walls's blog
The modern writer can put his characters in modern surroundings, but the story is always some variation on a Greek myth or a Shakespearean play. Betrayal, love, sacrifice, hatred, deceit - mothers, brothers, lovers, others. How can a writer not recapitulate what he has read or heard or seen adapted into a Gilligan's Island episode? What character is not a Frankenstein of archetype slices?
Supposedly a scientist, it is hard to keep up with evidence based life, let alone evidence based medicine.
I know I have been blogging on modeling and simulation and cultural evolution pretty much exclusively. But with such a lot of interesting experiences lately I thought I might just annotate them in the hope that the process of doing so might cause the emergence of some better idea. So, a personal digression.
There has been no convincing argument that war either is or is not intrinsic to humankind.
Homegrown Islamist suicidal violence in Western Europe has yet to be revealed as either generally auto-toxic or as a successful infection strategy. Clearly, detonating yourself is auto-toxic to the individual host, but it may be worth significant net gain in ideosphere share for Islam as a whole as it attempts to re-establish and extend the Caliphate.
Could something like the Turbi Village massacre have been predicted by modeling and simulation techniques? This massacre may present a real research opportunity due to some special features of this conflict on the Ethiopian/Kenyan border.
Na na na-na na!
As much as we joke about the best department at Hopkins being the Public Relations Department, this continues to be a pretty cool annual event. You will however notice that emergency departments aren't even part of the ranking methodology. Likely they didn't want to hopelessly skew the data. Leaving out the housekeeping and food service departments is also a big boost for Hopkins.
The modeling and simulation of human conflict is fascinating, and it would seem that emergency medicine and public health would be perfect backgrounds for scientifically examining war and violence.
The recent comet shooting mission of Deep Impact crashing into Tempel 1 has garnered a lot of popular interest. I suspect in no small part because it evokes the image of meteorites and comets bringing cataclysm down on Homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps this mission makes us feel hopeful of interceding in such a debacle (a la Bruce Willis)? I have no idea whether or not that is a well founded feeling.
Six whole months after my first postings, and I can’t say that I have been deluged with enthusiastic support of my proclamations. Yet I persist!
Perhaps a more practical observation is in order. Not much science in my scienceblog. The practice of emergency medicine (EM) is an art. I hope that our practice is informed by science. Academic emergency physicians in big teaching hospitals have the responsibility to base their teaching practice on best evidence and disseminate the science of EM. Yeah, yeah. But still, statistical probabilities are no more than that. And we just trust that our attendings know best. I am a resident at Johns Hopkins in emergency medicine, but only for 6 more days. I am graduating.
I mean to portray a dynamic and complex systems model in the form of an easily interpreted linear equation. Human war, and war more generally, is clearly a dynamic process, as I hope to assure you.
over delta time X (culture)[approximates] = A (war) x B (reproduction) x C (index of relativity to other know groups) x D (environmental beneficient vs. catastrophic)
Where X is culture (2x2 matrix of religious/secular, butter/guns)
A is (2x2 matrix of impending war/last war; victory/defeat)
B is (2x2 matrix of growth/decay; gay/straight)
