Lessons Learned

Recently about a week back my eyes became red and started watering. I initially thought it to be the regular welder arc, but something seemed peculiar about this in that it occurred in only the right eye. I got my eyes washed at the office Occupational Health Centre but the next day the pain and irritation started increasing, so I went to an ophthalmologist in a reputed hospital who diagnosed that I was having Thygeson Superficial Punctate Keratitis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thygeson's_superficial_punctate_keratopathy, a rare eye disease. He gave me 5 types of of eye drops and told me to report to him 2 days later. I went after two days, by now my pain had subsided due to the local anesthesia he gave me. He checked and told me to get admitted immediately so that he can perform the debridement of the affected epithelium (a sort of surgery). A host of lucky coincidental circumstances prevented me from getting admitted. I spoke to my seniors and they suggested me to get second opinion about the diagnosis and its treatment from other doctors. My parents helped me find a specialist in Matunga. So I went to him and told him the story so far. He checked and told me that I was suffering from Viral Keratitis, a common disease. He gave me an eye drop and an oinment and told me to stop all medicines from the previous doctors. I went to show my eyes today. I am almost cured without any surgery. However I have learnt a couple of lessons from this incident.

1. Always get a second opinion before undergoing any surgery.

2. The reputation of the hospital does not matter; hospitals are becoming more like 5 star hotels and in that somewhere diluting the actual reason for their existence. It does not matter if the hospital has state of the art equipment unless it has qualified doctors.

3. There a a hell lot of difference between root cause analysis in engineering problems  and medical problems. You don't have "Take 2" in case of medical problems.

Hope you also learn from my mistake.

Musings on time scaling

I have a thought. If Big Bang Theory is true as most of us believe or understand and accept as fact, then it has a very interesting consequence. I don't know if anybody has thought this or not; we can do away with our ridiculous methods of tracking time. We can start with t=0 at big bang. I understand time is relative, but for normal purposes we can accept the current definition of the second as defined in SI system. This will do away with time scale based on earth rotation around itself and its revolution around the sun.These scales are not constant and necessitate introduction of leap seconds and years. Also when we move to other planets we can't have earth hours or mars days!!!! We need a common time scale. Also it will do away with the A.D and B.C. In fact it will completely replace the calender. Also the prime source of this frustration is the conversion factor to convert minutes to seconds, or hours to minutes. We can replace it with the beauty and ingenuity of the decimal system. So we have t=0 at big bang. Then we can have a kilosecond,a megasecond ..... Initially this may sound confusing but we ll get used to it. We can use our creativity to create calenders based on this system to schedule our meetings etc. More thought needs to be put into this, but now I have to get ready for work.Also the system of measuring angles need a radical change or maybe relooking (google "gon").

P.S.

1. There is a +/- 0.17 billion years estimate of error in t=0 so we have to arrive at a compromise.

2. Creative views first, critical views second.