My freshman year of college he came to campus and everyone was crazy excited. Still trying to fit in, I bought one of his books and faked enthusiasm for his talk. After hearing about his dad’s affinity for eating rotten fruit, I had to admit the man was pretty funny. Certainly enough to continue my sheep imitation and stand in the very, very long line to get my brand new, never opened copy of Naked signed.

Forty-five minutes later, Sedaris was asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and what my last name was. As he doodled a creepy pumpkin in my book, he chanted, “Jay-ya-raa-jun. Doc-tor Jaya-ra-jun. Dr. Jayarajan I have a banana stuck up my ass.” Then he shut my book and handed it back to me with, “Yup. I see it. I think you'll make a great doctor.”

I may not have ended up a doctor, but I definitely still have a favorite author.

After a brief love affair with all things Sedaris in my early 20's, I kind of forgot about him. A few weeks ago I caught his interview on The Daily Show and was reminded of his existence.

I have a large stack of New Yorker magazines that I've been meaning to read (Read: probably will never read), and after his interview I looked through all their table of contents till I found an article by Sedaris, “Company Man”.

Not too much had changed. Sure he was older and writing about middle-aged shenanigans, which as he'd probably agree, aren't nearly as thrilling as childhood or early twenties shenanigans. Still, his bemused, nasally voice carried me pleasantly through everything that’s wonderful about being a middle-aged married man with a house that has guest rooms.

Then, in the last few column inches he let’s it drop matter-of-factly that the way Hugh, his partner, speaks of his deceased father in voices “still brittle and reverential, full of loss and longing” reminds him of the way he and his sisters used to talk of his mother now deceased for 22 years. Before he ends his story, he pauses mid-tidying of the guest bedroom his sisters used during their visit and takes a moment to hug the sheets to his chest before he does the laundry. All of this is like a heavy punch to the gut.

I'd forgotten that as much as Sedaris has made me laugh, he’s equally made me cry. I might not have found much in common with him before these short inches, and I haven't yet had to experience the kinds of loss he describes, but I know it’s coming. Probably sooner than I’d like.

So unexpectedly, I found myself sitting next to Sedaris on that bed imagining the sheets I will soon hug and experiencing the flashbacks to childhood and family that he likely remembered in those few moments. Long after he moved on to the finish his chores, I still sat with all the nostalgia.

In the NYT article, “Why Barnes & Noble is Good for Amazon”, David Carr touches on the symbiotic relationship between the last standing mega bookstore and the online behemoth. He proposes that if B&N were to go out of business Amazon would see a drop in sales as the “reduced opportunity to browse the physical artifact [results] in less online buying”.

What if we took it a bit further and just got the two companies hitched?

Let’s skip past the awkwardness of the actual wedding ceremony (Which Big Five publisher would officiate? Who would be on the guest list - indie booksellers and used bookstores, best-selling authors mingled with self-published authors? yeesh. nightmare. gag.)…

Instead imagine a world where you go to a B&N either for a quiet moment in the stacks or in the cafe sipping a coffee while perusing a novel. Maybe you go for a book signing, a book club meeting, or your mom dropped you and siblings off so she can go shopping in peace.

During this time you discover an author or book that’s not on a Top 100 bestseller list, you engage in a heated discussion on whether Game of Thrones is as epic as the Lord of the Rings with some random stranger/future friend in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy aisle, and you run your fingers over the binding of the blank journals on display, testing weights and paper textures before choosing the absolute perfect one to hold your inspiration and creativity.

Then when you're finally ready to checkout you have the option of purchasing the actual book or opting for the ebook version. If you walked or rode your bike and don't feel like carrying your purchase home, you could have them mailed to your home instead.

Really it'd be beautiful. It’d be a relief. You can enjoy the instant gratification and clutter free experience of the eBook without feeling like you're burning down a bookstore every time click “Buy now with 1-click” AND you can still have a physical place to discover books, thumb through pages, and be a part of a community that loves to read as much as you do.

There’s probably a bunch of reasons why this is a terrible idea, but when I think of this fantasy book mecca all I see is a win-win scenario.

Now, this isn’t innovation in the buzz word-y, conference-speak sense. It’s innovation where if you give Gomez-Marquez an ink cartridge, he’ll turn it into a no-prick vaccine delivery machine, or if he picks up a bunch of coffee filters at the grocery store, some of those might become TB drug compliance urine test strips.

Having grown up in Honduras and coming from a family of medical professionals, Gomez-Marquez knows firsthand the limitations health workers face in low-income developing countries. Unlike in developed countries, if an essential part of a medical device breaks, there’s no repair person coming to fix it. In part because of his background, Gomez-Marquez adheres to the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) philosophy and recognizes that health workers in resource-constrained settings around the world are capable doing some of the best DIY work. In order to foster this behavior, he and his team at Little Devices have recently released a product called MediKit, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies.

I had the pleasure of getting an in-depth look at the type of work he does when I attended his micro-lab session at the SwitchPoint conference hosted by IntraHealth in North Carolina. During this short hour and a half workshop, Gomez-Marquez provided us with a list of ingredients: a foot pump, two nebulizers, tubes, a splitter, scissors, and duct tape and told us to create a drug delivery device that would treat not just one, but two patients, suffering from an asthma attack. Before setting us loose, he gave us instructions to not only build the device, but to also create a language for replication.

Of course, once we started playing with the pieces, we completely ignored the second part of the instructions.

It was so exciting to solve the puzzle. We got really into the experience of designing something useful and something that saves lives. But when it came to present our final devices and show off our ingenuity, we quickly realized how important the abandoned second part of the instructions were.

Gomez-Marquez didn’t have each team show off how well their inventions worked. Instead, he asked teams to describe how other teams put the device together. When someone began a description along the lines of “attach one end of the tube to the foot pump”, he’d stop them and ask questions like, “what if your audience doesn’t recognize the word ‘tube’ or ‘foot pump’?”, thereby nudging us closer and closer to the revelation that while we had created these life saving devices using nothing but a $7 foot pump, none of our devices had been designed for easy reproduction.

Gomez-Marquez taught us that it’s not enough to hack the device, but you also need to “hack” the language as well. Device reproduction and design dissemination needs to be able to transcend language, literacy, and cultural barriers. In this case, there was a simple solution — color code the connections between parts with different colored duct tape. So, say you connect the nebulizer to one end of the tube with purple tape and the other end of the tube to the foot pump with red tape, someone who’s outside of the process would look at the device and know to connect purple with purple and red with red. He/she wouldn’t have to know the English words for tube and foot pump.

Really, then, it all comes back to knowledge management. You know how to make a life saving device and you want other people to know how to make a life saving device — use colored duct tape. Easy and simple to understand and adopt. This is knowledge management at its best. This is knowledge management when it works.

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This post was originally published on K4Health.org on May 7, 2013.

What does duct tape have to do with health? was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Normally, I don’t like talking to stylists. We rarely have anything in common and an hour of small talk is exhausting. But this day was was different. I got lucky and was paired with a Hair Designer named Janet Stephens, who it turns out is also a part-time hairdressing archaeologist.

Her story of how she became an authority on ancient roman hairdressing was absolutely fascinating. One day she was in the Walters Art Museum waiting for her daughter’s music lesson to end. The museum curators must’ve been doing some rearranging or cleaning, and had brought the busts from the Roman Empire exhibit down from the high shelves and had exhibited them as standing displays in the center of the room. In this presentation a 360 deg view of the heads was possible, and Janet found herself examining the intricate hairstyles carved into the back of the busts’ heads.

Intrigued by the varied designs, she went home and tried to recreate them on manikins. But she couldn’t quite get them right using modern hair dressing tools. Still she wasn’t discouraged, and continued researching the topic, going as far as connecting with experts in the field of roman archaeology, and translating ancient Latin texts herself. In one text, she translated a line that used the Latin word for “sow” in the context of hair dressing. The academic community had interpreted this word as “to sow” in the figurative sense. However, since she wasn’t researching from the perspective of an academic, she took its meaning in the literal sense and found herself back at the manikin, literally sowing braids of hair into intricate designs using needle and thread. In this method, she was finally able to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles.

It turns out her research was groundbreaking. Before her discoveries not much research had been done on Roman hairstyles and there wasn’t much documentation available. The prevailing thought had been that Roman hairdressers had depended on wigs. Since the ancient art of wig making has been mostly lost to human memory, stylists had been attempting to create these hairstyles using modern tools and never quite getting the right look.

Anyways, she now has a series of Youtube videos that teaches people how to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles, and her findings have been published in a few academic journals, including the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Watch one of her instructional videos below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs9fLwm-9-k]

Hairdresser by day; Archaeologist by night was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every year Fall shows up. Yes it’s a season. It’d be weird if it didn’t. Probably catastrophic even. But every year the season’s arrival also marks the flu season’s arrival. But unlike Fall, who actually has quite a few redeeming qualities like boots, scarves, dresses and leggings, the end of 110 deg temperatures, the Flu sticks around like a bad rash through winter and bumps up against spring.

Knock on wood. I rarely get the flu. I might have a bad cold that convinces everyone that I’m spraying death germs around, but never anything so severe that it can be described as the flu. But what I do get every year is a bad case of the guilt trip. I never line up and get a vaccine shot into my arm. Ever. I just don’t want to.

I think one year a coworker physically dragged me from my desk, marched me down the hall and sat me down in front of a lady with a syringe and I still bitched and moaned and whined during and after until people wanted to kill me. I used to rant and rave about how we might not even be getting vaccinated against the right viruses, or how it doesn’t matter if I get it, everyone else did and so by default I’m safe by herd immunity. I think I’ve even managed to convince other people not to get vaccinated. I’m a really horrible person.

The thing is though, I know better. I went to public health school. I know why flu vaccines matter. I know the math behind predicting epidemics. I even know how to put it on a map with fuzzy colored blobs. There is just no logical, rational reason why I don’t get the vaccine.

I really do hope the rest of the world is more responsible than me. While news outlets were slow to pick up on the flu trend, and the CDC merely set the risk levels at “moderately severe”, Google trends track data on the search inquires related to the flu that predicts the number of doctor visits for flu related symptoms could exceed those during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009.

Individuals most at risk of infection include children under age 5, adults over the age of 65, and pregnant women. If you can’t find any vaccine near you, at the very least be prepared by stocking up on some Tamiflu.

I’m lazy, but I really hope you’re not was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.