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1. The Legend, the King, and the Hostile Abdomen On March 28, 1980, in a military hospital on the banks of the Nile, Michael DeBakey removed a spleen the size of a football from a dying exile. The patient was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran. The spleen weighed close to 2,000 grams, riddled with tumorous nodules from a lymphoma whose severity had been concealed from the Shah himself for years. The surgeon was the most celebrated figure in twentieth-century Amer

Or: Why the Best Surgeons Cannot Escape Variance, and What That Teaches Us About Learning in Complex Systems 1.    The Ether Dome and the Statistician On October 16, 1846, William Morton administered ether to a patient in the amphitheater of Massachusetts General Hospital, and surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from the patient's neck while the man slept. Warren turned to the assembled physicians and said, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." The Ether Dome, as it came to

Intuitive wins 3 new indications for da Vinci SP system Getting energy from a fusion reactor 93 million miles away is cheaper than burning the rocks in the ground. Logarithmic axes I. There is a famous graph of the cost of solar power. It looks like a slide at a water park: an inexorable drop from "prohibitively expensive, best for space tech" in 1975 to "cheaper than coal" in 2023. If you had written a blog post about solar panels in 1990, you would have been factually cor

I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data. Then I called my doctor. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/i-let-chatgpt-analyze-a-decade-of-my-apple-watch-data-then-i-called-my-doctor/ar-AA1UZxip?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email I. In Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel , there is a library containing every possible book. Most of them are gibberish—random sequences of letters like “mcvbn qio jkl.” But somewhere in there is the true history of your dea