The .Plan

…you can make it anywhere.

Big-city living is a minefield for the germ-conscious. Emily Beck, the inventor of City Mitts, nonslip antibacterial gloves that commuters can wear to grasp subway handholds, has developed a prototype of a product to keep potentially infectious strangers even farther at bay.

The Excuse Me flag is a little yellow banner mounted on a lightweight pole, which is attached to one’s waist so it swings back and forth in front of the wearer during walking. Any other pedestrian who walks too close will be slapped in the face by the pole or the yellow flag, which reads “Excuse Me.”

“It generates a cubic yard of free walking space between you and a sneezer,” Ms Beck, a former New Yorker, said from her home in Delaware. “It makes it so you don’t have to touch anybody or talk to anybody in New York.”
–Allen Salkin, “Germs Never Sleep”, New York Times, November 5, 2006

Garetz FK, Raths ON, Morse RH. The disturbed and the disturbing psychiatric resident. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1976 Apr;33(4):446-50.

Two hundred psychiatric residents who were in training during a 25-year period were retrospectively studied. We found that residents could be meaningfully divided into the four following categories: (1) neither disturbed nor disturbing; (2) disturbed and disturbing; (3) disturbed but not disturbing; and (4) disturbing but not disturbed. There is a need for early recognition of disturbed residents in order to guide them into appropriate treatment, supervision, and career choice. Some very disturbed residents make a satisfactory adjustment to residency and psychiatric practice. Certain disturbing residents are not at all disturbed but are mislabeled as such by faculty. These residents often make outstanding psychiatrists. Personal psychotherapy is an important factor in the eventual outcome of the lives and careers of disturbed residents.

Something I had always suspected but couldn’t prove:

The present study determined the caffeine content in a variety of decaffeinated coffee drinks. In phase 1 of the study, 10 decaffeinated samples were collected from different coffee establishments. In phase 2 of the study, Starbucks® espresso decaffeinated (N = 6) and Starbucks brewed decaffeinated coffee (N = 6) samples were collected from the same outlet to evaluate variability of caffeine content of the same drink. The 10 decaffeinated coffee samples from different outlets contained caffeine in the range of 0–13.9 mg/16-oz serving. The caffeine content for the Starbucks espresso and the Starbucks brewed samples collected from the same outlet were 3.0–15.8 mg/shot and 12.0–13.4 mg/16-oz serving, respectively. Patients vulnerable to caffeine effects should be advised that caffeine may be present in coffees purported to be decaffeinated.
–Rachel McClusker et al, “Caffeine Content of Decaffeinated Coffee”, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, October 2006

Perk #1: not having to dress as though you are smarter than you actually are:

That package is strikingly unprofessorial. “I’m not a fancy guy,” says Murphy, 48, “not your typical academic.” An athlete in his high- school days—he was thinner then—he has, over the years, taken on the look of a former football player, maybe a linebacker, gone slightly to seed. He drives a pickup truck, buys his clothes at Sam’s Club, wears a baseball cap at all hours—a vestige of his years coaching Little League—both outdoors and in. He teaches, speaks at conferences, and has testified before Congress wearing cap, jeans, and sneakers. He has been photographed wearing a tie, but not recently, and there are rumors that the tie was added later, using Photoshop.
–John Easton, “Murphy’s Law”, University of Chicago Magazine, Nov-Dec 2006