The “Shrink” episode of Radiolab was fascinating: we thought viruses were all small, but that was a consequence of the method we used to first discover them. But now we know better, and there are some giant viruses out there, some even bigger than bacteria and large enough to get their own viruses.

From Bloomberg, an interactive infographic that looks at interprofessional marriage from the 2014 US Census.

Female doctors, whether gay or straight, tend to marry other doctors.

Straight male doctors also marry doctors, but they’re almost as likely to marry nurses or schoolteachers. According to the census data, gay male doctors most commonly marry nurses.

From section 57.10 of the updated service terms for Amazon’s popular AWS service (emphasis mine):

Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

From Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Doomsday Invention” in The New Yorker, a profile of philosopher of Nick Bostrom and discussion of the (highly dangerous) future of artificial intelligence:

He stopped and looked ahead. “What I want to avoid is to think from our parochial 2015 view—from my own limited life experience, my own limited brain—and super-confidentially postulate what is the best form for civilization a billion years from now, when you could have brains the size of planets and billion-year life spans. It seems unlikely that we will figure out some detailed blueprint for utopia. What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens—pros and cons—and they had listed, on the pro side, ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’? Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there is more to the human condition than that.”

Long, but well worth the read.

I sporadically post “best books” recommendations for medical topics, which if you’re reading this you’ve likely also noticed sometimes cover topics that I’m not in expert in and discuss books I haven’t actually read. This is my general methodology, for those curious:

• For specialties and niches, I typically get a first-round of book recommendations from people I trust in the specialty in question.
• I simultaneously scour the Internet for all relevant recs including reading through every thread I can find on various forums as well as the remainder the Internet.
• I then search through Amazon to find additional potential books and read all of the reviews for literally everything.
• I then read through at least a sample of each book on Amazon to get a feel for the organization, quality, depth, style, and other such factors. This also helps me corroborate other people’s opinions that I’ve been exposed to. You might be surprised how good that quick gestalt can be (I highly recommend it before you buy anything).

The potential downside to this method is that I am not necessarily a subject matter expert on every topic or every book that I recommend. I also definitely have not read each (or sometimes any) book cover to cover.

The positive side is that I’m not just one guy telling you my personal opinion about what I personally like; I’m instead building a cohesive viewpoint based on a foundation of broader public opinion, somewhat similar to the old-school Wirecutter or US News cars reviews. I’d like to think it’s refreshing to see a reasonable grouping of book recommendations that can be attributed to a single person. I am not an expert in or even a trainee in every field, but I know from the continued popularity of my medical school posts and initial forays that people find these types of recommendations helpful and a one-stop shop anxiolytic.

I could call the series “good books that will likely serve you well,” but that doesn’t have much of a ring to it. These “best books” of course aren’t necessarily really the best books. Or sometimes they are, but they still might not be the best books for you. Nonetheless, the goal of these posts is to provide you with a simple straightforward reasonable selection of books that you can read or “read” without remorse.