I get to post first because she drives me home

lyceum_arabica and I saw Moore's "Sicko" tonight. Well done for emotional impact. Low on stats, though the claims it did make on comparative health measures are AFAIK accurate, and supplementable by how much we spend for our lower outcomes. We wondered how much emigration it might inspire. The credits even mention a http://hook-a-canuck.com/ site[1].

Stats I don't have are on how representative his horror stories are: he got lots of complaints, he showed us people being bankrupted or denied treatment, and health care workers and doctors testifying as to how they're paid better to deny treatment (vs. the British doctor getting paid more for getting patients to stop smoking, or get low blood pressure in the pool), but how many insured Americans do run into such problems? Of course, even those who don't still get the experience of being afraid to be unemployed for a while, or to start a small business, due to the high expense of individual insurance if you can even get it.

He actually didn't make some of the standard financial arguments for universal care. He touched on such systems paying for preventive care, and thus having lower total costs than ER-based care (the US *has* government mandated universal care, really, with ERs having to take in anyone; it's just a really inefficience and ineffective form of care) but not that heavily, and didn't say anything private insurers having high overhead, plus the billing overhead doctors have to deal with, nor the point that insurance works better the bigger the pool that risk is spread among.

Note when I think of universal health care, I think of "Medicare for all", not the epicyclic mandates and subsidies of existing insurers that the leading Democratic contenders talk about, and which HR Clinton was into the first time around, or a couple of states have done (Vermont (Howard Dean) and Massachusetts). Yay, insurance, but you're still dealing with inefficient denial happy profit-driven bureaucracies; much of Sicko is about the insured who get screwed anyway, not the uninsured.

[1] Huh, just noticed James dropped http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/ from his Usenet sig.

Cool data work

From fanw: http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/blog/photosynth-prototype/

Actually two parts, seemingly unrelated. One is indefinite zoom data display, and the second half is the seed for a photographic Netwide groupmmind, at least groupmemory: a reconstruction of Notre Dame from random photographs, with potential for picking up annotation.

Even if I'd been a better grad student that I've been, I'd probably still feel inadequate. Obscure hard to explain AI model vs. practical Awesome.

Exalted picture meme

Because it's awesome. If your screen is short enough to make you scroll, do so slowly, savoring the panels until you get to the end.

( Teh Awesome )

Thomas Midgley

He developed both the tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and held over a hundred patents. While lauded at the time for his discoveries, today his legacy is seen as far more mixed considering the serious negative environmental impacts of these innovations. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley