Wrong Body Parts / Sinus Fiction / Possibility Studies

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Wrong, wrong, wrong — The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called “Insurance claims for wrong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors: A retrospective study for 10 years“. Something is a little off even with […]

Counting Things that Could Exist (philosophically)

Professor Tobias Rosefeldt, of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, counts things that could exist – in particular, he specifically does so in a new paper for The Philosophical Quarterly. “Consider a tailor who works for a company that sells business suits as well as hipster suits. She has two business trousers and two business jackets […]