From midnight (PDT) tonight through Sunday the sixth, the Kindle edition of The Technology Was Never the Problem is free. No catch, nothing to sign up for, and you do not need a Kindle device, because the app reads it on a phone.
The book opens with an infusion pump set to deliver 28.8 milliliters an hour. The number should have been 1.2. Three weeks later Denise Melanson was dead of fluorouracil toxicity.
I spent forty years building the machines that were supposed to prevent that. Brain monitors in operating rooms. Anesthesia records in Vienna. A box on a kitchen counter that read twenty one different glucose meters. Infusion pumps wired into the hospital records I helped write the standards for.
Every one of them worked exactly as designed. Almost none of them changed what happened to patients, and it took me until I retired to work out why.
That is the argument. The book is the honest version of it, written by somebody who signed off on the compromises rather than somebody studying them from the outside. Chapter 22 is my own list of everything still wrong with the demonstration I built to prove the last part of it.
Why give it away. Because a first book nobody has read is a manuscript with an ISBN on it. If you have been reading these letters and wondered whether the longer version is worth an evening, this is the cheapest possible way to find out. It costs you nothing and it costs me nothing, which makes it a fair trade.
Five days. Then it goes back to $9.99 and I will not bring it up again for a while.
Normal service Monday.
Dan