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Readings: Pain, Woods+, Jeter’s 3,000th Hit

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A few reads from today:

(1) “Thinking Away the Pain” [Wall Street Journal] – author Jonah Lehrer probes this question: can meditation and other alternative methods (including cognitive behavioral therapy, biofeedback, and hypnosis) help with relieving pain?

Pain is a huge medical problem. According to a new report from the Institute of Medicine, chronic pain costs the U.S. more than $600 billion every year in medical bills and lost productivity. Back pain alone consumes nearly $90 billion in health-care expenses, roughly equivalent to what’s spent on cancer.

Despite the increasing prevalence of chronic pain—nearly one in three Americans suffers from it—medical progress has been slow and halting. This is an epidemic we don’t know how to treat. 

(2) “Woods+” [Ftrain] – What is Google+, exactly? This is a hilarious take from Paul Ford. My favourite part is the allusion to the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.”

I know it’s confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That’s the circles. But it’s easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole. And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats. One of the things that can happen, according to the press, is that you can, if you are very lucky, talk with one of the founders of Google, because he’s hanging out using the service too. And you can ask him about user experience, and show him your cat.

(3) “Was Giving Jeter’s 3,000th Hit Back a Dumb Move?” [The Atlantic] – over the weekend, Derek Jeter joined an elite group of baseball players to have accumulated 3,000 or more hits in their MLB career. His 3,000th hit was a home run. The big story revolved around 23-year-old Christian Lopez, who caught the HR and then returned the ball to Derek Jeter. So what’s the issue? If Lopez decided to auction off the ball:

So how much money might the ball have fetched? According to one Bloomberg report, it almost certainly could have been sold for somewhere between $75,000 and $250,000 at auction…

But I think Lopez did the honourable thing here. In return, he received luxury box seats at Yankee Stadium, valued at $40,000+. However, the point of highlighting the article is for this fact, which you learn about in Economics 101:

Criticizing Lopez’s decision as crazy misses the maxim that “money isn’t everything.” But more importantly, it ignores an important aspect of basic economics that supports that maxim: utility theory. It teaches that money isn’t a person’s ultimate goal. Instead, they seek to maximize their personal utility. Think of utility as happiness: while money certainly plays a role in happiness for many people, it isn’t all that matters.

So, to an economist (and to someone like me), Lopez giving the ball back was a completely rational thing to do. It was the right thing to do.

Readings: Antidepressants, Wal-Mart, Google Plus

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A few reads from today:

(1) “In Defense of Antidepressants” [New York Times] – a solid opinion piece by Peter D. Kramer, coming to the defense of antidepressants. This piece appears reactionary against Marcia Angell’s “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Part I) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry”(Part 2) featured in The New York Review of Books (which I called one of the best long reads of the first half of 2011). It is always good to hear the other side of the argument.

Could this be true? Could drugs that are ingested by one in 10 Americans each year, drugs that have changed the way that mental illness is treated, really be a hoax, a mistake or a concept gone wrong?

This supposition is worrisome. Antidepressants work — ordinarily well, on a par with other medications doctors prescribe. Yes, certain researchers have questioned their efficacy in particular areas — sometimes, I believe, on the basis of shaky data. And yet, the notion that they aren’t effective in general is influencing treatment.

(2) “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird” [Wall Street Journal] – what happens in Wal-Mart stays in Wal-Mart…Unless you get written up in the WSJ:

Maybe a man dressed in a cow suit, crawling on all fours, will steal 26 gallons of milk from a Wal-Mart and hand them out Robin Hood-style to patrons in a parking lot, as allegedly occurred in Stafford, Va. in April.

Perhaps a glazed-eyed 20-year-old will take a truck filled with 338 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from a Wal-Mart before police find him drowsy and in possession of a bag of marijuana, as authorities say took place in Ocala, Fla., in March.

Or perchance a rapper named Mr. Ghetto will shoot an unauthorized, sexually suggestive music video paean to picking up women in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, full of ladies shaking their hindquarters in ways hindquarters typically don’t shake, as happened in New Orleans in May.

Hilarious.

(3) “Like it or Not” [Rethrick] – former developer of Google Wave and Google Plus speaks out about the innovation (or lack thereof) of the new sharing/social media service, Google+:

It might surprise you to learn that I don’t find Google+ all that innovative. It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure–but I don’t find it all that interesting, personally. To my mind, Twitter was a far greater innovation that continues unchallenged. But broad product innovation is not exactly what they were going for, I believe.