Author: David

One of my son’s friends consistently sets the curve in their medical school class. Ellen scored in the 99th percentile on STEP 1. Ellen scored in the 100th percentile on USMLE. (On the United States Medical Licensing Exam scores above 99.5 are rounded up.) Arguably the hardest and most competitive

That the Scarlett Pumpernickel was voted the 31st best cartoon of all time by members of the animation field is no surprise. Every frame is beyond brilliant. Daffy Duck portrays the title character, a swashbuckler replete with bandana. Sylvester the Cat plays the stuttering malefactor. Note the plume on the

Robert was, by his own admission, in trouble. His trigonometry final was eight days out. The exam covered logarithms and conic sections as well. With the ink still wet on my undergraduate math degree, I considered myself something of a F-15 pilot: I can communicate anything to anybody in any

“Res ipsa loquitur” means “the thing speaks for itself.” A Miami woman buys knock off pocketbooks and returns them to a designer store. She keeps the real pocketbooks in her closet. This thing speaks for itself. But I don’t know what it is trying to say. The fake pocketbooks are

In the late 1960s, bus station food impressed us as having more to do with “bus station” than with “food.” Our perception was corroborated across days, states, and bus stops. Rather than suffer the gastronomic indignities of yet another questionable skillet, my buddy and I determined, in the decades before

Stephen Hawking’s publisher is said to have told the astrophysicist not to put any equations in A Brief History of Time. Each mathematical symbol will cost you half your readers. Or as my younger daughter puts it, “nobody likes the math thing.” If e = mc^2-–an engaging relationship between energy,

“Steady as she goes” said Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Indeed it is a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of small minds. To my knowledge, Emerson never had anything to say about a sensible consistency. Of course, Emerson only had four children. And it frequently seems

“Dear Gemente Stein” my letter began. “I would like to participate in your triathlon.” In 1985, I had more discretionary income then sense and thought nothing of traveling to the Netherlands to plunge into 63° water before biking and running over hill and dale. The advert in the athletics magazine

Medieval doctors had a sweet gig. No downside, really. Their powers of prediction were pretty much perfect. “You are desperately ill,” a doctor might say. “Undoubtedly, you will soon die from this mortal disease.” And the doctor was usually right on. Sick people had a pronounced tendency to die. What