Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

What’s Up in Early November

Some happenings:

Getting heart surgery next week! Psyched to do it, frankly. Will feel better afterwards. If you’d like to help with medical expenses and lost income, buying a book as a gift (for yourself or another) would be an amazing thing. I’ll be shipping books through Nov. 12 before there’s a gap. Update, Dec. 17: It went great and I’m well into returning to normal!
I updated a host of ebooks for Take Control Books, where I’m also executive editor. We introduced a discount program, Take Control Premium, where, for $14.99, you get 50% off any book you buy over the next 365 days—including updates from previous editions. I believe I currently have 14 active books, and a few of those have additional updates coming in the next week!
My client Ben Zotto’s amazing book on the history of Sphere Computers

Immortal Rats Making Phone Calls

You've probably heard about the new study that provides a shocking link between exposure to mobile-phone signals and radiation!!!!! RIGHT?!?!?

It's not shocking. It's a pre-publication, not-yet-passed-peer-review release of incomplete data. The more correct headline on the coverage would have been, "Exposure to radiation leads to longer lives among male rats." You can read the study yourself; particularly focus on the first few pages and the reviewers' comments attached at the end. This hasn't been replicated, and many people are already challenging the statistical validity of cherrypicked data that the researchers chose to focus on in the study and in interviews.

The control group of 180 rats in the study died much younger than the six groups of 180 rats exposed to varying degrees of signal strength (at far higher levels, for longer periods, than almost anyone experiences using a phone). Female rats in the study (50% of all the

Medical

The Soylents of the Lambs

Durable, long-lived, dehydrated full-meal replacement products have a significant place in the future of human life on this planet as war and global climate change produce huge migrations and displacements. The problem of potable water is hard enough, and will become more challenging as wet regions dry out or become arid for parts of a year. But it's possible to sanitize water for drinking and convert sea water to fresh. It's a technological challenge, but it's not physically impossible, and some parts of it have been solved.

Getting sufficient quantities of food to the right places on the globe at the right time that is pest-resistant, stable, nutritious, and not foul is vastly harder. While there are many variants in the world today, most relief projects and ongoing aid to refugee camps involves food components, like beans, often requiring some preparation, and which may be deficient for a minimal healthy

Medical

Making Lemonade out of #cancerlemons: Bid on a Drawing

Update! The auction is over. One fine person bid $150, and Matt Bors offered to donate the artwork. That $150 is now in Sloane-Kettering's hands, and I matched that with $150 of my own money.

You can still and always donate in many places to help fund cancer research. I'm donating to Sloan-Kettering right now through Lisa Adams fundraising page as a mark of respect to her.

Original post:

This last week, Emma and Bill Keller separately wrote horrible Op-Ed essays in the Guardian and New York Times, respectively, shaming cancer patient Lisa Adams about her openness in documenting her progress and about her medical decisions. The pieces were also riddled with factual errors, and the Guardian has retracted Emma Keller's article. I'm not even going to link to them.

To make delicious cancer-research fund lemonade out of these two lemons, I have purchased the original artwork from Matt Bors

Buddies

2013 in Review

Last year, inspired by Joe Kissell, I wrote a summary of the enormity of what 2012 had encompassed. It was freaking huge. Joe enumerated for years all the words, books, articles, and such like he worked on. This year, I'm inspired again by Joe: he decided to stop the extensive documentation of his year, having felt he'd proven his productivity. I'm somewhere in between: less documentation than last year, but still quite a bit to share.

In June, I bought The Magazine from Marco Arment. It's been one of the greatest things I've worked on in my life, and it's a constant joy of collaboration with contributors both before and after the purchase. We just put out Issue #33 — we produced 26 issues during 2013, and now have some subscribers who are paid up though the end of 2015. We'd better deliver.

I launched the weekly podcast The New Disruptors

Medical

The Parlous State of American Health Insurance

Yesterday, I received the bill for my heart intervention, hospital stay, and the imaging (echocardiograms and the like) that was done before the heart work.

The raw "retail" amount was $100,000. But all my providers are in the preferred network. They agree to accept about $35,000 from my insurer. My current insurance plan has a roughly $2,000 deductible each year, and then pays 75% for anything above that. I pay the remaining 25% up to an additional amount of $6,000 per year. The most I should be out of pocket in any given year is $2,000 (deductible) plus $6,000 (co-insurance payment) or $8,000 total. (That excludes the physician's fees. I was in the catheter lab for 90 minutes for the angiogram and stenting. I was in a standard, private hospital room for less than two days, and needed no special gear or care.

Medical

An Insurer's "Cheap" Pharmacy Partner? Ha

Years ago, my insurance company offered a small prescription drug benefit on the plan we had as a family — $250 per year with lots of provisos about brand names and such and no co-pays. Over time, the plans changed and even the modest benefit disappeared. However, the insurer partnered with a mail-order pharmacy that, originally, offered significant discounts by using them for 90-day supplies of recurring drugs, and had negotiated deals with retail pharmacies to reduce cost for ones you had to get on the spot.

I knew the discounts weren't great, but some drugs I needed were brand name (Lipitor) and others were very cheap. I didn't price check that often, but I thought I was paying reasonable prices. Lipitor went off-patent, and the generic was much cheaper. I turned to Canada for one drug before it also went off-patent. But then I hit the wall when I had

Medical

Radiation Induced Heart Disease: Get Screened

Just a few days out from getting a heart stent, I've been wondering why I, as a 45-year-old Caucasian Jew with no real history of heart disease in my family, had a blocked artery. My cholesterol has been an issue, but not so much as to cause this I firmly believe. I don't want to displace blame, but I am rather an unlikely victim on the whole, even though statistics suck when you're on the wrong side of them. A tiny bit of research finds that there's a more likely elevated risk factor that the cholesterol may have played into: radiation induced heart disease (RIHD).

Because there is now a large cohort of people who received radiation near the heart for previously harder-to-cure diseases and have survived for decades beyond that treatment, a previous suspicion now appears to be moving towards statistical confirmation. Radiation treatment, like the kind I received

Medical

A Heart to Heart

On Friday, I unexpectedly had a stent put into my heart. That wasn't the plan when I went to the diagnostic imaging office that morning.

I'm doing fantastically well and have a really superb prognosis. I feel better the last few days than I have for months and, in some ways, for years. This problem was building for a while, but I was asymptomatic until very recently, and I thought a gradual loss of energy and some other minor problems were a sign of age.

Nope: my heart. Or, rather, one of the arteries. I feel like I'm 30 years old again, and had been feeling closer to 50 or more recently, so that's a great improvement and likely to last.

I put on 20 pounds a few years ago, and couldn't get it off. I lost 10 pounds between Friday and Monday, even after they filled me full of