Over a century ago, the psychologist William James proposed a thought experiment, and suggested the answer: if the eyes were forced to connect to the auditory centres of the brain, and the ears with the visual centres, we would “hear the lightning and see the thunder” [1]. James’ point was that the perceptual qualities of our sensations — what philosophers term qualia — have their origin in the...

Gregory House, M.D., stated in one of his memorable if misanthropic aphorisms, that patients lie. “I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do” (Moran & Spicer, 2004). This is true. On the other hand, the patient, like the customer, is always right. This is also true. Reconciliation of these aphorisms leads us some way to understanding the art of medicine and the tribulations of pal...

Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for perf...

To the Editor: The recent paper from Myerson et al1 on the “reliability” of formulae for calculation of echocardiographic left ventricular (LV) mass needs to be carefully considered. Quantitative echocardiography presents problems of reproducibility, but less than expected from initial studies performed without 2D guidance. There is evidence that the test-retest “error” of echocardiography is s...