Try to get the first appointment after lunch; barring that, bring snacks.

Sometimes it's startling to think of how much of our lives are controlled by the whims of another human being. For example, getting a correct diagnosis at the doctor is something we simply assume will happen, and if you have a common disease--strep throat, chlamydia, pinkeye, whatever--it probably will. But more complicated "medical mysteries" will not necessarily be solved your physician. As I learned several years ago in Atul Gawande's excellent book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, sometimes a correct diagnosis in a difficult case happens only because a doctor has recently read something or heard something about the ailment in question; had the patient come the day before or a week after, the doctor might never have made the connection, or the diagnosis. Rather sobering if you think about it.

(Side note: This is actually why I'm pretty jazzed on the idea I heard (on Nova, of course, my favorite TV show) of using a computer like Watson to do medical diagnoses. With a computer full of every symptom of every disease ever recorded, improbable diagnoses will become a lot easier. Of course, an unintended consequence of building computers smart enough to diagnose human diseases might, eventually, be a computer takeover of the world, but I'm not really too worried about that. If they diagnose us as well as I think they will, humans will be healthy enough to pull the plug before too much happens. Plus, we'll probably run out of electricity before machines become self-aware.)

Back to the point. Recently a few items in the news have made me stop and think again about how easy it would be our lives to be inexorably altered (or cut short) by a simple human mistake, or an accident of timing. First, I'm sure you've heard about the spate of air traffic controllers who have been found, quite literally, to be asleep on the job? Yeah. And it turns out they're not just sleeping--sometimes they also get locked out of the tower, or watch movies on duty.

Hilarious picture stolen from Wikipedia

All of which is to say, there's sometimes nobody directing the planes while people like you and me are hurtling towards the airport at terrifying speeds in what is essentially a tin can with wings. Safe to land? Who knows, let's just go for it. (Oh god, we're all gonna die.)

(Related: Wikipedia has a nice long list of additional ways to die in an airplane. Swell.)

The other fate-hanging-in-the-balance-of-a-capricious-human news item I saw recently has less potential for fatality, but it is interesting nonetheless because it involves justice, who, it turns out, can be blind to no ill effect, but who definitely shouldn't be hungry. As I learned in an article in The Economist, if you want a favorable decision from a judge, it's best to be the first appointment after lunch. Yes, really - according to recent research, if you're the last appointment before lunch, you have a significantly lower chance of having your case decided in your favor than if you're the first appointment after...at least if you're an Israeli criminal seeking parole, that is.

As one might expect, I went to the online home of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and read through the study discussed in the Economist article, which is entitled "Extraneous factors in judicial decisions" (abstract here). In the study, researchers in Israel examined the parole decisions of "experienced judges" over the course of 50 days.  Most of the parole cases involved requests from prison inmates to change the terms of their incarceration, and the researchers recorded not only the outcomes of these cases (all of which were decided by one judge), but also many additional details, such as severity of the crime committed, months served, availability of rehabilitation programs for the inmate, religion of the criminal, and so on. Time of day in which the request was considered, meal breaks, and the temporal sequencing of the case for the relevant day were also recorded.

The researchers made a fascinating discovery, which is that the order of the case matters, even when controlling for confounding factors. Just look at this chart:

As described by the researchers, "The plot shows that the likelihood of ruling in favor of a prisoner spikes at the beginning of each session--the probability of a favorable ruling steadily declines from ≈0.65 to nearly zero and jumps back up to ≈0.65 after a break for a meal."

Isn't that amazing? Your future in jail might depend on whether a judge has eaten recently or not.

(Hey-Maybe there is something to the popular belief in my department that the best time to talk to my adviser is while she is eating lunch or immediately thereafter...hm. Fascinating.)

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Well, that's about all I have to say about that. I guess the take-away message of this somewhat rambling post is this: It might not be a bad idea to send a pizza to the air traffic control tower shortly before your flight is scheduled to land. Just sayin.