2100: What Does the Future of Healthcare Look Like?

2100: What Does the Future of Healthcare Look Like?, (no editor information available) (2019?)

Update to entry pending

Normally, I start off these entries saying like "not a review, just some notes to help me remember what I read". In this case, I'm not sure I wish to remember. I'm deliberately leaving out names, so anything negative I have to say won't get associated with them in any web searches. Also, the book contains no copyright information other than the authors retain the rights to their own stories which have not been published elsewhere. I'm assuming this book is from 2019, but there is no way to know.

Update: I just discovered that all of these stories are available to be read online from the foundation that hosted the contest. I guess a link would be helpful.

I was recently at a book reading/book launch party for an anthology that I wanted to participate in. (Maybe I'll write about this some day.) There was a raffle, and I won two books. This was one of them. I figured that it was a skinny collections of short fiction (flash fiction, really) and I could squeeze it in by the end of the year.

It didn't look too promising, to be honest, as it turned out to be a compilation of stories that were the winners of a competition about health care in the future. I didn't recognize any of the names of the authors, and glancing through the full-page bios padding the end of the book didn't help any.

A few stories in, and I couldn't help but wonder if the stories were chosen because of the messages they contained, and not because they were written particularly well. (They are not.) If this was the best of the competition, then there was just about literally no competition.

The theme of the book is "What will healthcare look like in the year 2100"? But it reads like, imagine the worse problems of today (again "imagine" if you want), and multiply them -- not exponentiate them 80 years into the future. But leave everything as it is -- or again, as you imagine it is -- today.

The lead-off story began in the recovery room after a baby had been delivered and taken to the nursery, and we find that the mother is married to another woman and that 90 years from now, this is still a problem with both sets of parents. Okay, let's get to the health care now. The entire plot revolves around an AI doctor's assistant and a bed-ridden doctor (who just gave birth) telling the other a bunch of things that the other already knows. Then there's a sudden complication out of nowhere, and we hear how healthcare still sucks 80 years from now. About the only thing interesting in the story is that the baby, Ava, tests positive for the Sickle Cell gene, which the black mother knew she carried, but was unaware that the Hispanic mother also carried.

Stop and think about that for a second. The baby inherited a gene from both mothers. Okay, now this is science fiction. That is your starting point -- THAT IS YOUR STORY. How did they edit those genes together? How did they overlook this? How can they fix the baby?

Nope. Instead we get that black mothers are still (in 2100) three times as likely to die in childbirth, even though they are not a minority any more. (And you know something? There's a better story in that sentence than the one we got.) But I'm not going to critique the story I didn't get. This one, however, is terrible.

Follow this with a story that takes place in a climate change dystopia with a main character who is one of the lucky ones, one of the survivors, and who owns firewood made from the last of the redwoods. (The goal is to replant them.) He's also 100 years old, lived through the Health Care Riots, and cured many horrible illnesses, which, once again, insurance companies never pay for.

This is another story which is two characters drinking brandy and talking to each, explaining the previous century. Worse -- do not read if you are tired -- the author switching between first and last names of the two characters so often that a couple of times I forgot which was which. They both sounded the same, after all.

...more to come ... or maybe not ...

A Dozen "Dozen" Game Books

A Dozen Dozen Game Books, Philip J. Reed (2019)

Entry pending

I spent a lot of time reading gaming material in the latter part of the year. Altogether, those pages could comprise a book the size of many others I'd read this past year. And they were better written than some of the things I subjected myself to (particularly things I didn't bother to list on the blog).

The title of this post doesn't mean that I read 144 books. It means that I read many of the books in the A Dozen Adjective Nouns series by Philip J. Reed (@philipjreed on Twitter). There will eventually be more than a dozen of these, and many are already available for preview by the backers of two separate Kickstarter campaigns. (And I'm one of them.)

Here are some of the coming PDF files:

On top of this, there was an additional Kickstarter for Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2, which had issues #1 as an add-on. These were each 48 pages of well-thought-out source material.

I thought all of this merited an entry before the end of the year. The question, in my mind, is how to count them. Definitely as one. Maybe even two -- one for Delayed, and one for the Dozens.

Below is a list of the supplements I've read already read, mostly presented here so I'll know what to put next year:

Delayed Blast Gamester, issue 1 (48 pages) Delayed Blast Gamester, issue 2 (48 pages) The Book of Unusual Potions (64 pages) A Dozen Ancient Dragons (14 pages) A Dozen Arcane Spell Components A Dozen Sinister Rumors A Dozen Dreadful Rumors more to come ...

Classics Illustrated: Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare)

Classics Illustrated: Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare (Author), (Illustrator)

[image pending]

I don't know where I got this graphic novel from -- probably from the library. It's been in the basement for a while. I didn't read illustrated classics as a kid because they seemed to dense. I picked up a few when I started teaching (they were in the class library), but those seemed very thin. If you didn't already know the story, you might not know what was going on. Then again, if you did know the story, you'd see how much was left out.

So... Romeo & Juliet. I've watched the Franco Zeffirelli film from 1968 with Olivia Hussey and ... other people that I could google. And I've seen the modernized version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, which kept the dialogue but modernized everything else. I prefer the former. There are also a billion adaptations -- skip those.

What I didn't know about this comic -- even though it's on the front cover in the lower corner, and explained on the back -- is that this was a "Quick Text" version, which leaves a bit out. There is a "Classic Text" version, which I may or may not have liked (even if that's want I might have wanted), and a Plain Text version of the same comic (which I probably would have enjoyed the most).

The downside of this is that most of the Shakespearean language is discarded, and when it is included, it sticks out oddly.

Another problem of the Quick Text is the artwork. The art was created and framed to allow for large word balloons. Without them, there are many tall panels with people's heads and shoulders at the bottom of the frame and a lot of empty space above them. It looks weird, and you wonder what the artists (and the editors) were thinking.

As for the story, you know it. Not much to say, except that the review of the material helped when I covered a drama class and they had to do a reading of the sword fight between Mercutio, Tybalt and Romeo. At least I knew enough what was going on (and who was who) to explain to the students.

TL/DR: go for the Plain Text or the Classic Text. Skip the Quick Text. Or just read the play.

Mathematical Recreations (Kraitchik)

Mathematical Recreations , Richard H. Minear (Author), Maurice Kraitchik (1944)

[Image pending == its just a green cover with a geometric pattern]

I have too many old math books in my basement. Years ago, I made a practice of attempting to read one math book each summer, and to see how far I got before I gave up. Reasons for giving up: the math moved beyond me, or the notation became tiresome to figure out.

There are times when I might prefer a sentence to a nifty equation. Consider the difference between four or five lines of programming, and a single line of "clever code" that can accomplish the entire thing. Or even a paragraph explaining just what is going on.

Sometimes I feel I'm not the audience for these books, which is usually a 1940s grad student or above, or a 21st-century math professor (and above).

This book has been in my possession for at least a decade, and was taken from a pile of discards in the William E. Grady Technical-Vocational High School teacher center, which was formerly the Math Dept office. The book had been removed from circulation from the school library years earlier.

The title Recreations caught my attention, because I thought it might be more fun and games and puzzles. Not exactly, but still interesting. The problem with math puzzles is that once you work one out, they lose a little of the magic. And repetition of similar problems start to feel like homework. On the other extreme, problems that are impossible to figure out (or just behind your capability) are too frustrating.

That said, there was some interesting "stuff" in the books, including an old sheet of paper containing a list of scholastic websites on one side (they're probably all dead links by this point), and calculations on the back, mostly related to Pythagorean Theorem. I had several posts about those over a decade ago.

When I picked up this book at the beginning of the month, I thought I could possible knock off a chapter every day or two, and then write about it on my math blog. Rather than link all the individual posts, here is the link to the "Books" tag.

https://mrburkemath.blogspot.com/search/label/books
All the posts relating to this book are in December 2019. There will possibly be a wrap-up post in 2020, but I don't have time to think about it and write it now. Other projects are coming up with deadlines.

This book will probably be left on a table at the next Heliosphere science fiction convention in NY in April. Hopefully, there will be another math book there to join it. I hope to tackle another one (also with a page of notes as a bookmark) after I finish a couple other things.