June 10th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, Humor, News, True Stories
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They seem to like medical devices in the high stakes world of spelling championships. Anamika Veeramani, from Cleveland, Ohio, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee this weekend by spelling “stromuhr,” a rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery.
Don’t feel bad — we’d never heard of it before either, and we’re supposed to be experts in this stuff. Education never ends…
Merriam-Webster: Stromuhr
London Science Museum: Ludwig-type stromuhr, London, England, 1920-1940
Press release: National Spelling Bee: A Spawning Ground for Future Physicians and Obscure Diseases
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
October 5th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Humor, True Stories
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Health IT is valuable in many ways and I do believe it will revolutionize how we practice medicine. However, we’ve got a long way to go yet, especially in auto-translating English into other languages. This short exercise in English-Spanish translation (through a computer software program) reminds me of how far off “seamless” health technology really is…
(My mother is fully bilingual in Spanish and English and decided to test the auto-translator service with a sentence from a book. Here is the result:)
ENGLISH: He popped a deep-fried sardine into his mouth and washed it down with a few swallows of beer.
LITERAL TRANSLATION OF SPANISH RESULT: He punctured a sardine fried deep in his mouth, and he laundered it near the bottom along with some swallows (referring to the birds) made of beer.
