiar in some form with Wittgenstein’s Rabbit, a drawing where the image can be seen as both a duck or a rabbit with a shift in perspective. We may need to start thinking of healthcare in this way because I contend that with the centrality of the...
Complexity and Big Health vs. Small Health
As I suggested in my blog post The Animosity Towards BigX, although I am skeptical towards BigHealth, I don’t hate them—partly because big problems of the world, such as CoVid will need big institutions to help deal with it. However, I do think it's important to...
Tolkien—Role Model? Mentor?
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition for a mentor: Originally (in form Mentor): a person who acts as guide and adviser to another person, esp. one who is younger and less experienced. Later, more generally: a person who offers support and...
Twitter: Mute vs. Block?
Twitter describes the technical differences between muting and blocking well, which I would summarize like this: muting is simply not seeing someone's tweets (or tweets with specific words, emojis, or hashtags), whereas blocking preventing all interaction with...
My Book Template: A History of PI
The book A History of PI by Petr Beckmann (1971) is what I call a role-model book, the type of book I would love to write myself. Apart from giving a nice step by step history of the mathematics behind pi, starting with Mesopotamia and ending with the current period...
Very Few Things Are Black and White
The more Black & White photography I shoot the more I realize how rare it is to have a photograph that has something which truly all black or truly all white. Nearly everything is simply a different shade of gray.
Definitions: Healthcare’s Rabbit Hole
One of my long-term writing goals is to write a treatise on the ethics of AI in healthcare. But to pursue this I realized I had to first clarify what I meant by healthcare, which then led me to consider the definition of health, and finally, so I can recognize a good...
Deep Reading
What is deep reading? Here are some definitions mined from the internet: Deep reading is the active process of thoughtful and deliberate reading carried out to enhance one's comprehension and enjoyment of a text. Richard Nordquist (ThoughtCo) Deep reading, also called...