If you go on adventure trips, you should read “Deep Survival”, by Laurence Gonzales. I finished it on my marathon subway rides yesterday. It’s partly a voyeuristic look into how people do or don’t survive when bad things happen. This part is pure storytelling and who doesn’t love a good story? At times, the outdoorsy jargon made it hard for me to follow what exactly was going on, but on the whole I was sucked in, turning pages to see what happened to our poor characters.

The other part is an analysis of why one person survives and another seemingly more equipped, more experienced person succumbs. There is, of course, no hard answer and luck is a huge component, but some common characteristics do emerge. Survivors tend to remain calm, come to terms with their likely mortality, yet continue to strive against it by adapting to their new situations as best as possible. On the other hand, “The Rambo types are the first to go.”

Parts of Deep Survival made me wonder if I should ever go hiking in the woods ever again. His description of seemingly innocent trips gone horribly bad can scare you. But (and the author makes this clear), this is NOT the point. Life is about enjoying beauty and constantly extending your abilities. It’s just critical to understand that nature is not a supervised playground and that there are always real dangers, no matter how simple the excursion. Knowing that fact, being properly outfitted and prepared, and most importantly, being aware of your surroundings and instincts will decrease your risk. And with risk managed properly, the reward-to-risk ratio of immersing yourself in nature easily beats out staying secure in your daily life, which is by no means risk-free either.

So check out Deep Survival if you like a good story and if you want to learn a little more about what gives you the best chances of surviving a bad event.

I did something yesterday that I haven’t done before. I took a ride on the subway from one end all the way to the other end. I took the D train from 205th street in the Bronx to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn, passing through Manhattan on the way. Left at 6:04 AM and arrived at 7:46 AM, just in time to make it to the start of the Brooklyn Half Marathon. It was a beautiful day to run.

I’ve only been running for a few weeks since taking a “long” time off, so I was happy with my 2:00:50 finish.

DailyLit.com is an interesting service that takes classic books and chops them up in to bite-sized pieces that you can read in just a few minutes. It then emails you one piece at a time until you finish the book. You can customize how often you get the emails.

I just finished “The Art of Money Getting”, by P.T. Barnum. It has a lot of practical advice, and predates (by 100 years) a lot of what you see these days in self-help books. There are a lot of gems in here, but this is one of my favorite quotes:

Strict honesty, not only lies at the foundation of all success in life (financially), but in every other respect. Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable. It secures to its possessor a peace and joy which cannot be attained without it–which no amount of money, or houses and lands can purchase.

I can’t wait to figure out what I’m reading next.

Here’s my 2006 Investment Performance update. My individual stock picks broke their 4 year winning streak versus the S&P500 and overall (including my 403b), I lagged the market by a couple percentage points. That makes for a pretty lousy year overall. So, is it time to switch tactics? Give in and stick all my money in an index fund? Some would say yes (or more like “YES, you IDIOT!"). I knew when I started this approach that there would be times where I would underperform, even for long periods of time, meaning 1-2 years. But, on the whole, I would come out ahead. Small cheap companies have always outperformed over the long run. I still believe that and will continue with this approach, at least until 2009, at which point I will have a 5 year track record to analyze. In the meantime, I’m not going to cry too much about a 12.8% gain.

Notes: These are calculated using the XIRR function in OpenOffice. The XIRR function takes a series of cash flows in or out of an account and returns the internal rate of return for that account. It’s the best way to compare portfolio returns when investments or withdrawals are made on an irregular basis. The VFINX column shows how I would have done if I had simply invested all my money into VFINX, a low-cost mutual fund which tracks the S&P 500. This number will not match numbers you see posted for VFINX for a given year because it depends on the timing of my investments. Note that I include the cost of commissions in my performance, but not in VFINX’s.

I posted about this last year, so here’s our updated donation list for 2006. Again, I think they’re all great causes, so I encourage you to check them out.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation - The internet is the most innovative force in our lives and the EFF working to preserve freedom on the net.
• Free Software Foundation - When software is free, it means that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. That allows developers to focus on more and more interesting problems.
• Asha for Education - A secular group bringing education to the most needy in India
• Grameen Foundation - In the news recently because they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, they help the world’s poorest escape poverty through self-sufficiency
• WNYC - To support my NPR Podcast habit.
• Ashoka - Encouraging social entrepreneurs
• Association for India’s Development - Promoting sustainable development in India
• World Education - world education :)

You can look up most charities on the Charity Navigator website to see how efficient and organized they are. The ones above received the highest rating, 4 stars.

I remember telling people at a dinner party that I often entered symptoms into Google to help me diagnose patients. I remember them being apalled.

Turns out that Google is pretty accurate.

Sorry for another post linking to Journal Watch, but they really are doing a great job of reading my mind…

In my talk to the residents about osteoporosis, I mentioned that one of the unanswered questions is how long to treat patients with bisphosphonates. Well, a randomized trial published in JAMA says “5 years”. Bone density in placebo-users decreased minimally and hip fracture risk stayed the same. Vertebral fracture risk increased, but vertebral fractures are much less significant than hip fractures. I’m sure more studies will be done, but it’s reassuring to think that bisphosphonates may not be needed lifelong.

I gave the residents a talk on osteoporosis at noon conference on Friday. Here’s the powerpoint slides that I created, in case they might be useful to anyone. They’re licensed under a Creative Commons license and available in 2 formats - ODP (good) and PPT (bad).

Medical information changes constantly, so hopefully these will be useful until at least the end of 2006. I’ve also uploaded slides from previous talks on Abnormal Liver Function Tests and Adult Immunizations.

• Osteoporosis: ODP View online
• Adult Immunizations: ODP View online
• Abnormal LFT’s: ODP View online

It’s been hard to keep this news from friends and family, but we wanted to be sure. So, without further delay, we are immensely happy to present:

Kidney Bean

vaishnodevi

I was fortunate to take a trip with my in-laws to India last month. I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the pics, but as I look at them now, they don’t quite capture the amount of amazing stuff that we saw. I took about 400 pictures and uploaded 187 here. You’d think 400 pics would adequately capture a trip, but not for a trip to India.

Here are some interesting ones in case you don’t want to wade through 15 pages of pics.

jaipur street traditional jaipur dance mom and dad me at golden temple golden temple golden temple at night jallianwala bagh india pakistan border border ceremony Ethan at Vaishno Devi