Reading (For Dummies)

Human Interest

Ever notice that, whenever there's a whole lot of really horrible world news going on, the US media feels the need to focus on some rather mundane tragedy, usually involving hospital mix-ups or other strange accidents?

This week the news seems to be carrying lots of news about the little girl with the wrong organs. I won't link to the story, I'm sure you know all about it. All I can say is whoop-tee-doo. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a bad thing that a little girl is dead somewhere, but millions of dollars are being spent to discuss the thing. Guess what? Accidents happen. On the morning that the doc put organs with the wrong blood type in the little girl, a few hundred other people made mistakes that killed a lot more people than that (drunk drivers, robbers, what have you, falling of cliffs, being gored by bison). Why all the focus on the doctor?

On a related rant, why villify hospitals so much? They're there to try and help. Every once in a while they reveal that their workers are human, some synapses fire in the wrong order, and then their professional lives are over. Bummer. I think I'll choose a line of work that keeps me out of harm's way like that.

Well, back to proving that the class of Recognizable tree languagues is equal to the class of statements in Monadic Second Order Logic...