The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
At first it's dis-believable and impossible, and you think the person is crazy, but after "troubleshooting" something rational pops up.
I can't tell you how many times this has happened. But it really doesn't help having a product/service that manages (on Windows) an underlining system of Virtual Hosts, dozens of configuration files, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, and a bunch of other software and tools (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper).
Every once in awhile, I'd bump my desk and the computer would shut down, and wouldn't boot until I thumped it. ("Russian components, American components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!")
Completely baffled me until I was upgrading something with a friend, and he found the little guy rattling around.
After a great deal of highly baffling troubleshooting, I finally figured it out. The streaming software sent the music over UDP, where each packet contained a pre-set amount of audio encoded with a lossless codec. Classical compresses better than rock, so it generated smaller UDP packets. The guy had somehow managed to set the MTU of his LAN interface to 1200 bytes, and the software was using IPv6, which doesn't do IP-level fragmentation when the MTU is below 1280 bytes.
When playing classical music, every audio packet was less than 1200 bytes. When playing rock, an occasional packet would not compress well and end up too large, then fail to send. The software would then abort the connection in response to the error.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
You can make money by being the intermediary to find subjects for experiments, e.g. "For a study we are looking for identical twins who cannot see from birth but now one has restored vision where the other does not".
Does something that looks remotely similar exist?
My thinking is that a properly programed medical diagnosis expert system probably could have figured out the issue by the second or third trip to the doctor. Further, my guess is that a nurse who has been properly trained to use such a system would be at least as accurate as your average doctor.
Unfortunately, my next guess is that any such system would be opposed by the medical establishment and quickly sued into non-existence by patients it made mistakes on (even if the rate of such mistakes was significantly below that of normal doctors).
I was recently at a medical/technology conference and the physicians in attendance were all actually in support of moving to using machine learning/AI (selection bias though, that was what the conference was about). They would rather have a machine with a 5% error rate than a human with 20% error rate. They believe that the role of physicians is going to change and become more of a management role as technology catches up.
Granted, once I knew she was on pacemaker, I figured that this has something to do with electrical connectivity. But then again, may be this is consequence of my poor soldering skills and watching too much of House MD.
The Ruby Rogues podcast had Conrad Barski, author of Land of Lisp, a while ago:
http://rubyrogues.com/043-rr-book-club-land-of-list-with-con...
Barski is a medical doctor who gave up medicine to code. He explained how it just didn't fit the medical culture to be interested in thinking deeply about an interesting problem, House MD not withstanding. Medical training is designed to give real time answers to presented problems, and it is, er..., 'highly discouraged' to tell a patient "That's an interesting case you have there. I'm going to go google that tonight and I'll have more information in the morning."
It is frequently referenced.
"Dr, Dr! Every time I drink a cup of coffee, I get a stabbing pain in my right eye..."
(google it if you don't remember)
Exhibits, the same kind of ability to see the whole situation and make a diagnosis
From what I learned during my medical training, this king of issue is not so uncommon, but it is usually diagnosed very easily. Her peacemaker can be disabled using a simple magnet. This is a common test in nearly all protocol to check how the heart is working without the help of the device. Doing this simple test while upside-down would have shown that the paecemaker was effectively working in that position. That should have be enough to ring a bell to most of the cardiologists.
Since in there they say patient has "Nephroptosis, also known as 'Floating Kidney'", which is a listed medical condition, conditions like OP should not be uncommon.