Ten Words from Today's NY Times - April 25, 2012

Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.

In some cases, the company’s workers had access to health information while persuading patients to pay overdue bills, possibly in violation of federal privacy laws, the documents indicate.

An Accretive spokeswoman declined to comment on whether other states were looking into its practices and issued a brief statement, “We have a great track record of helping hospitals enhance their quality of care.”

For years, Zimbabwe was infamous for the opposite problem: mind-boggling inflation.

But United States coins seldom circulate more than 100 miles beyond the country’s borders because of their weight and high shipping costs.

Complicating matters, the rand, like most currencies, fluctuates against the dollar, making prices tough to fix.

You might think that would go without saying for a nine-and-a-half-minute video on a YouTube channel, Mr. Green’s SciShow, where he delivers irreverent lectures on topics like earthquakes, colossal squid and why a plant would want to produce the active ingredient in marijuana.

At the Intelligent Channel there were smart, lengthy (by YouTube standards) interviews with cultural figures like the documentarian Alex Gibney and the comedian Gilbert Gottfried conducted by Richard Belzer (Detective Munch on “Law & Order: SVU”), who resembles a more prolix, pop-cultural Charlie Rose.

At Numberphile, mathematicians discourse, enthusiastically and winningly, on numbers — the properties of 3 or 666 or 13,983,816 (the odds against picking all six winning numbers in the British lottery).

The most inviting and right-feeling of the original channels may be Geek & Sundry, as befits the persona of its creator, the actress and writer Felicia Day, as the geek’s geek.