We planted a butterfly garden for The Bug back in Spring, and I was skeptical when we were told the plants would be flourishing the same year. But they have with a vengeance. The Butterfly Bushes are going bonkers, each covering about 4 ft in diameter. Plenty of of bees and flutterbies, for sure, although I managed to miss a pair of monarchs with the camera.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Butterfly garden
Friday, September 18, 2009
My two degrees of George Clooney
If I achieve nothing else in this world, I will at least die knowing that I achieved that.
Monsieur Clooney is starring in a small, local St. Louis* indy film, and two of my acting buddies share a few lines with him (at the editor's discretion, of course).
These buddies are also in the far superior Oscar contender, Game of the Year, by St. Louis-based film company, 88MM Productions.
Consistent with the current economy and state of the academic establishment, my income is barely sufficient to clothe, shelter and feed my family. And so I am obliged to strut and fret many an hour upon the stage and before the camera in order to make up the shortfall. There's no money in it, of course, but all the pizza and Doritos I can eat and later regurgitate for The Grub back home in the den. It's a good arrangement, and the IRS can't take a cut out of it.
Anyway, I'm in Game of the Year, hence the Two Degrees of Clooney. That's only Four Degrees of Kevin Bacon, though, which isn't enough for fast-tracking into SAG.
Alas.
Game of the Year will be showing at a certain film festival in a certain city bearing a French name and abiding by a certain large body of water* (Nov 12-22, 2009). It will also be showing at the Archon 33 SF convention (Oct 204, 2009).
I'm not well-versed in regard to the ins and outs of the D&D world**, but I have it on good authority that, besides simply looking pretty awesome, the movie poster is also highly authentic and liable to elicit ecstatic whelps of enthusiasm from a certain section of the geekosphere.
* St. Louis is a small city occupying that vast area of wilderness between New York and LA. It is sometimes rudely referred to as Deep South Chicago. This is unacceptable. There are no good baseball teams in Chicago.
** No, seriously I'm not just saying that to try and be cool. I had to do a two month "boot camp" to learn, among other things, what a d8 is and what it's for.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Goldhill on CNN
In a CNN interview, David Goldhill summarizes the main themes of the article I posted on previously.
Money quote:
"I think we have to recognize that all politicians are limited by the 55% of Americans who are happy with their current health coverage. What I say to them is that if you're happy with your current health coverage, it's because you don't know what it's costing you. You don't know what it's costing you in terms of lost wage increases. I mean, I've run several companies, and the average cost to a company of insuring an American is now $12,000; that comes out of potential wages, that's a lot of money."
I think that he's saying we're happy like this fella is happy:
Friday, September 04, 2009
Narcoleptic doggy
It starts off funny... but then you realise it's a duggy with a v. sad tail. Ahem... tale.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
David Goldhill writes in the Atlantic on health care reform
This is a stellar article, and one that has completed a gradual shift in my opinion on the subject of the correct direction for health care reform in the US.
In an earlier post, I stated my appreciation for single-payer health care, and regardless of my feelings about US health care, I still strongly support the continued existence of the National Health Service; one of the finest things about The Old Country. If this sounds a little contradictory, let me explain.
The NHS came in the years immediately proceeding the Second World War, when the then Labour government was implementing socialist reforms to heavily centralise the economy (which, of course, was already highly centralised during the war for obvious reasons). Thus, the creation of the NHS was consistent with the broader economic landscape and didn't require a major overhaul of an already established health infrastructure.
Clearly, the USA in 2009 is not Britain in 1948, and this is an important factor to recognise when talking about the pros and cons of a single-payer system. There is a strong argument to be made that implementing a single-payer system in the US is unfeasible not simply for political reasons, but for reasons relating to the basic economic structure of the country. That is, even if every American was screaming for single-payer, it would be an astronomically expensive, labour and time intensive process to implement such a system.
Of course, none of the reforms currently on the table have anything to do with a single-payer system, I'm just highlighting the above to explain why my view of American health care is legitimately different from my view of British health care; Britain got lucky in that it managed to buy into and retain one of the few advantages of the socialist model. Appealing to foreign single-payer health care systems born out of centralized economies is something of a non sequitur with respect to any discussion of US health care.
Contemporary realities aside, I am still undecided as to whether a deregulated free market model will provide better service than a fully single-payer model. One thing I am sure of is that either one of those systems is preferable to the current insurance-based absurdity that passes for US health care at the moment.
"But the current health care mess is a result of wicked free markets!" has been the cry from some on the left, as if trying to outdo the right in misrepresenting the facts.
As David Goldhill explains, there is nothing remotely "free market" about the business of US health care, right now. It's a system regulated out the wazoo at state and federal level, facilitating the existence of state monopolies and preventing the competition that is necessary to stabilise prices. In addition, the existence of an administrative behemoth that is the insurance industry has completely divorced the consumer, you and I, from the true cost of the product, health care, meaning that there is no consumer-driven price control either (as there is in all other areas of the market). When you understand this, the current administration's public option plan suddenly start to look a little ridiculous, because the ideological basis of the solution that it proposes is essentially the cause of the problem it aims to rectify!
If my support for the NHS doesn't make it clear, I am not a Ron Paul libertarian by any stretch of the imagination (at most, I'm a centrist cherry-picker of certain classical liberal notions), and I understand the profound necessity for government regulation and support many them in many aspects of the economy. However, when the government has to introduce new regulations to regulate the negative impact of its previous regulations - as is being proposed for health care reform and has been previously implemented in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis - isn't it time to entertain the possibility that a bit of deregulation might not be such a bad thing?
Read Goldhill's article, because it lays all this out far better than I can. In addition, he covers many other sobering aspects of America's health care woes, such as the resistance of US hospitals to revert to good practice in regard to combating hospital-born infections.My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.
About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.
Actually, this is an issue that is of far broader relevance to western health care as a whole. I recall somebody explaining in horror that a 1990's British ward was actually a lot less sterile and orderly than a WWI field hospital, with the hypothesis that our complacency these days is a result of better post hoc treatments for infections.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Of film directors and rabbits...
inre my previous post, I think I've come up with a situation that acquits natural selection from the charge of tautology.
Imagine two competing species of hominid that find themselves thrown together and competing for resources in the same environment. One species is big, muscular, high in awesomeness, and able to breed like Leporidae; the other species is made up of male and female gender variants of Woody Allen, with a breeding rate hamstrung by congenital insecurity, lengthy self-analysis, and sometimes terminal anxiety.
As time wears on, Homo awesomeness is trouncing Homo selfdepracatus on all fronts, and barring a freak cataclysmic event, the latter seems set for extinction.
Suddenly, a freak cataclysmic event occurs. Hundreds of thousands of small meteorites descend from the heavens and, inscrutably, splat every single Homo awesomeness dead. The freakishness of the event is that, even though a meteorite would just as easily have killed a Homo selfdepracatus unfortunate enough to have been struck by one, pure luck results in the falling rocks striking only members of the Homo awesomeness species. Every single one of them.
And so Homo selfdepracatus lives on and prospers; not because of a random mutation that caused them to be resistant to falling meteorites, but by a purely external stroke of cosmic fortune bearing absolutely no relation to the passing on of genes from one generation to the next.
Note that a scenario in which a virus wiped out Homo awesomeness would not necessarily be equivalent to the one I posit above. If Homo selfdepracatus is also exposed to the virus but has a resistance to it, then Homo selfdepracatus would simply have received a rather rapid promotion from least fittest to most fittest relative to Homo awesomeness for this new virus-afflicted environment. The critical factor in my analogy is that what ultimately brings the hammer down on the fittest species is a completely chance occurrence unbiased by genetic variation.
The hypothesis that "only the surivingest ultimately survive" is therefore falsifiable.
Am I wrong?
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