I guess I'm not stupid...

...at least that's what Dr. Jon LaPook, who works for CBS and has an awesome name, tells me: "No, you're not stupid if you're confused about health care reform."

His piece in HuffPo today is about how politicians, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, etc., have intentionally made this issue impossible for most people to get a handle on. And he lays the four main goals of the legislation:

Coverage expansion and subsidies. This is where most of the estimated trillion dollar price tag over ten years would go -- to expanding Medicaid for uninsured and lower income people and to help people who can't afford it pay on a sliding scale for insurance through new health insurance exchanges.

Insurance market reforms. This is about fair play in the insurance industry. Advocates want to eliminate practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions and jacking up premiums if they're sick. The most controversial proposal is the
establishment of a "public option" -- a government insurance plan that would compete against private ones.

Delivery and payment reforms. This is about delivering more effective care at a lower cost. About 20 percent of the 2.5 trillion dollar annual health care price tag does not contribute to better health.

Prevention. This has been long overlooked in America. Spend a few dollars on foot care for a diabetic and you may prevent a foot amputation and thousands of dollars in expenses.

I know embarassingly little about the health care system, so I'm curious as to what you guys think about this. Clearly, the reforms mentioned above are needed, but does the current legislation go about it in the right way? Is it an efficiant use of a trillion dollars? Etc. Thanks!

Governor Sanford *should* resign

Generally speaking, I wouldn't say infidelity necessitates an elected official's resignation (unless they support DOMA or something like that), but the AP reports that the governor spent nearly $40,000 on air travel for five flights to Brazil, sitting in first/business class while he aides sat in coach. And that is grounds for resignation.

"The Jews and Their Lies."

Holy shit. I had no idea Michael Steele and the RNC could be so stupid as to create The Obama Card, a game that allows players to use their Obama credit card to purchase "Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature - with pictures to boot" (AMERICAblog). Apparently this material helps the public understand just how Obama's spending is destroying our country.

Using a search engine modeled after Amazon's, 'players' search for keywords relating to items they wish to purchase. A search for Jews brings up a set of thumbnail images including, you guessed it, "The Jews and Their Lies." One can also, with proper searching (as done by AMERICAblog), find items like "Sex Secrets of Escorts" and "Porn: Have Anal Sex and Call Her Best Friend for a Threesome". Seriously.

Also hilarious is the fact that certain words are banned: one must use homosexual instead of gay, and the word vagina is banned.

Check out the AMERICAblog post to see screenshots of some of the searches (for some reason Blogger won't let me upload these images).

TV and space

both make me unreasonably happy.

Thus today was a good one for fucking around on the internet, because I got to dissect the brand-new Emmy nominations (BSG was once again criminally overlooked, although I'm really happy about the recognition Breaking Bad is getting) and check out lots of Apollo 11-related NYTimes content (today being the 40th anniversary of the launch): reader's photos and memories of what they were doing at the time, a cool page of NYTimes' original coverage, and, best of all, really amazing photos taken by the astronauts, many of which I'd never seen before.

Phthalates and Penile Volume

A very bizarre op-ed in the Times today.

One more MJ post.

Footage of Michael Jackson's hair catching fire during a 1984 Pepsi commercial shoot has just been discovered:


As always, I recommend everyone see the four-hour, made-for-TV mini-series The Jacksons: An American Dream, which dramatized the same accident in this way:

Public vs. Science: Evolution and Climate

So, Gmail informs me that there have been 42 posts and comments since the last time I read anything over here ... even though I'm still not caught up, I felt compelled to pass on this fascinating study which not only compares what the public thinks about evolution and global warming with what scientists think, but it also shows the difference between what the public thinks that scientists think and what they actually do think.

Only one?!

In the fall of 2006 the Secular Coalition of America announced that they would award $1,000 to the person who identified the highest-level atheist, humanist, freethinker, or other nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States. SCA Advisory Board Chairman Woody Kaplan, a civil liberties activist and former member of the ACLU's National Board of Directors, took some of the suggested names and interviewed close to sixty members of the U.S. House and Senate. “At the time, twenty-two of them told me they didn’t believe in a god,” Kaplan recalls. “Twenty-one of them said, ‘You can’t tell anybody.’ One of them said you could: Congressman Pete Stark.”

Here is his acceptance speech. Nothing earth-shattering, but that's just it - how is it possible that his simple, logical thinking is so rare among elected officials?

This sounds too familiar

“People often don’t know what products acetaminophen is in,” said Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, a medical toxicologist from New York University who was the panel’s acting chairman. “It isn’t that hard to go above the four-gram dose. If you took a couple acetaminophen for a headache until you got to the maximum dose, and then maybe later you take Tylenol PM and some Nyquil for a cold. And your back hurts, so you take Vicodin — by now you’ve probably gotten to a seven-gram dose.”

I am glad NYT put out an article to mitigate the hype/scare of last week's panel decision, but Dr. Nelson, who I work with, has a point here.

Strange Syntax

Not stabbing in the head, but stabbing the head. Struck me as odd.

Snake eyes, everyone loses.

The above photo shows the aftermath of a fight between a 13' python and a 6' alligator in Florida's Everglades in 2005. Apparently the python swallowed the alligator whole and began to digest it, inspiring the alligator to claw at the insides of the snake. In the end both animals were dead, and as can be seen in the picture above, the hindquarters of the alligator were sticking out of the python. (In case the image is too small to be meaningful: the scaly thing sticking toward the lower-right corner of the picture is the alligator's tail, while the other two points are the ends of the torn-in-half python. This just adds another item to each of two lists: 1. Reasons no one should live in Florida until they are old enough that they can't leave the house; and, 2. Reasons I am not cut out for any kind of wilderness adventure.

Invincible.

Hilariously, Michael Jackson's final studio album was named Invincible. Also hilarious is Michael's melting, whitening, clearly-not-invincible face, shown in its different stages throughout the years in the great morphing video below.

Cats!

Two cat-related stories:

1. The owners of a Kansas zoo allowed their pet golden retriever to raise three white-striped tiger cubs [note: this is the term used in the article I read, though it doesn't really seem right; the animals have black stripes, not white ones] who were abandoned by their mother. The family, seen above, is now being split apart because the cubs have grown large enough that even just playing with the dog the cubs could severely injure her. There are some pretty cute pictures in this slideshow. This MSNBC report includes video:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

2. Riana Van Nieuwenhuizen, an animal sanctuary worker in South Africa, lives "[...] with not one but FOUR orphaned cheetahs, five lions and two tigers. Forty-six-year-old Riana said: 'I love them all. But they're a handful.'" All of the pictures below are shot at her home, where the animals seemingly have free reign.

China Lights Up.

Two bewildering stories relating to tobacco have come out of China recently, and both make me glad to live in the USA:

1. The Gongan county government of central China has ordered civil servants in the area "[...] to puff their way through 230,000 packs of local Hubei-produced cigarettes over the year," or face a fine. Contradictory to the central government's policies intended to curb smoking, this edict is an effort to stem losses of tobacco tax revenue to non-local cigarette producers. The edict has since been put "under study" to determine if it should be in place or not.

2. Tong Liangliang, a two-year old from China, now holds the unofficial record of being the youngest chain-smoker in history. Liangliang (pictured above) was pushed to smoking by his father, who believed that the cigarettes would numb the pain of the boy's hernia until he grew old enough to have an operation for the condition. Liangliang's smoking began about six months ago, but he is already smoking a pack a day and "[...] resists all his father's attempts to take away his only pain killer."

Alice in Wonderland.

Check out these pictures of the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and the White Queen from Tim Burton's upcoming interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. The characters are played by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway, respectively. (Images taken from HuffPo.)

I am worried that this movie will be disappointing in the same way that Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was, but I have to admit that these images give me some hope. Between these visuals and the fact that the film will be shown in 3-D I will likely end up going to see this in theaters despite my reservations. Does anyone know anything else about this project? Any early reviews of the script and casting?

This guy is my great-uncle

...really. This could get interesting.


Ed Meese, Far-Right Reaganite, Hired By GOP To Coordinate Sotomayor Attack

Damn Mahmoud, you don't remember Benford's Law?!

Statistics for the win.

I won't go into to much explanation since Nate does, but check this out. Benford's Law says that, with remarkably few assumptions, an extremely wide range of types of data all exhibit similar patterns when it comes to their values' first digit.

So whether you're talking about the number of people living in each of America's counties or the distance between Earth and each of the Universe's objects, if you took your entire list and only kept the first digits, the proportion of 1s would be about the same on both lists, and the same for 2s, etc. (This sort of makes sense - there are probably more counties with 10-19 people than 90-99, more with 100-199 than 900-999, more with 100,000-199,999 than 900,000-999,999, etc.)

Long story short, Nate's analysis appears to show that one of Ahmadinejad's opponent's vote totals per county(?) behaved extremely well according to Benford's Law - except there were far too many 7s ...

Fucking weak.

Students at two elementary schools in California will, because of a clerical error and strict laws regarding the length of school days, be forced to complete 34 extra days of school this summer. An associate superintendent, who has now conveniently decided to retire, mistakenly allowed the schools to have short days during the school year that were only 170 or 175 minutes, below the required 180 minute threshold that defines a school day in the state. The law is so strict that these 170 or 175 minute days, typically shortened to allow teachers more time to prepare lessons, do not count as even partial school days, meaning that if the schools hope to receive their usual amounts of state funding next fall the students must complete 34 additional at-least-180-minute days of school before starting summer vacation.

"Fourth-grader Sean Cornish says his classmates 'think it's dumb that they have to go to school for these extra days because some lady messed up.'" I agree, and also cannot believe the state laws do not allow the schools to make up only the missed time, rather than the number of days that were too short.

Let's move to rural Siberia or Malawi.

The BBC has aggregated a lot of information about swine flu into a convenient map of the spread of the disease over time. Finally, an excuse to move to Siberia.

Clouds.

A new class of cloud was discovered this week: asperatus clouds (above). In honor of this surprising find I decided to completely take a posting from New Scientist and bring it over here! Check out the nine interesting cloud formations below (original post is here and includes descriptions of how each forms).

Fallstreak hole:
Roll cloud:

Pink UFO (altocumulus lenticularis):


Cap cloud:

Wave cloud:
Virga:

Mammatus:


Kelvin-Helmholtz:

Horseshoe vortex: