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Last month Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod. One of them is with a nutty young doctor

MY POD
BY ANIL RAJAN, MD
Readers Digest I May 2007

ME AND

For most of my adult life, Ive run through a routine mental checklist before leaving home: Cell phone, wallet, keys, I chanted so that I wouldnt forget the bare essentials. But at some point, a few years ago, it became Cell phone, wallet, keys, iPod. That little rectangular slab has entrenched itself permanently into my daily life. Im a physician, and even my hospital work is enriched by it. And what you probably dont know is that the vast storage and clear videos an iPod offers is drawing the most unlikely people to itfrom thieves who podslurp corporate data to aircraft engineers, preachers, university professors, even Test cricketers. My day starts at 5:30 when my iPod, perched on its speaker-dock, wakes me up. Instead of an alarm I let it talk: For a

ILLUSTRATIONS: JAN

Anil Rajan, who graduated from Mysore University, is a resident doctor at a New York hospital.

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while now its been a reading of the bestseller Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt. Bleary-eyed I reach over and turn the volume up so Id hear that rogue economist better in the shower. Having dressed, I automatically place my iPod in the pocket of my jacket or surgical gown. Driving to work, Im no longer obliged to put up with the parochial drone of morning-talk radio. Instead its the iPod on shufe, rigged through the cars speakers. Through my 45-minute commute it could be a medley of 1970s music, a Beatles number maybe, or any of the 15,000 or so songs the iPod holds. The choice of audio books, especially, make trafc jams easier to bear. Over the past months, Ive listened to Vikram Seths Two Lives read by the author, and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Sometimes its Spanish or Korean lessons, and it has turned out that, in New Yorks melting pot, Ive sometimes used a foreign word the very day I picked it up. Like the the day I learned caballo, the Spanish word for horse. That evening I was evaluating an emergency room patient, a migrant from Mexico, whod swallowed some 30 plastic pouches. He couldnt speak any English, but I needed to know exactly what substance those bags contained. He kept gesticulating. No luck. I knew the Spanish word for heroin. Herona? I asked the young man. Herona? Qu herona?

So I went down a list, in English, of other substances, getting nowhere with any of them. Then I remembered that horse was an American street name for heroin. I wondered if thatd be the same in Spanish as well. Caballo? I asked the man. Caballo... s, caballo! And we soon rushed him to the operating room. now have 60 hours of downloaded films, andbecause I travelsubway maps of all the worlds metros. Never in my life had I shot a picture. But after my brother gave me a digital camera on my birthday, I went wild. All of a sudden I had over 4000 images stored in my iPod. Thats partly because Ive also used the camera to copy every X-ray, MRI or CT scan image I have to review at work. On my very rst overnight call, I had a patient with something I only suspected. Having just seen a handful of CT scans at that point, I searched my iPod for an old image Id saved from a patient with similar symptoms. I compared them, felt confident and made a flawless diagnosis: Acute appendicitis. Two years ago, I cannot tell you how many patients looked astonished and grateful after they asked me, How did my CAT scan look? Id pull it out of my top pocket and actually go over it with them. You can do that with an iPod? theyd ask, I thought you just listened to music! But today, my patients often pull out their own iPods and pay me back instantly with

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ME AND MY POD

iDeas
While Apples sold its 100 millionth iPod on April 9, no other man-made device in history could have produced so many accessories (some 4000, says Apple). We decided to ignore all those countless cords, interfaces and remotes when we made this short list. Bed: A New Zealand company has an iPod-compatible bed named Pause. Some even call it the iBed, because of its concealed iPod dock and speakers. Money: A black leather wallet, from Marware.com, has a slot for the iPod Nano, which you can recharge without taking it out. Toilet: Sing along in the bathroom with the iLounge Toilet Paper Dispenser. Buttons on top make for easy access. Sex: A UK company, Love Honey, sells its iBuzz, a music activated, iPod-compatible vibrator. A bit naughty, so we cant tell you more, except that it has both his and her attachments. Jukebox: Wurlitzer, the US company long famed for its coin-operated jukeboxes, has made a comeback. Its One More Time jukebox has classic styling, built-in iPod dock, Bose sound system, and a 100-CD changer. If you can really call it an iPod accessory, at Rs4 lakh, its possibly the costliest. Covers & docks: A simple silicon iPod

Call em

Readers Digest I May 2007

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cover costs as little as Rs100, but a designer version from Louis Vuitton or Dior sells for over Rs10,000. Meanwhile, the Nano Thong Case, made of black leather, makes an iPod Nano look its sexiest. Not very practical, say users, because the leather thong covers the Nanos clickwheel. And there are iPod wrist bands, hip belts and buckles, and several brands of docks to park, play and recharge an iPod, including the Rs17,888 SoundDock speaker system from Bose. Clothes: The iBoxer shorts are made from a comfortable cotton-spandex blend and feature an integrated front pocket for your iPod. Wrote Tim Carvell in Fortune magazine: Upon getting my iBoxer home, I padded around listening to the music originating from just south of my navel and tried to gure out what it enabled me to do. I found that, when dancing in my underpants, I could now play air guitar or clap along to the music. Meanwhile, the iShirt is a cool T-shirt equipped with a magnetic clamp system to ensure your iPod stays rmly attached when youre jogging, exercising or maybe even using an iBuzz. More: Not enough? Then get online and check out the iDog, iDrops and the iBrella. Also nd out whats iBod, and read a blogger named the iGirl.

vacation shots or snaps of their grandkids. Meanwhile, other doctors are catching on. One recent American study found that listening at least 400 times to different heart sounds on an iPod was an effective way for a doctor to hone his skills, making him much better at detecting heart murmurs and other anomalies by stethoscope. Indeed, a digital stethoscopewhich directly records heartbeats onto an iPodis already available. Since late 2004, iPods have changed the way radiologists around the world store, exchange and manage vast amounts of medical imaging data after Dr Osman Ratib of the University of California, Los Angeles, realized that his iPod had much more disk space than his laptop and he was barely lling 10 percent of it with music. He and Dr Antoine Rosset of Geneva developed OsiriX, a free software. Thousands of radiologists now use OsiriX together with iPods as a standard tool with their Apple Mac computers in place of much costlier workstations. We basically wanted something that everybody could use, says Dr Ratib, who has since moved to Geneva. Its the same storage, search and video capabilities of the iPod that some English cricket players were quietly tapping to prepare for the World Cupstudying clips of their opponents bowling techniques.

Cricketers had already been using PCs for this, but with an iPod, they do their homework anywhere. Just like me, schools and colleges are also waking up to the iPod. At Americas Duke University, for instance, students taking certain courses get free iPods to listen to audio books and to download course material. It also enables professors to podcast their lectures. Preachers, too, are employing iPods for Godcasting. And LoPresti Speed Merchants, a Florida company that modifies aircraft, will implement iPods as in-flight data recorders. These new black boxes can record over 500 ying hours. It felt like foolish podiacide (shooting oneself in the foot), when I misplaced my iPod the day I tidied my closet. Frustrated, I went to bed thinking of life without all its contents. But, at 5:30, in the quiet of the morning, I was awakened to sounds emanating from my closet. I jumped out of bed and found my iPod playing an audio book from underneath a shoe. Luckily its earphones had been plugged in when Id dropped it there. But the separation anxiety is hard to describe. I think it was since then that my morning chant got slightly modified. Its now iPod, cell phone, wallet, keys.