Joseph Fosco

I am Joseph Fosco, a Composer and Sound Designer based in Chicago. You can find out more about me at my website josephfosco.com, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for this tumblelog here.

Archive

Jun
2nd

Tue

That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes.

— Atul Gawande in The New Yorker

May
26th

Tue

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process.

— Matthew B. Crawford in the NY Times

May
23rd

Sat

When I tell people that my iPhone isn’t a very good phone—its reception in my apartment is so terrible that I reach for Skype as an alternative—they look at me as if I’m an idiot. Why pay all that money for a phone that doesn’t phone? But the iPhone’s name is a marketing trick; it’s really a mobile computer that I occasionally use to make crappy phone calls.

— How I got addicted to playing games on my iPhone. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine: via Mike Daisey

Apr
3rd

Fri

controlling the scarcity of something that isn’t scarce can’t work

— Joey Baker

Mar
20th

Fri

Undo Send for Gmail is all fine and good, but I want Undo Receive, I want some people to have to take back their stupid messages

— via Peter Rojas on Twitter

Mar
19th

Thu

We need a Coalition for Culture and we need it urgently.