Ancient Empiricism vs. Modern Evidence

Rationalism and Empiricism in Modern Medicine

About ten years ago, after fellowships and clinical experience in a community setting, I had my first experience as a ward attending in a university hospital. We were working with cardiac patients, and I was struck by the common treatment each patient received. No matter what the symptoms, patients received an exercise treadmill, an echocardiogram, and were put on a calcium channel blocker. Thi...

On Greek, Ancient and Modern (but Rather Ancient than Modern)

In this paper a few applications of the current implementation of R are given. These applications concern typesetting problems that cannot be solved by TEX (consequently, by no other typesetting system known to the authors). They cover a wide range, going from calligraphic script fonts (Adobe Poetica), to plain Dutch/Portuguese/Turkish typesetting, to vowelized Arabic, fully diacriticized schol...

Agricultural origins: the evidence of modern and ancient DNA

The appearance of agriculture is one of the most striking features of Holocene human history, a feature that has long been studied in an interdisciplinary fashion, bringing archaeology together with plant and animal genetics. This paper reviews new developments in that study, consequent upon recent advances in DNA science. Among these advances is the possibility of complementing modern DNA data...

Ancient and modern rangefinders

OAKOC is an Army acronym used for planning operations: it stands for Observation and fields of fire, Avenues of approach, Key and decisive terrain, Obstacles, and Cover and concealment. The first point is therefore the Observation and fields of fire. It means that it is necessary to answer the following questions [1]: What can you see throughout your area? What fields of fire will you have in t...

Ancient teachings, modern lessons.