2023 is over and I am looking back at my achievements and failures, to take stock and try to learn something from the matter. This blog looks like a reasonably good place for such an exercise, so I am writing here an inventory of what happened to me in the past 12 months. Sorry if this sounds very boring!

Everyone wants an easy solution to being more fit but the only thing easy is eating too much pizza. Since 2022 we've been treated to far too many pictures of celebrities with weird "Ozempic Face" because their vanity is stronger than their desire for energy balance.

You don't need a gimmick, you do need a little willpower. Commercial gyms love this time of year because everyone joins to honor their New Year's Resolution, they even pay stupid initiation fees, and then most are done a month later.

An easy way to save money on a gym membership, in order of difficulty:

One concern about the Affordable Care Act was that in providing access to 700,000 people that companies refused to insure, access would decline along with the surges in cost for everyone. That has turned out to be true in both cases. 

Some states have also 'bundled' behavioral and physical health care, and that hasn't improved access or care for people with mental health issues. It isn't worse, that is the good news, but for the 400 percent increase in cost it isn't better - and demand became higher due to heightened anxiety and depression rates during and post the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though every medical school and residency program has sexual harassment training and methods for reporting, over half of medical interns surveyed from June 2016 to June 2017 data in the Intern Health Study say they have experienced sexual harassment.

Self-reported demographic characteristics and survey were from June 2016 to June 2017 data in the Intern Health Study, an ongoing National Institutes of Health–funded repeated cohort study of postgraduate year 1 residents (interns) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

In some homes, it is believed that static electricity can lead to inferior grinding, and that has coffee connoisseurs searching for answers.

Will water help, or is it just making a mess because while a little may help, people will use too much? 

Coffee is prone to fads the way athletics - nasal strips, cryo-therapy, those weird blue-light filter glasses - and certainly nutrition is. A study may create a correlation and people sell a produce. Giving coffee acupuncture before tamping in espresso was all the rage starting in 2020 and for the last year some have sworn by adding water to reduce static electricity.

No one likes to talk to elder family members about money, it can come across as greedy, but a sign of cognitive impairment that isn't obvious, like drastic memory loss, is 'wealth shock' - a sudden loss of savings.

Wealth shock does not cause dementia or Alzheimer's, sorry IARC epidemiologists, it does not cause cancer either, but it is a symptom of a decline. 

Jobs. Gates. Berners-Lee. They opened our worlds to wonders: Graphical user interfaces, PCs, the World Wide Web. They were my heroes, and probably yours, deservedly so.

The Universe is very large, and we are very small compared to it, not only in size. Creating a cosmology that attempts to explain the whole existing Universe is an obsession shared by all cultures. We think we now have the true cosmological model, like many civilizations that have come before us. There are, however, reasonable grounds for thinking that the total truth about the origin and evolution of the Universe is beyond our reach.

Once per year, America goes through cultural spasms over international standardized tests. One group says only more money for government union employees will fix it while another claims young people are just dumber today while another claims that only dismantling education will restore America to its former glory.

They all claim they are being critical because they care; "it's for the children."

It really isn't, it is just politics.

Sorry Boomers, you didn't lead the world in standardized tests. Neither did you, Gen X. Standardized tests were not your thing either, Millennials.

The federal government now mandates and subsidizes electric cars. Like with similar solar panels, ethanol, and compact fluorescent light bulb schemes, science shows it isn't helping anything except the companies getting taxpayer money.

With government providing corporate welfare, companies can cut lower-profit lines, including of electric cars, and focus on the fattest margins. Government funding is so lucrative that Buick dealerships are...plummeting?

Yes they are, they have declined 47 percent this year. The reason is because General Motors is buying out anyone who does not want to 'play ball' and invest heavily, about $400,000 of their own money, in electric car service and support.