I’ve found it quite hard to write for the past little while. Normally I find that when I don’t write for a couple of days, I get bent out of shape and it becomes harder to do so. But this has been rather a surprising development because I wrote regularly during the summer in Iran. Since returning, however, I feel uninspired despite being overwhelmed perhaps with thoughts and ideas. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that for whatever reason I am suffering from a bad case of writer’s block. After reading on the subject, I’ve decided to not force it though. It seems that, herbal remedies and all, the only reasonable antidote to this malaise is to let words and ideas find their way back into the mind naturally. While conducting my little investigation I found this interesting letter by Fyodor Dosteovsky to his brother Mikhail, discussing Dosteovsky’s experiences and toils writing. I figure if the gods themselves struggled, then there is hope for the rest of us yet.

One thing is a pity: he (Pissemsky) writes too fast. He writes much too fast, and much too much. A man should have more ambition, more respect for his talent and his craft, and more love for art. When one’s young, ideas come crowding incredibly into one’s head; but one should not capture each and all of them as it flies, and rush to give it forth. One should rather await the synthesis, and think more; wait till the many single details which make up an idea have gathered them-selves into a nucleus, into a large, imposing picture; then, and not till then, should one write them down. The colossal figures, created by the colossal writers, have often grown out of long, stubborn labour…

But I have vowed to myself that, however hard it may go with me, I’ll pull myself together, and in no circumstances will I work to order. Work done to order would oppress and blight me. I want each of my efforts to be incontrovertibly good. Just look at Pushkin and Gogol. Both wrote very little, yet both have deserved national memorials. Gogol now gets a thousand roubles a printed page, while Pushkin had, as you know well, as much as a ducat a line of verse. Both — but particularly Gogol — bought their fame at. the price of years of dire poverty…
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This year I’ve begun to venture into acrylics. I’m still trying to get used to the medium and learning how to manipulate the colors. But, I seriously love it. It’s so much fun to work to paint. This following is a 4″x6″ I completed today. I assure you though I am not a narcissist, I just use the most readily available subject.

[Show as slideshow]

Each river, a sea,
Each bodhi, a buddha had become.

*Image source unknown.

With the hustle and bustle of classes well underway, it’s become hard to find the time (and energy) to breath, let alone sit down and write something without highlighters in the other hand.

I returned from Iran almost a month and a half ago, after spending two months in the country. Of that time I spent about a month in Tehran; and in the rest I traveled southward and eastward from the capital towards Shiraz and Mashhad. Before, during and after my trip I was asked over and over, why now?… why after all this time?… and I didn’t have a good answer for it. I still don’t. But while there is some debate to be had about fate, there was a wheel was set in motion months before the events in Iran that led me to return to the country after all these years.

I went to Iran, and I came back and the only thing I could write was: “Back from Iran. I witnessed devastating courage and found a part of myself, I witnessed ancient beauty and and left a part of myself behind.” and no more. But today there are still so many images drifting in my mind, desperately seeking to be pinned down, written about, made sense of. Thousands of pictures, thousands of journal entries, thousands of news stories later… I am wondering, what do I tell?

Do I tell you about the changes in country I left ten years ago, or do I tell you I about the changes I witnessed while I was there? Do I talk about the antiquity that permeated every alley, or the immense highways the bridged the edges of the metropolis Tehran? Should I speak of my pilgrimages to the silent mausoleums of dead poets, or of my excursions to the loud streets of chanting heroes? What do I say about incongruities, about contradictions? How do I sum up faithless believers? How do I put beauty and ugliness in a sentence?

While in Tehran, I visited an exhibition in the Sa’adabad Palace Museum complex which showcased the travels of Issa and Abdullah Omidvar. The brothers, whose last name incidentally means “hopeful”, were two Iranian explorers who starting in 1954 traveled all over the globe for more than 7 years on motorcycle. When I was leaving Montréal I wrote that I wanted… hoped to see with eyes unclouded. What I saw was this motto of the hopefuls:

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/20738

Diagnosis gone digital
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, October 5th, 2009

Almost every field has adopted digital technology, and medicine is no exception. However, the transformation of health informatics in the past decade has not simply been a change in tools of the trade, but a change in the very way knowledge is acquired and applied.

13th century Anatomical Illustration | Source

As a discipline that brings together health care and information science, health informatics is involved in setting up resources like search engines that doctors can use to retrieve clinical data. These tools can be grouped into two categories – information retrieval systems (IRS) and clinical decision support systems (CDSS).

Pierre Pluye, a physician and associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, investigates these electronic resources. He explained how IRS provide a way to filter the staggering amount of available information down to only the most relevant.

“There are 19 million abstracts on Medline [an online biomedical database]. Physicians do not have time [to read every single one]… because basically you would have to read 24 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep updated,” said Pluye.

CDSS differ from IRS in that they provide patient-specific information. Clinicians can use calculator-type programs that look at a patient’s history to determine their likelihood of contracting diseases or experiencing medical complications.
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