The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Monday, selections include Eric Schmidt’s daughter reporting on North Korea, strange book recommendations from an app that uses Facebook data and the European Union’s $1.3 billion contest for financing science projects.

For an example of what this means in practice, look no further than a new Tumblr blog started by London-based programmer Tom Scott, entitled “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” This also sounds somewhat dry and academic, until you take a closer look at some of the things that Facebook makes it trivially easy to search for — things like “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran” (where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death) or “family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong,” the latter being a religious group whose members are routinely persecuted.

Many of these searches may be figments of Tom Scott’s over-active imagination (at least for now) but the fact is that Facebook’s graph search makes them relatively easy to conduct. Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive who left to start the mobile social network Path, has pointed out that the company has had this kind of interest-graph powered search for some time — and this kind of targeting based on “likes” and interests, friends and followed pages, etc. has been available in a different form for advertisers. But it is far more robust and more public now.

It’s not about privacy, but the end of obscurity

In a FAQ on the blog, Scott says he’s not trying to make any deep arguments about privacy, and his Tumblr blog is subtitled: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be used to this in a few weeks’ time.” But it’s still worth thinking about the implications of Facebook’s graph search, especially given the fact that many people don’t seem to appreciate the nuances of the network’s privacy settings — something that Facebook doesn’t really make simple or easy to figure out. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi was recently blindsided by them, so what chance do the rest of us have?

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, philosophy professor Evan Selinger and his co-author Woodrow Hartzog argued that in many ways it’s not really helpful to talk about privacy, which is a vague concept in a world of real-time information, “frictionless sharing” and “data exhaust” (the information we give off as we move around the internet, often without realizing it). Instead, they argue that what we are really losing is the protection of obscurity — in the sense that information which was technically public before but difficult to find provided a form of privacy through obscurity:

“Obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion’s share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious.”

As Selinger notes, the recent publication of a map of New York state’s registered gun owners made much the same point as Scott’s examples of disturbing Facebook graph searches. The information about who has a gun permit was public by default in New York when the map was published (although a new law has been proposed that would make it private) but it was difficult to collect and so hardly anyone bothered. Other kinds of information are also technically public — government databases and so on — but difficult or impossible to extract useful data from.

Clicks you may not even remember are being analyzed

Of course, the same thing was the case with much of the world’s information before Google came along, and we had to learn to adjust to the fact “the internet never forgets,” and that the information you posted online years ago (or information that was posted about you by others) without really thinking of the consequences can come back to haunt you. But Facebook has taken that to a whole new level of intimacy because much of what occurs there seems so ephemeral: a “like,” a follow, a click — things you might not even remember doing.

While they may seem ephemeral, each of these can be as permanent as anything else on the internet, and just as public, unless you can master the intricacies of what Facebook lets you hide and what it doesn’t (and as Scott notes in his FAQ, you probably shouldn’t rely on that anyway). As Megan Garber of The Atlantic points out in a post, the social network is essentially constructing a virtual version of you out of all those signals — a version that is categorized by all of your activities and interests, some of which may be harmless and some of which may not.

It may seem absurd that someone might say they “like” racism, or that anyone would actually search for that behavior and make use of it somehow. But if we have learned anything from the era of big data, it is that if the information is available — as dirty or questionable as it might be — someone is going to make use of it, and not always in the way you would like them to.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Alan Cleaver and Tom Scott

For an example of what this means in practice, look no further than a new Tumblr blog started by London-based programmer Tom Scott, entitled “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” This also sounds somewhat dry and academic, until you take a closer look at some of the things that Facebook makes it trivially easy to search for — things like “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran” (where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death) or “family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong,” the latter being a religious group whose members are routinely persecuted.

Many of these searches may be figments of Tom Scott’s over-active imagination (at least for now) but the fact is that Facebook’s graph search makes them relatively easy to conduct. Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive who left to start the mobile social network Path, has pointed out that the company has had this kind of interest-graph powered search for some time — and this kind of targeting based on “likes” and interests, friends and followed pages, etc. has been available in a different form for advertisers. But it is far more robust and more public now.

It’s not about privacy, but the end of obscurity

In a FAQ on the blog, Scott says he’s not trying to make any deep arguments about privacy, and his Tumblr blog is subtitled: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be used to this in a few weeks’ time.” But it’s still worth thinking about the implications of Facebook’s graph search, especially given the fact that many people don’t seem to appreciate the nuances of the network’s privacy settings — something that Facebook doesn’t really make simple or easy to figure out. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi was recently blindsided by them, so what chance do the rest of us have?

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, philosophy professor Evan Selinger and his co-author Woodrow Hartzog argued that in many ways it’s not really helpful to talk about privacy, which is a vague concept in a world of real-time information, “frictionless sharing” and “data exhaust” (the information we give off as we move around the internet, often without realizing it). Instead, they argue that what we are really losing is the protection of obscurity — in the sense that information which was technically public before but difficult to find provided a form of privacy through obscurity:

“Obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion’s share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious.”

As Selinger notes, the recent publication of a map of New York state’s registered gun owners made much the same point as Scott’s examples of disturbing Facebook graph searches. The information about who has a gun permit was public by default in New York when the map was published (although a new law has been proposed that would make it private) but it was difficult to collect and so hardly anyone bothered. Other kinds of information are also technically public — government databases and so on — but difficult or impossible to extract useful data from.

Clicks you may not even remember are being analyzed

Of course, the same thing was the case with much of the world’s information before Google came along, and we had to learn to adjust to the fact “the internet never forgets,” and that the information you posted online years ago (or information that was posted about you by others) without really thinking of the consequences can come back to haunt you. But Facebook has taken that to a whole new level of intimacy because much of what occurs there seems so ephemeral: a “like,” a follow, a click — things you might not even remember doing.

While they may seem ephemeral, each of these can be as permanent as anything else on the internet, and just as public, unless you can master the intricacies of what Facebook lets you hide and what it doesn’t (and as Scott notes in his FAQ, you probably shouldn’t rely on that anyway). As Megan Garber of The Atlantic points out in a post, the social network is essentially constructing a virtual version of you out of all those signals — a version that is categorized by all of your activities and interests, some of which may be harmless and some of which may not.

It may seem absurd that someone might say they “like” racism, or that anyone would actually search for that behavior and make use of it somehow. But if we have learned anything from the era of big data, it is that if the information is available — as dirty or questionable as it might be — someone is going to make use of it, and not always in the way you would like them to.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Alan Cleaver and Tom Scott

Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe. Safety, here, doesn’t mean inaccessible … Online, obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion’s share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious.

The authors cite as an example the recent debate sparked by a newspaper that used FOIA requests to obtain the names and addresses of all New York gun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties, and then geocoded the data to produce and easily readable scheme of dots on a map. Although technically the newspaper did not violate any privacy rules, since the information was publicly available and lawfully obtained, there does intuitively seem to be something intrusive about this. The point of the article is that we need a new framework for thinking about these issues. We might agree that information should be public, but perhaps not that public. This is where obscurity provides a better framework for dealing with the issue. Obscurity operate less on the publicity of information and more on the availability of that public information.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has held that we do have a right to “practical obscurity,” still the question of how we would effectively protect this right is not obvious. What would it mean for a lawmaker to say that a certain set of information must remain not private, but “obscure?” How obscure? The question leads us straight into a sorites paradox. Would determinations of obscurity liability easily lend itself to other familiar legal tests such as “reasonably foreseeable” in a society where interconnectivity seems to grow at an even pace with technological advances? Is it possible to keep information obscure on the internet? Suppose I have a mugshot that is publicly available, but a court has ordered that this information remain obscure. If one person (P1) makes a FOIA request for this information and shares it with only one other person (P2) on the internet, this act hardly abrogates obscurity. Furthermore, if P2 shares my mugshot with exactly one other person (P3) as well, then P2 has surely not violated any obscurity duty. But, if this process continues to (Pn), then no individual person can be said to have violated the obscurity duty, yet the duty has surely been violated since an arbitrarily large number of people will have seen my mugshot. Should we hold P1 liable for having started the chain? What if P4 posts my mugshot on a blog? Would something like this break the chain of causation? Even if the blog only gets 1 unique hit a year every year? Or, instead, should we not hold P1 liable at all, under the theory that what is important for obscurity liability is not that my right to obscurity was violated, but rather how it was violated, and P1′s actions are categorically different from those of P4? Can we effectively track this causal chain without raising other privacy concerns, or is obscurity merely a pyrrhic victory over difficult privacy questions?

There are a great many things and beings in the world and the majority of them exist and live in obscurity. Most people don’t notice objects and beings during their daily routine or in familiar places. We only tend to notice and see those things that affect us directly or that cross our paths in a startling way. The bird above is partly obscured by the colors of the leaves and flowers surrounding him, his size, and the berries. But even if the branches were bare it’s very likely we would walk by the tree and not notice him, possibly not even notice that the branches were, in fact, bare, or even notice the tree at all. Our attention is so occupied by our thoughts or by the conversation we’re having or by actions we’re taking that we spare no time for the world around us. This is not always a negative thing, we must direct all our attention in a single direction at times, but certainly not all the time. It may be to our advantage to spread our concentration around us to allow many, rather than few, things and people a portion of our attention. Objects normally obscure may offer us a new friendship, a new subject for artistic expression, or a train of thought that leads us to a new beginning in some way. Paying attention to the world around us is an important skill to develop both in terms of safety and of opportunity. Putting all your concentration into scouting the area around you all the time, however, is useless; using a strategy of glancing over your surroundings and training yourself to catch interesting things out of the corner of your eye does not take up all of your attention or distract you from a primary task. Wouldn’t you prefer to be aware of the things around you and not move blindly through life?

Maybe people don’t change all that much, just, the more you look at them, the more you come to know who they’ve always been. @

It appears that no straw will ever break the camel’s back, but that somebody’s going to wind up sweeping his legs. @

It has always been about the people… corrupt them, and it’ll always be about be about YOU. @

Both sides rail the other side for their stupidity, but which KIND of stupid would you rather on YOUR side? @

Obscurity is a comfortable chair, but you can’t really DO anything with it. @

The other hand is busied, while it leaves the fighting to the first. @

~~~

Note: The preceding random musings are mine, ~tdv (@subconch) The @ symbols take you to the specific quotes on twitter if you care to RT, Favorite, or Reply.

…There comes a point in time when one must succumb to the changes that they are undergoing and depart until such a time when they are ready to be seen. Even caterpillars go to undisclosed places for a time to transform. Jesus is our example of how to live, had an understanding of his purpose Im sure from a young age; how challenging it must’ve been to combat against the ostentatious habits of his humanity to wait to be announced and released by God to and for the nations?

The Problem lies in the fact that many of us allow the sensitivity of our transformation to be exposed for the world to see (no thanks to social media.) So what then is the cure? It may seem simple while reading but in fact it takes a whole lot of discipline: GETTING CONNECTED TO THE SOURCE!

Us kids were no exception. On the ranch there was always wood to split and cows and hogs to be fed. Dad would let us sleep in until 6 and then come banging on our door. It was a rude awakening.

If my mom slept until 6:30 a.m., I thought she was a lollygagger. Boy, I needed to experience more of the greater world before I became the judge and jury. Mom would get up and fix breakfast — usually one egg, over hard, with a bowl of mush on the side. The oatmeal generally came out of a box of Zoom cereal, which I loved because if you accumulated enough boxtops, you could send off for a autographed baseball glove. Eventally, after eating approximately 730 bowls of Zoom, I got a glove autographed by Dick McAulliffe, a .247 hitting second baseman for the Detroit Tigers, and a three-time all-star, and from then on I was a fan of obscure heroes. Even to this day, I like off-the-beaten-track books, movie stars and musical groups, and it feels fun to accidentally discover them and be a fan of people who aren’t used to having fans.

I don’t know if McAuliffe is a morning person, but I know in night games he hit like one.

My first wife, Tina, was a night person, to a degree, although she could drag herself out of bed and go to work in the sunrise hours. She did so for years. She also attended night meetings as a reporter, and so, not by choice but by necessity, was both a night and a morning person.

After Tina died, in 2007, at age 48 of complications of diabetes, I got remarried to Teri, a card-carrying night person. I struggle to stay up with her. Oftentimes, I am totally groggy while she is going strong, ready to watch the “Late, Late Show” or the “Insanely Late Show” or 30-minute ads for knife sets. Just kidding. She does have her limits.

If Dad were still alive — he died in 1997 of multiple myeloma, a particularly virulent form of bone cancer — he’d say Teri and I are wasting the best part of the day. But, with all due respect, maybe he needed to get out more and experience what night people experience before he became judge and jury.

No matter. Today, because of the way I was raised, and because my job demands it, I am a sunrise connoisseur. And because I am married to Teri, I am also a sunset connoisseur. Thanks to my lovely wife, I love color. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

When God appointed Ananias, Saul’s leader for this point in his journey, Ananias had a thing or two to say about Saul’s reputation. Even when your appointed leader has heard of your reputation and questions their assignment in your life, fear not because God will silence all opinions about you because He has chosen you. He hand-picked you and set you in a particular place to receive full restoration, and He will see to its completion.

When God has chosen you that means He’s for you; and if He’s for you, then NO ONE can stand against you. At the appointed time, He will command the ravens to feed you, the critics to be your source of healing and deliverance, so never underestimate the power of your positioning. Do as Saul did – continue to pray! While Saul was praying, God was doing His part.

Be encouraged – your blindness is temporary! Know that God has a prepared place for you that is conducive for your healing, restoration, and growth. He has commanded the hands of your leadership, so rest in His guidance and continue to pray. Your vision may be dull, but your words are still powerful!

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief. Proverbs 24:16 KJV

(1,739)

It was a time when the world was engrossed in a raging debate over taxes. The most recent Caesar was deliberating on how to maintain the integrity of his empire, keeping it from falling off the current “fiscal cliff.”

Poverty was everywhere. It was gnawing at the flesh and the innards of ever-increasing numbers of common people, who were only able to muster complaints over the sheer magnitude of lack.

Kings were concerned about maintaining their power, ignoring the needs of mothers and children in order to maintain the supremacy of their positions.

Zealots roamed the terrain, performing terrorist acts against perceived injustice–all in the name of their favorite gods.

Religion, having stalled in its own inadequacy decades before, was trying to discover new life through regulations, restitution of historical moments and rigid application from the pages of dusty scrolls.

The cultures were segregated. Some say it was done so that the traditions of each group of people and their customs could be honored, but more often than not, the separation just created misunderstandings and blockades to communication, sprouting feelings of superiority.

Nations were rising against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms.

It is into this environment that God inserted Himself in human flesh as a baby–birthed in obscurity.

As I sat over a meal last night with the lovely members of my family, I looked around and realized that they were an intelligent lot, filled with creative energy, but still sheep heading to the slaughter of the sameness of “olden times.”

For today, we suffer from the same conditions that greeted the Messiah. We are trapped in the inflexibility of men’s wills and purposes. We extol our differences and tout our uniqueness, never having a chance to absorb deeper fellowship through commonality. We have trapped ourselves in religious and political upheavals that threaten our future, overemphasize our past and leave our present stalled–void of purpose.

I suppose I could tell you that some things have changed. We have computers, which quickly inform us of our disjointed status. We have penicillin to heal diseases (until those same infections discover ways to outsmart our drugs). We dress differently, if not better. We drive cars instead of camels and we eat with knives and forks instead of our fingers.

But the main demons that possessed our society all those years ago remain intact, having survived all of our attempts at deliverance.

I have decided not to join the melee. I resist all attempts by the masses to deem me odd,  not slithering into the present pit of lava. I have decided to shepherd the sheep that are sent my way, simultaneously listening for the angels of my better nature. I am trying to gain wisdom as I look to the skies. And I travel the earth as a student of discovery instead of a know-it-all.

I am not interested in taxes and I’m quite intent on avoiding kings. I may appear to the common man to be insensitive as I move in and out of cultures, seeking similarities instead of accentuating differences. And most of all, I find my source of worship and meaning in barns and mangers instead of sanctuaries and the halls of Congress.

Call me weird.

Most of the world slept through the night some two thousand years ago, wondering how things could ever get better when everybody seemed content with them remaining bad. It took a child–and it will take a child in each and every one of our hearts–for us to birth peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Goodreads | Amazon

My name is Beatrice. When I was born, I was blessed with the Sight. I was immediately removed from my parents and enrolled in the Institution. At the age of twelve, I had my first true vision, earning my raven’s wings. And when I turned seventeen, one of my visions came true. Things haven’t been the same since.

The Institution depends on me to keep the City safe from our enemy, the Dreamcatchers, but I’m finding it harder to do while keeping a secret from everyone, including my best friend Gabe. It is a secret that could put us all in danger. A secret that could kill me and everyone close to me.

But the enemy has been coming to me in my dreams, and I think I’m falling in love with him. He says they’re coming. He says they’re angry. And I think I’ve already helped them win.

3 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Entangled Teen for this eARC! This book is now available.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing frustrates me like a book that has awesome potential but fails to deliver.

Sadly, Luminosity was just another one of those.

When I requested this book, I thought it sounded so ridiculously awesome. I began to worry a little bit when the first chapter was really info-dumpy, but I calmed down as I kept reading. The world in which Beatrice, or Bea, lives is really neat, even if at times it seems very vaguely defined. (Yes, I know: info-dumpy and vague in the same paragraph. Trust me, I have no idea how that works any better than you do and I read the book.)

The idea was SO COOL. There are these Seers who protect ordinary Citizens, but only some Seers have really clear visions. Bea has seen the coming attack of the Dreamcatchers, people who can see into the past and see peoples’ intentions. Oh yeah, and Dreamcatchers can, with a single touch, kill a person and take their energy. The Seers are taken away from their families as young children and brought to live in something called the Institute where they are trained in everything from weaponry to art class. Bea is considered a hero, because she originally Saw the Dreamcatcher attack coming, but then a Dreamcatcher named Echo starts entering her dreams and telling her that they need to save each other, not kill each other.

Oh yeah, and Bea can’t decide if she’s in love with him or her long time friend Gabriel. Love triangle alert. *headdesk*

See, for me, Bea is where all the awesomeness started breaking down. The first thing is that, from the second she starts having her dreams with Echo, she is totally in love with Gabe while she’s awake and Echo while she’s asleep. Like seriously, she makes out with both of them and finds nothing wrong with it. She is also a total spaz, always freezing up right when the team of Seers she commands needs her. At the end of the book, the choices she makes seem to have absolutely no sense behind them at all. They just … happen.

Actually, that could speak for most of the book as a whole. Things just kinda happen, with not a lot of explanation or sense. Some of the characters are clearly just planted to be killed, and trying to invoke an emotional reaction for their deaths. Grief does NOT explain away everything that happens for the randomest reasons after that. Besides the Dreamcatchers, the other major people in the story seem to have no reasoning for why they’re doing anything. They’re just bad, or they’re just good. I hate, hate reusing this analogy, but SERIOUSLY, things need to stop feeling like a National Novel Writing Month novel, where the author was speed writing and got stuck and then just decided ______ would happen just so the story would start moving again. With that randomness in mind, however, I must say that none of the “revelations” in the novel surprised me. I had them pegged very early on.

Honestly, I’m mostly just frustrated because I know the book could have been so much better. There were all these spectacularly awesome pieces, but they just didn’t get threaded together very well. I appreciated that the book was always moving, but I wish sometimes things had made a little bit more sense or at least have been explained. Worst of all, I found Bea as a character to be flat and uncompelling, defined basically by the guys in her life. I would read book too, Evanescence, if it popped up on NetGalley, but I wouldn’t go looking for it.

Books 2 and 3 in this series have titles, Evanescence and Obscurity respectively, but no release dates.

I started a project a couple of years ago while I was back in Melbourne which was based around the concept of obscured faces. I find that I really enjoy faces where the eyes are either not in the image or where they are not the focal point  of the image.

I started the project with images of L’amour (you can see more here of her comeback to the Melbourne and Sydney stages) and revisited it recently with Toronto burlesque performer and model Rubie Laframboise (more about what Rubie is up to here)

Here are some of the original images with L’amour and some recent additions with Rubie.

L’amour

L’amour

L’amour

Rubie

Rubie

Rubie

You can see the entire project in progress here

We absolutely love watching the Flytime TV “Word of the Day” because you’re guaranteed a good laugh. In this edition, your favorite celebrities have to tell Nedu,  what “Obscurity” means. Enjoy this hilarious video and watch out for the  ”that’s a scarce word” response!

Watch it here.

photo by Josh Scholten

Be obscure clearly.
~E. B. White

As a family doctor, I work at clarifying obscurity about the human condition daily, dependent on my patients to communicate the information I need to make a sound diagnosis and treatment recommendation.  To begin with, there is much that is still unknown and difficult to understand about psychology, physiology and anatomy.  Then throw in a disease process or two or three to complicate what appears to be “normal”, and further consider the side effects and complications of various treatments — even evidence-based decision making isn’t equipped to reflect perfectly the best and only solution to a problem.  Sometimes the solution is very muddy, not at all pristine and clear.
Let’s face the lack of facts.  A physician’s clinical work is obscure even on the best of days when everything goes well.  We hope our patients can communicate their concerns as clearly as possible, reflecting accurately what is happening with their health.  In a typical clinic day we see things we’ve never seen before, must expect the unexpected, learn things we never thought we’d need to know, attempt to make the better choice between competing treatment alternatives, unlearn things we thought were gospel truth but have just been disproved by the latest double blind controlled study which may later be reversed by a newer study.   Our footing is quicksand much of the time even though our patients trust we are giving them rock-solid advice based on a foundation of truth learned over years of education and training.   Add in medical decision-making that is driven by cultural, political or financial outcomes rather than what works best for the individual, and our clinical clarity becomes even further obscured.

Over thirty years of doctoring in the midst of the mystery of medicine — learning, unlearning, listening, discerning, explaining, guessing, hoping,  along with a little silent praying — has taught me the humility that any good clinician must have when making decisions with and about patients.  What works well for one patient may not be at all appropriate for another despite what the evidence says or what an insurance company or the government is willing to pay for.  Each person we work with deserves the clarity of a fresh look and perspective, to be “known” and understood for their unique circumstances rather than treated by cook-book algorithm.  The complex reality of health care reform may dictate something quite different.

The future of medicine is dependent on finding clarifying solutions to help unmuddy the health care decisions our patients face. We have entered a time of information technology that is unparalleled in bringing improved communication between clinicians and patients because of more easily shared electronic records.  The pitfall of not knowing what work up was previously done will be a thing of the past.  The risk and cost of redundant procedures can be avoided.  The patient shares responsibility for maintenance of their medical records and assists the diagnostic process by providing online symptom and outcomes documentation.   The benefit of this shared record is not that all the muddiness in medicine is eliminated, but that an enhanced transparent partnership between clinician and patient develops,  reflecting a relationship able to transcend the unknowns.

So we can be obscure clearly.   Lives depend on it.