peter martin

n-a-s-a:

M74: The Perfect Spiral

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA)- ESA / Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: R. Chandar (Univ. Toledo) and J. Miller (Univ. Michigan)

vimeo:

Today is a big day - one of the biggest in the short-ish history of our small-ish company. For the past year (37 years in Internet time), we’ve been working nonstop on a project that we’ve desperately wanted to tell you about. Because, frankly, it’s all about you. Our willpower muscles are pretty much at the breaking point right now, and so we are doubly ecstatic to finally let the tiger out of the satchel and make this officially official announcement: We built you a new Vimeo.

To learn more about these new big things in more detail, head over to vimeo.com/new. It’s also the place where members can sign up to try the new Vimeo as we roll it out over the next few weeks. Go ahead - you know you want to check it out!

New Vimeo layout looks pretty amazing. Given how much I love the “old” Vimeo and how many innovative sketches and mockups I’ve seen from Sox over the years, I’m looking forward to my invite.

curiositycounts:

Christoph Niemann charts the elements of happiness and creativity at work.

jayparkinsonmd:

Here’s a snippet from a wonderfully written piece, called How Doctors Die. Please read all of it.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

The first photo is how many people die nowadays— in a hospital surrounded by nurses and doctors and beeping machines. The second is a self-portrait I took the day my grandmother died peacefully in her own home in July 2009. It’s really up to you to choose.