Redefining Needs

Since getting rid of my car, I order pretty much everything I need via the internet. I was kind of doing that even when I had a car. This lends itself nicely to keeping lists of stuff to buy, and it’s even beneficial because it makes grouping stuff for shipping easier.

Of course, most people keep lists of things to buy on or off of the internet anyhow.

Anyway, in order to prioritize the order in which I … uh, order stuff, I started breaking the list into three categories:

  1. Needs – Things I need. These must be ordered when I have the money available.
  2. Wants – Things I want. These would be nice to have, but not necessary.
  3. Wishlist – Things I think I might want to buy, if I had enough money. Maybe I don’t really want them, but they seem interesting and maybe useful.

To keep my life functioning properly, Needs has to include more than the typical, “food, shelter, water”. In the interest of thrift and functionality, I have redefined a need as something that:

  • Costs more not to have than it does to purchase such as groceries and cooking utensils. Without these items, a very basic need of nutrition will have to be fulfilled from restaurants, which after a short period of time outpaces even the cost of cooking utensils.
  • If not purchased, will result in the loss of something that I’m not willing to lose, such as plane tickets to see Amanda on a regular basis. I’m not willing to let the quality of our marriage suffer in favor of a few hundred dollars per month.

A good example of a combination of these is property (or renter’s) insurance.

This has nicely separated out my needs and wants. The wants vs. wishlist separation is typically done on utilitarian grounds. For instance, I want dish towels for the apartment so that things can be wiped up without going through paper towel, but my desire for a green laser pointer (when a red one would work just fine) goes on the wish list. The green laser pointer is an order of magnitude more expensive than a red one, with only a little added functionality.

Cardiac EP Finding of the Day

I say finding rather than fact, because sometimes a finding is later revealed to be incorrect, or subject to qualifications. Anyway, I read a lot of papers, and sometimes there are little useful nuggets of information that you might not be able to easily find if looking for them.

Here’s today’s.

According to Hearse et al 1977, the specific gravity of the left ventricular tissue of mongrel dogs is about 1.5.

I had no idea what the specific gravity of LV myocardium was. If asked to estimate, I probably would have placed it between 1 and 2, but I couldn’t have been much more specific. This could be useful when, say, someone gives concentrations in terms of wet weight of the myocardium.

Reflexively Looking for References and Trust

If you read a lot of scientific papers, or I guess academic papers really, and you care about where the information is coming from, you develop a habit.

I guess I, have developed a habit. I can’t speak for others but I think it’s fairly common.

That habit is to look for references whenever an assertion is made. There are three kinds of assertions in academic writing.

  1. Assertions with references: This is a case where the author has read something elsewhere. Ve wishes to pass that information along to the reader, perhaps to build an argument. A reference shows that the assertion comes from elsewhere, and most importantly, where to find it.
  2. Substantiated claims: In the field of science, this would be direct reference to included data (say, a table or graph), or an inference based on such data. No external reference is necessary. The reader may not trust the data, but the experiments should be repeatable by the reader to be considered valid.
  3. Unsubstantiated assertions: These generally fall into two categories: (1) Restatements of common knowledge, which one should know or can easily look up in a general reference or (2) Bullshit.

I call the last item (unsubstantiated claims that cannot easily be verified by a general reference) bullshit because without the back-up included in the other case, the reader has no grounds to believe what is written.

Try reading, say, a religious text with this frame of reference. It’s rather illuminating.

Fixing a mysterious iPod headphone buzz

I have a couple of pairs of iPod headphones. One of them is a set of lanyard headphones for the nano, which I absolutely love. It keeps me almost entirely cord-free. They’re great for listening to podcasts while walking around town, listening to music at work, or whatever.

Today, I found them to be affected by what I call the iPod headphone buzz. It occurs occasionally, typically in only one ear, and only with certain tracks. I thought it was an indication of degradation of the headphones. That would suck, because they’re not cheap to replace. Out of curiosity, I took the black cover off of the right earbud (the one giving me trouble today) and I found some very small red fibers of some kind stuck in the metal mesh. I pulled them out, and the buzz was gone.

Next time I hear it in my non-lanyard set of headphones, I’m going to check them out similarly. Am I the only one who’s had this problem?