Automatic Weatherman
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 5:27 pm
How do you tell it's about to rain in St. Vincent?
No, it's not not cats meowing, dogs barking, or goats bleating… (Goats bleat, right? I mean, I should know, I hear them enough…)
My automatic rain alert is the sudden, inexplicable loss of my internet connection. We pay lots and lots of money to the local cable company for a 256k broadband cable modem connection. They must use a satellite uplink to connect to the rest of the world, since every time it rains, the internet goes out, just like satellite TV. However, upon calling them the other day after multiple outages to ask their refund policy for lack of providing service, or for lack of providing a certain level of service (i.e. other times when the internet goes at about 0.3k/s), they stated that there were no such things as refunds. This is why I hate monopolies - they can provide poor service in violation of a contract without recourse. Well, the only thing we can do is reduce our plan to a cheaper, lower bandwidth one if the speed they promise isn't guaranteed anyways…
Alright, back to studying Pharm for the 2nd midterm exam tomorrow. Though this author claims it is an urban legend, I am starting to believe in 7±2 (a 1956 theory where the human mind can only remember 7±2 related items… I mean some drugs have more side effects than that, and we have to remember all those plus mechanism of action, kinetics, indications, contraindications, drug interactions, etc… Ugh.)
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that theory works with numbers (it’s hard to repeat back more than 9 numbers after hearing them once…or at least for me…but i also have the whole ‘brain shuts off when confronted with numbers’ issue that also handicaps me with that) but i’m sure not it applies to all ‘related’ items like your exam materials…hopefully for your sake it doesn’t
I don’t know — I really didn’t look into the theory too much, I just heard it in the “related items” version from a US med school MD/professor that came down to lecture on the USMLE a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t think I managed to remember everything, but enough to get a decent score, which means I am one exam closer to not having to stay in St. Vincent’s another term.
(With typical German efficiency of the professors, the exams were graded and results were on-line less than 6 hrs after the exam.)