Mathematics meets real life (opens in new tab)

Focused ultrasound could have been used to do cardiac ablation as well, though it's probably still in experimental stage. It's also noninvasive.

In general, focused ultrasound is the cure to a lot of ailments but is criminally underfunded at the moment. It's a potential immortality device.

Good heavens, I shall be watching this blog for the next few days to see how it goes.

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-gra...

this is class stuff. I shall try the airport shoelace tying problem out on my motley crews next week.

As for the right dosage of Warfarin, there are genetic tests that allow to make a better initial guess at least in some cases. Genetics itself involve a lot of math, and there's also economic aspects (healthcare costs) on top of that. I hope to see more and more mathematicians and programmers participating in healthcare.

The author is a mathematician, and thus used to thinking about percentages and numbers.

Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice book, Reckoning with Risk (or Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You in the US), in which he calls for people to stop using percentages and to use natural numbers numbers instead.

When you say that someone's risk has increased by 33% they usually have no idea what that means, but they think it's scary. But if the risk used to be 0.001% then a 33% increase isn't much to worry about.

The book has many examples from real world medicine of people having great disruption caused because they took medical treatment based on a faulty understanding of the numbers. It wasn't just lay people making the mistakes either; many doctors and consultants were getting the numbers wrong.

Hope it goes well. I don't think Romney winning or losing is as dire as dying, which you very likely will not do, Tim. :) Good luck.