philg_rss

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/11/thoughts-on-observing-a-birth/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/?p=5322

My son, Alexander Daniel, was born this morning at 6 am. I attended the birth of my 4-year-old, Greta, but it was a C-section and over before there was any time to think. Also, the docs and nurses strategically place a big white sheet to screen their activities from laypeople.

It was a fairly conventional birth by American standards, with three medical interventions: antibiotics to prevent infection, pitocin to hurry the baby out because the water broke before labor started, and then an epidural to ameliorate the intense pain caused by the pitocin. A midwife presided over an all-female team at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The actual pushing lasted about 30 minutes during which time the room was active with five or six women monitoring for the mother’s blood loss and blood pressure, the baby’s health and position, the baby’s health once out in the world, etc.

I’ve become moderately accustomed to life-or-death situations, but those that arise during helicopter instruction last for just a few seconds, not for 30 minutes. Sitting next to someone whom you love and who is putting herself at this much risk for the benefit of someone whom you’re going to love deepened my feelings in ways that I wouldn’t have expected. Even from a position up by the mom’s head, it is impossible not to notice the flood of blood and tissue that come out with/after the baby and wonder “How can a person survive that kind of loss?”

Generally I’m not a medical worrier. If I have a pain in my side I think it must be from playing LEGO with Greta, not rib cancer. And throughout the pregnancy I hardly gave a thought to the possibility of a baby or mother with problems. But in the last hour or so I was plagued with worries about something going wrong or something being wrong. The sometimes-worried looks on the faces of the professionals didn’t help. Nor did it help when a nurse said “I don’t like the way he’s breathing.” Soon enough, however, the new baby was nursing apparently happily.

In http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/health-care-reform I argue against the idea of spending 18 percent of our GDP on health care. And the idea that the typical American hospital charges more to handle a delivery than does the most deluxe private hospital in England where the royal baby was born (story) is kind of ridiculous. But the staff at Mt. Auburn made me a believer for about an hour. I’m grateful to them.

philg_rss

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/11/new-software-for-my-samsung-note-3-user-interface-still-painful/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/?p=5318

Having switched from an iPhone 4S to a Samsung Note 3, I am amazed almost every day at some of the user interface decisions made by Samsung. (Apple fans: please don’t post comments about how it wasn’t smart to switch; I needed the Note for a work project.) Today I installed an operating system upgrade and was hopeful that some of the most glaring problems had been fixed. Sadly, they hadn’t…

One of the most heavily used parts of the phone is the “Phone” app. This has a “Contacts” tab. If I search for a friend whose last name is “Bailey” I would think that the first result would be the single contact in the phone that has a phone number attached to a person with a last name of “Bailey”. Yet astonishingly the contact with the phone number is not even on the first page. The app, which the owner entered by touching the “Phone” icon (presumably indicating an intent to make a call) shows first three random people that I don’t know at all but perhaps at one time might have replied to an email from them from my Gmail account using a browser. Then I get eight email-only contacts that have the same first and last name as the contact with the phone number. Mr. Bailey is an entrepreneur who wears a hat at a lot of distinct small enterprises and consequently has many distinct email addresses. Google Contacts wasn’t smart enough to merge these when I instructed it to merge whatever it could. But why isn’t the phone smart enough, given a list of contacts with the same name, to show the one with the phone number first?

Another crazy bad interface is from the “Messages” app. It will show a notification of a new text message in red. If I touch the icon, though, it takes me to an unrelated text message conversation with someone who might not have sent me anything for several days, i.e., whatever the last conversation I was in.

The camera is simply unusable if the subjects are humans and moving. It seems that most of the sites that test mobile phone cameras do it with studio scenes. That capability has nothing to do with a mobile phone camera being a practical photographic tool. This seems like something that Google should take over as part of the core Android software. It is too important to leave to the handset manufacturers, particularly if the goal is competing with Apple, whose camera software seems to be the world’s best (Canon, Nikon, and Sony obviously make better cameras, but because they use huge sensors and heavy traditional optics).

I’m thinking the Samsung software for the Note 3 was developed by someone who did not use Google Contacts, did not have many friends, and never used text messaging…