Most hospitals adhere to American Hospital Association guidelines when describing a patient's condition to the media. Those guidelines instruct hospital spokespersons to give out only a one-word description of a patient's condition. The recommended conditions, which are excerpted from the AHA's "General Guide for the Release of Information on the Condition of Patients," are:

Undetermined: Patient awaiting physician and assessment.

Good: Vital signs are stable and within normal limits. Patient is conscious and comfortable. Indicators are excellent.

Fair: Vital signs are stable and within normal limits. Patient is conscious, but may be uncomfortable. Indicators are favorable.

Serious: Vital signs may be unstable and not within normal limits. Patient is acutely ill. Indicators are questionable.

Critical: Vital signs are unstable and not within normal limits. Patient may be unconscious. Indicators are unfavorable.

The term "vital signs" means indicators such as blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and respiration. The one-word descriptions are not medical terms, and they are more art than science. They're based on a doctor's best judgment of a patient's condition, as relayed to hospital spokespersons.

The AHA's "General Guide" adds: "'Stable' should not be used as a condition. Furthermore, this term should not be used in combination with other conditions, which by definition often indicate a patient is unstable." (As one hospital spokesman put it, "You can be dead and be stable.")

So how can Jessie Arbogast's condition be "critical but stable"?

Not all hospitals follow the AHA guidelines strictly. They're advisory guidelines, after all, not regulations. George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for example, uses its own definitions. GW Hospital defines critical condition as "uncertain prognosis, vital signs are unstable or abnormal, there are major complications, and death may be imminent." Many hospitals use the term "treated and released" to describe patients who received treatment but were not adm...

Loss of consciousness -- a Grade III concussion -- should mean at least a month off and no return until examined and cleared by a neurologist; often it should mean the player's season is over. That hundreds of high school players sustain a Grade III concussion and go back in the same day is shockingly irresponsible on the part of coaches and high school administrators. High school football players are, legally, children; their coaches are, legally, their temporary guardians. A grown man in the NFL might decide to take a health risk; high school coaches should be protecting children from health risks. State high school sports associations should enact concussion rules -- such as that one Grade III or two Grade II concussions always end a player's season, while anyone sustaining even a mild Grade I must sit out a week. If this were a rule, then there would be no pressure to force players back into the game or back to practice.

If teams in a pro sports league are like divisions of a single organization, then it's not restraint of trade for them to cooperate on salary caps, sales of television rights and so on. If teams are like independent companies, then certain kinds of cooperation may be price collusion. (In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Division I college football teams are more like individual companies than like divisions of the NCAA, but the legal issues for college and the pros are somewhat different.) In the NFL's case, TMQ thinks the 32 teams are like 32 divisions of the same enterprise, considering that no NFL team wants to put any other NFL team out of business -- if, say, the Vikings didn't just defeat the Packers but put them out of business, that would be a huge disaster for the Vikings. The same applies to other NFL teams -- they compete with rival teams on the field, but financially all clubs rise or fall together, unlike in the marketplace for products. On the other hand, each of the 32 NFL divisions is run by someone with the title "owner," which does sound like distinct organizations which would be banned from price collusion.

Genachowski, a lawyer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley, is the most technologically aware FCC chairman ever to occupy the job. In particular, he understands what has made the Internet such a successful platform for innovation: It was designed to avoid favoring any particular application. In the few months since he took over the FCC, Genachowski has set a new tone for the agency, promising to rein in any companies that try to restrict what people can do on their Internet lines. In August, he surprised the tech industry by demanding an explanation from Apple for its rejection of Google Voice. Late in September, he argued for new rules to make sure Internet service providers obey the FCC's network-neutrality principles. In an interview with CNBC the other day, Genachowski was asked whether telecom companies should think of him as the new sheriff in town. The chairman dodged the question. But he's being modest: Genachowski didn't have to pass a single new regulation before carriers began to transform their business practices. Whether or not he wants to be known as the sheriff, they're already scrambling to avoid his six-shooter.

When Paul Begala came up with the phrase "the comeback kid" to spin Bill Clinton's second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, he may have been making a deeper observation than he knew. At any given moment, Clinton seems to be winning your admiration, squandering it, or putting every ounce of his energy into regaining it. He's at his best in a corner. But after a while, you begin to notice that it is always the same person who puts him in the corner. There's a Houdini element to the performance. Clinton allows himself to be bound in chains so that he can emerge to amazement and applause. He's like a fireman whose hobby is arson.

The Clintonian loop of accomplishment, self-sabotage, and recovery means that whoever you are—a member of the public, a journalist covering him, an aide, his wife—it is impossible to maintain any kind of consistent attitude toward him. If you invest your hopes in him, he will disappoint you. If you fall in love with him, he will cheat on you. And if you decide you're giving up on him once and for all, he will move heaven and earth to get you back. This routine, embedded since childhood, will continue until the day he dies. It played out most recently in the 2008 election. Clinton helped to undermine his wife's presidential chances and infuriated even his most ardent defenders by diminishing Barack Obama's primary victories and dismissing his popularity as a "fairy tale." Through the first half of last year, everyone was completely disgusted with him. But the ex-president has been on his best behavior ever since, and we've all forgiven him once again

• The carbon freezing chamber is the only time in the original trilogy that Darth Vader and C3PO can be seen on screen together.
  

As someone like you trying to find and hold a shrinking "middle ground" on a battlefield of true believers, one metaphor I like -- reflecting my technogeek roots -- is that of signal processing: People like you and me believe that there is something that precedes our material world, both temporally and metaphysically; and further that we can on occasion glimpse or "feel it". In other words, there is a Signal, though it can get corrupted, become "noisy" and open to many imperfect interpretations -- as it is mediated through limited human understanding, powerful egos, primate pack dynamics and political maneuvering.

The militant atheists, a la Dawkins, insist (with no real evidence) that there is no signal.

The fundamentalists and literalists insist (with poor evidence and poorer reasoning skills) that there is no noise, only their own One True Signal.

To me the most fertile ground for intellectual and spiritual exploration is the effort to recover the signal from the noise. It seems to require humility and patience, two assets largely devalued in today's culture.

Much has been made of the fact that Alanis' concept of irony doesn't quite meet the standards taught in most high school English classes, but her similes are every bit as worthy of scorn. Has anyone, in the history of mankind, ever needed a knife and ironically wound up with 10,000 spoons instead?

We're trying to imagine the circumstances, but each scenario seems more unlikely than the last:

• You work at the spoon factory, and the only way to unjam a cog in the spoon-making machine is to grease it by spreading butter over it.
• You invited the band 10,000 Maniacs to a dinner party, and the caterer, worried that they were in fact 10,000 maniacs, thought it best to limit their access to sharp items.
• You are armed for an invasion of Cereal Land, but the gates are being guarded by two juicy 72-ounce steaks.